Thursday, March 31, 2005

This is planet Eart (da, da, da, dah, da, da, dah, dah)

Time to say goodbye to Bangkok and head to the intergalactic airport.

I've enjoyed my time in SE Asia but I'm really excited to be heading to another planet. Cathy Pacific flight CX 751 was brief and bearable, aside from the two pashing passengers to my right (very happy to have scored the aisle seat). Actually, I tell a lie, since the woman across the aisle was watching an episode of 'Friends' on her personal TV screen - I hate the series with inexplicable passion. I guess I shouldn't have ogled her TV screen, so I turned the other cheek, forgot about those skeletal actresses who I fantasise torturing, and stared instead at the two next to me, still pashing.

We landed in Mumbai on time. I was very, very excited indeed, but a touch diappointed that the customs official stamping my passport didn't share my enthusiasm for the luggage carousel ten metres ahead.

Excitedly, I zoomed out of the Arrivals terminal, and with a habitual reflex action, scanned the multitudes of names of people and hotels on hastily prepared paper sheets held tightly in a sea of grubby hands. Never sure why I do that, since I've never yet spent time in a hotel posh enough to have an airport pick-up service. Not to worry, I headed to the Pre-paid taxi service, got myself a receipt and a giant Sikh into the bargain, and we ambled off into the night toward downtown Mumbai - in a Hindustani Ambassador at ten miles an hour.

I was grinning, the wide grin of the wildly-stupid-and-never-sure-what's-around-the-corner, but again, like the customs officia, the Sikh failed to pick up on my lust for India. Nevertheless, he did have a lust for the horn, and kept his hand on it the entire way to Coloba, which is about as south as you can drive in this town without ending up in the Arabian sea. He dropped me at the Salvation Army Hostel on a murky street full of people offering me hashisch or 'something special' - oh, wonder what that might be - and I ran excitedly upstairs to grab a dormitory bed.
Threw my gear onto a spare bed in the room, and stayed long enough to meet Kevin, Martin, Gerry, Matt, Vinod and Claude, and then excused myself to race downstairs and out into the street for my first dose of real Indian food in a year.

I breathed in the filth of this fair city's atmosphere (think Bangkok with a larger concentration of bovine excrement), and headed to a Veg-only diner. An hour later I had demolished a tray of aloo mutter, palak paneer, three roti and a sweet lassi, and certainly didn't have room for the 'something special' that was kindly offered innumerable times over the hundred or so metres back to the dorm.

I am unbelievably overjoyed to be back here again, and if my former employer can find me a job in the Mumbai or Bangalore office, I would be very satisfied indeed.

Anyway, gotta get to bed since I'm collecting my baby cousin and her friend fom the airport tomorrow afternoon.

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