As it is gonna take me a bit of time to put my traveling memories online, I'm gonna put it day by day on the blog, and I will do a proper webpage with more or less the same text later ... That way, I can begin to show you photos :D
The first day was quite short as it consisted to go from airport A (Madrid) to airport B (Mumbai). As you already know I spent the night in Madrid airport, and as the flight was simply not comfortable and long, I'm gonna skip this part. After landing at Mumbai, we had to go through the immigration before getting the suitcase and then out of the airport. The immigration is quite quick and simple actually, not much event here. As it was night and I am a girl, I had booked a hotel room with complimentary transfer to and from the airport. But of course, as this is me and my story, the guy was not here to pick me up. After checking the signs twice and waiting for 15 minutes, I decided to call the hotel. I was told that they did not have my flight number (although I had written about 5 emails repeating the same info, and had in my hand a voucher they sent me WITH my flight number and time on it). Well, welcome to India ;-) So I was not very nice to the guy on the phone* (who tried to make a joke btw.... but I did not get it, so it does not really matter), and I finally made him say he would come pick me up, but I had to wait 30 min. Well, as you will learn later, 30 min in Indian time is like buying a baguette in France. So I waited. In the meantime, I sent a text message to my friend Ramesh to tell him I was still alive, and told him I would send him another text once I am safe and locked in the hotel room (he wanted me to do so, and, also it looks like an insignificant detail, it is relatively important for the fun of the story ... well, you'll see ...).
30 minutes later, my driver is here, and he looks quite honest, so I finally go out of the airport (I mean, out of the safe area filled with guys in uniforms and guns -- so much for the definition of "safe" ... hihi ... -- ). First surprise (I know, everybody knows that India was a colony of Great Britain, except me, who keep forgetting what is important, unlike other people :-) ), people in India drive with the steering wheel on the left side ! Hehe ... So well, the car takes me to the hotel, everything works out well. When I arrive to the hotel, I receive a text message from Ramesh. As the message doesn't make any sense, I try to call him. But of course, it doesn't work. So I send a text to tell him I am safe and go up to my room.
I am actually surprised by the room which is all new and huge, with a king size bed (I booked a single one). It is so new that there is still some cement in the bathroom (better than crap, so well). Also, I am surprised 'cause the first impression I had from India is that it looked like Madagascar. The same kind of difference between people living in the city: very wealthy ones that have high speed** Internet and the ones that do not have electricity or water.
A little later, I received one more mysterious message from my friend. So I called him back to tell him not to worry, that I was ok. Then I slept (and got one more message during the night, which I learned later, was the actual first one and the key to understand the other ones :-) )
(*) I don't know how much is one phone call, but I did about 3 while in India, of 2 minutes each, and this exploded my 3 hours prepaid time !
(**) High speed means something above zero, and below 1024 k (they don't have the mega bit unit ... they were speechless when I told them we had 20 Mbits in big cities :-) ).
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