Flight-home : PART 1

Yeah…so I finally reached Home sweetest home (read: Visakhapatnam, India)on 21st May, a whole two days AFTER I was supposed to reach- after a taxing and arduous journey that tested my patience to the highest possible limit.
The adventures began after I landed in New Delhi’s newly built Terminal 3 which is being touted as one of the best airport terminals in the world. Well, I for one would like to beg to differ. The terminal apart from being all swanky and shiny, has it’s own set of design flaws. For one, if you need to get from the International terminal on the first floor to the domestic flights terminal on the second floor, then you have no other option but to cram yourself into a small elevator along with other i-want-to-go-first passengers. The lift itself is tiny and can hardly fit three passengers and two luggage carts. Apart from the Bonsai design, it also happens to travel at a speed that would make a desert-road-crossing-armadillo glow with pride at his own speed.
Then after the passengers finally make it to the domestic flight terminal, the boarding of the flights span three floors. My flight being on the ground-minus-one floor for which I had to travel almost a mile and take four escalators to get to. With all the twists and the turns of the path, I was almost at one point- led to believe that I was entering the ‘Chakravyuh’ out of which there was no way out.
An error on the terminals countless Television sets (that display the flight’s status), resulted in me missing my connecting flight to my home. Imagine my shock when I was told the next Air India flight was only the next day (24 hours later). So I had to make my own arrangements for lodging in a city where I hardly knew a soul (no…AirIndia did NOT freakin put me in a hotel on their account). The hotel search itself was filled with sweat, lots of shoulder-shoving, lot of tanning and a whole herd of Delhi’s famous expletives.
Spending a night in a so called ‘guest-house’ I again set out to the airport the next day at 3:30am. I had to go through a lot of tussling and arguing to ascertain my eligibility of being given a free seat on that day’s flight. The authorities (let me take a pause here and unabashedly tell you that The Air India staff at Delhi’s Terminal 3 are undoubtedly one of the worst managed and co-coordinating staffs I have seen) finally gave me a seat and said that I won’t be required to re-check in my luggage (I had checked it in for the previous day’s flight…the one I missed) and that It will be automatically loaded since I am boarding the flight.
I was one of the last people to be handed the ticket and I imagine I broke Usain Bolt’s world 100metere records about thrice on my way to make it to the flight. The plane took off after about half-an-hour’s delay and I was finally on my way to my final destination. I was excited to be visiting my family after almost a year and was smiling widely for a very long time until my co-passenger started giving me the stares thinking I was some maniac who was going to do something bad and was being happy about it.
Little did I know that I had more adventures in store and that my journey was not going to end in such a smooth fashion….
I think I’ve slightly overshot the word-limit on this blog, beyond which people tend to either start dozing off or leave the blog page to rather see what Rakhi Sawant is doing these days. So I will continue this blog in another part…that will be coming out very soon…(not that anyone in this world cares at all…. Hehe).
Until then..
Peace!