July 11 - On the Flight

I woke up at 6 am this morning after 5 hours of sleep. Surprisingly I felt more awake than I had in a while. I must be slowly getting adjusted to the new timings. Today we departed for Delhi to starty off the North India tour. We drove out to the airport at 8 am and got there at 9:30. The distance was only 40 km. Because I arrived at night, I didn't see the airport as it truly was. Driving up in daylight was eye opening. The airport was only one building and about half the size of the Calgary airport. It was a big rectangular box with an interesting wavy rooftop. Our airlines called the spiceJet (all one word) is a small aircraft.

Well I'm jumping ahead of myself here. Let me descrie the check in process a bit better. To enter the airport you have to show your flight itinerary to security guards at the entrance. Once you get past them, you have to check in, which is a little it strange as everyone rushes to the counter at once even if there is a lineup. The guys behind us would throw their papers on the counter, which of course the attendant ignored so it was a bit weird. Also, checking in our baggage, the guys behind us would put their luggage on the conveyor belt at the same time.

We then headed upstairs to get to our gate but we first had to go through the scanning of our carry ons as well as us. The line was divided into ladies and men. The ladies line had virtually no one in it. We said bye to my mom and our sis as they headed over to that line and we headed to our line. Again like the check in process the lineup was tightly packed and everyone was throwing their stuff into the xray machine no matter where they were in line, which I thought was pretty unsafe considering some guy ahead of you could take your carry on once he got to the other side. But, that never happens. Once we got past that we headed into the waiting area in front of the gate. THe interesting thing about India is that there is way too many people and hardly any space. All the seats were filled in front of every gate so my family and I stood around waiting for the boarding time.

When boarding time came along, we were ushered onto a shuttle bus and driven into the middle of the strip to our tiny spiceJet flight. I say tiny because it's a small plane but now that I seated inside I see that there must be at least 150 people on this flight. India is good at maximizing space usage with minimal footprint. Anyhow, all of this brings me now to me being seated on the airplane on my way to delhi typing this up. I uploaded most of my pics from yesterdays walkabout but haven't had a chance to upload them yet. I'm hoping there's internet wherever we are staying in India. The flight from Bangalore (which is pretty deep south in India) to Delhi (which is far north in India) is only expected to take 2 and half hours. I've already used up 1 hour catching up on my blog posts.