Sunday 14 November 2010

Zembatek Goes Sub-Continental

I arrived in Delhi today starting a 2-month journey of, well journeying through India to get to where I need to go. It's now, what 4:22pm and I honestly don't know what time it "really" feels like 'cos I'm shattered.
The plane eventually took off from Heathrow about 10:20pm on Saturday, landing a little after midday - about 7.5 hours to fly around 7500km (about 615 mph. That'll do Pig, that'll do.) - but despite the 777-300 being a nice plane with plenty of legroom, I only managed a couple of hours of pseudo-sleep.

Maybe something to do with having a window seat and no inflatable pillow - though a small pillow and a thin blanket where supplied. I stuck mine over my face - the blanket not the pillow.
Maybe it was only having been able to watch the first part of "The A-Team" before they had to reboot the plane's server - I watched the rest over breakfast, cracking yarn of a film! :))
Maybe it was something to do with one of the three minatures of brandy I had, the remaining two being saved for later - certainly not now!
Maybe it was because, goddamit it's a plane and I never sleep well on a plane! Yeah, more like.

Anyway I want to go back to the takeoff. I love them, absolutely love take offs, love landings too but take offs, awesome. Especially this one as we had live front camera relayed to the main screens in the ailse which meant as our nose went up, pointed into the air and raised into the sky what we saw where stars. And we were climbing up into them. I kept waiting for them to turn into streaks, but no. Methinks a tad more thrust needed there laddie! But what a taste of what some folks will see in the future on the first part of their journey to our new colonys on some other planet we can overfill! Yeah Baby!

'Cos I'm tired, need to go to bed so I can get up at 4:30 tomorrow morning to catch my train to Dehradun, and consequently can't think without winding my mind through all sorts of new things to my eyes that I want to get down whilst I remember, I'm going to go brief now.

Both meals, evening & breakfast - nice. Filling, interesting, tasty. Heard an album from a band called PaperTounge which I liked. Watched the A-team, yeah covered that. It's what you expect; awesome, outlandish, funny. Bit of bother getting through immigration as I didn't have a residence address to quote in India so ended up being allowed to use the head office address for Koenig, the training company I'm out here to get some training from. No issues finding the guy to take me to where I am now - in the Koenig student apartments, but I'll come back to that.

Weather is like a good normal summer's day in the UK. Not hot but very warm - air con is on now - and the texture and smell of the air as I came out of the airport was like a medium hot sauna, just not as hot. The roads, c'mon everyone's going to say this about their first experience of roads in India/Delhi so I may as well be able to say it myself; So awsesome man! I love the way they bump and grind and beep their way through traffic 6 lanes wide on a 3-4 lane highway, sorry weaveway! The beeping gives an interesting and actually very effective aural 'image' of what's going on around you. Nose to tail up to about 40mph and because they drive on the proper, colonial, side it makes it even better 'cos you can so relate! But as our drive said when I talked to him about it, everyone is used to it, it's just how things are here and so there's very few accidents. Scrapes and bumps yes - we witnessed at least two "dogem car-like" events, and the scrapes and dents on the car - but "proper" accidents, very rarely.

So far I'm nicely impressed with Koenig. Basic? Absolutely, but then I knew that, however they do make it very easy. There's a fridge in my room, with coke & bottled water, had some sandwiches ready when I got in, I'm being picked up by a driver in the morning and chaperoned to the station. They'll even carry my bags - fools! And on the subject of bottled water, although I've been advised to be wary of even obviously sealed bottled water (though most especially when buying from a street vendor), because of the number of warning notices in the appartment block - reception, stairwells, room, student info pack, etc - about only using bottled water and the whole water health thing, I'm confident that it's legit. I am however using my "filter anything" bottle to filter the tap water for brushing my teeth rather than using up the cold drinking water. :)

OK, shower, clothes for tomorrow, earplugs and sleep - with my phone alarm on vibrate to get me up!

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