Vancouver to Pune, India - May 2013

First stop Mumbai.  Do you think it is ever possible to have a seamless flight? Not in my lifetime.  Gilbert and I arrive at the airport for our flight to Frankfurt from Vancouver feeling fairly confident that all should go well – we are flying Lufthansa instead of our nemesis Air Canada.  Instead, what do we get – a 4 hour flight delay which will cause us to miss our connecting flight in Frankfurt on into Mumbai.  We are being rerouted via Dubai, adding 13 hours in the process.  I’m still convinced the Fick name is synonymous with ‘airline flight problems’ in the worldwide reservation system.  But truly, Fick means f_ck in German which gave passport security in Frankfurt a field day.  We went along with the humour although if we told them to ‘Fick-off’ they might not have been so jovial.

 

Our brief stop in Dubai has convinced me I don’t need to visit there anytime soon.  To me, it really is a remake of Las Vegas minus the casinos but with a greater price tag.  Shopping galore and all the themed entertainment one can think of - including snow skiing and ice skating.

 

We did finally make it to Mumbai and did our best to recover before continuing on 2 days later to Pune.  Pune is situated in the Western Ghats (mountains) about a 3 hour drive away.  The maximum speed limit is 80 km/hr and if our driver exceeded that, an automated voice told him to slow down and obey the limit – he laughed, we laughed - but there was no getting around the speed limit

 I do feel like we have arrived in Pune to a comedy of a situation.  The hotel we are at is lovely but was jam-packed with people.  Turns out, there was a wedding party going on (the final day of the usual 3 day festivities, complete with a groom on horseback). 

Virtually impossible to use the guest elevators so they took us behind the scenes and we used the staff service one instead.  The hotel’s apology for the inconvenience was chocolates sent to the room later in the evening when, of course, we were sleeping – so yes they woke us up with a phone call and knocking on our door but the gesture was appreciated.

 

And the lecturing Gilbert is suppose to do for 2 weeks?  Let me see – when we were still in Canada we had conflicting reports of the number of students; 25, 8, 40.  Gilbert meets with the school officials when we arrive and the magic number is a whopping 2 students.  Not only that, they can’t make the first day of his lecture as it is a Hindu religious holiday.  So instead, Gilbert is spending his first day with the school officials ironing out the details as to what is our fate for the next 2 weeks.  Our first reaction is that all his hours of preparation were for naught but we will just have to wait and see.