Duke Takes on International Travel – Hilarity Ensues…

35 and ½ hours after I first stepped into LAX I am finally settled into my room in Kolkata. My feet hurt a bit, I may still be sweating even after I showered, and it has become obvious that I packed a serious surplus of ziplock bags but I, like all the others of us who are still fighting jetlag and awake at this point, can’t seem to stop smiling. Flying is a weird experience. I walked into the Tom Bradley International Terminal in Los Angles and sat in a metal box with wings for a relatively short period of time and before I knew it I was walking out of the Kolkata Airport; literally around the world from where I started. These last few hours hove been a study in the contrast of emotions: fear to excitement to frustration to exhaustion to awe and hopefully this post will do all of them a little bit of justice.

            By the time I boarded the Emriates flight from LAX to Dubai, (the first leg of my two-flight journey, others on the trip had various different routes with all but one meeting up in Dubai to head to Kolkata) I could tell that this flight was going to be a unlike any that I had taken before. This plane made my mediocre domestic flights that I take to get back and forth to Durham look like rides on a dirty public bus. I had to remind myself several times to stop looking so awestruck as my eyes ran over the personal TV, flight crew with makeup perfected to a T, and the “anti-jetlag” lighting. I even caught a glimpse of flowerpots that were hung on the wall of the business class cabin before they shut off economy with the curtain to maintain “privacy”, which is of course, a total sham. Airplanes can try as hard as they can to try to make the passengers feel as though they have their own personal space, from putting individual covers on the headrests, to handing out eye-masks to be used while sleeping, to the arm rests that are lowered between to seats , but this is all in vain. If you looked up the word antithesis in the dictionary I am quite sure the two words: “airplane” and “privacy” would be the main entry. No matter how nice a flight and how much a person tries to mind their own business you always somehow become entangled with those who are seated next to you, so inevitably, the story of my flight is wound around the stories of two different groups of people who just so happened to be surrounding me.

These two particular stories were those of the two middle school aged sisters who sat next to me and that of the honeymooners who were directly in front of me. Going back to the aspect of privacy on a plane, there is really no privacy in any sense. In the middle of the night when I woke up to find one of the girls sleeping square in the middle of my lap I learned that physical privacy was a sham. She awoke to my sudden exclamation of “Oh!” as I peeled off my eye-mask and looked down and when she opened her eyes to find mine to be directly looking down at her as she lay like a baby in my lap she responded with a similar “Oh!!!”. She quickly flung herself back into her seat with many apologies on both our parts being said (I am not completely sure why I felt the need to apologize but it was better than breaking into nervous laughter which is my usually habit in situations like this). Our seats on this plane brought us into such intimate physical contact that all premise of privacy that was provided by the meager armrest that was in-between us was quickly dissolved. The honeymooners in front of me shattered the premise of verbal privacy approximately 3 hours into the flight. This third hour just so happened to also correspond with their 6^th drink of the flight. I learned things about Bethany and Miles that I never wanted to know. Until I was finally bored enough of hearing about their beautiful wedding “Just two days past in wine country with hundreds of guests!” to put on an episode of CSI on my TV I learned more about a pair of complete strangers than I ever have before.

After the 15 hours that I spent in my assigned seat thousands of feet up in the air I finally arrived at the Dubai International airport. I have heard many rumors about the glitz and wealth of Dubai and to say that the airport itself didn’t disappoint would be an egregious understatement. Somehow those of us who were flying through the airport at the same time managed to find each other, the most amazing find being Stacy casually walking in the same bathroom off of her flight from JFK as those of us from LAX were just finishing up. After about 20 frustrating minutes spent battling with the WiFi we decided to walk over to the shopping part of the airport, with tales of amazing sites to be seen going through our minds. Shiny Bentleys adorned the artificially lit walkways in the airport that seemed to be more of a mall than a place of international transit. Like any good American tourists, the four girls I was with and myself grabbed the provided shopping carts to put our luggage in and set off down the aisles with cameras at the ready. We ran into several obstacles along the way, such as the cramped elevators that strangely only had buttons of floors one and three, apparently two didn’t make the cut, and the maneuvering of the carts in the crowded aisles as we purchased the largest bottles of water that we could find, but we trucked along determined to absorb as much as possible. Somewhere along the way we ran into “camel chocolate” which claims to be the “first and finest camel milk chocolate”. Being the reasonable people that we are we decided to wait till our trip back through Dubai before buying excessive amounts of this newfound delicacy.

About 90 minutes before our flight we headed over to our gate only to find that we were not allowed into the waiting area until an hour before departure. As our feet began to get tired we looked around and decided to sit in the waiting area for the empty gate next to us. Soon after that we found ourselves surrounded by men and women returning from the Hajj (the holy pilgrimage to Mecca). Men bedecked in white floor length garb protectively led the way for their wives who were covered head to toe in their black burkas and in a matter of minutes our small touristy group was surrounded in a chatter of Arabic. Only a few moments after they had all settled down an airy voice with an unmistakable British accent wafted through the air with one request: “All passengers must vacate the waiting room”. At this point I started to think that this was almost as bad a paradox as privacy on airplanes, (I mean honestly, a waiting room where you cant wait?) when they finally opened up the gate for our flight.

Unlike the previous flight, this one required that we all pile on a bus that drove for about 5 minutes to take us to our plane. As soon as we stepped outside it finally hit me that I was really abroad. You see, all airports have basically the same feel: artificial lights, perfectly heated and cooled, and the incessant chatter of travelers. It took stepping out into the 90-degree weather at 2am in Dubai to give me the slap I needed to make me realize that I was finally on the journey that I have been waiting for for so long. After some initial seat confusion that ended in me sitting in the totally wrong seat so that a husband and wife duo returning from the Hajj could remain together, I was finally onto the last leg of my trip. I fell asleep during take-off around 2:30 and then at 3:30am Dubai time (I had really lost all track of time at that point though) I was woken up for my meal. I opened my eyes to a rather flustered looking stewardess speaking to me in very heavily accented English. Coming out of a nap and being confronted with broken English was a combination that ended with me absently smiling and nodding and subsequently receiving a plate of food that I had absolutely no idea of what it was. I could make out the word “eggs” so I believe that they were present in the mush of potatoes and red paste but I was still unsure after several bites. At this point I abandoned the main dish and stuck to the fruit and roll. A few hours later we began our descent into Kolkata and I looked out the window at my new home for 8 months. The lush greenery was spotted with colorful but dilapidated houses and intertwined with glistening rivers and lakes.

The airport, in contrast with this beautiful scenery, was a study in chaos. Finally we all made it through customs and I headed straight for the baggage claim (Having lost my bag a few times I am always paranoid that it won’t come through). My bags ended up coming fairly early in the process but we had to wait as poor Michelle was put through the nerve-wracking experience of being the owner of the last bag off the plane. After that there was a brief stop in the public bathroom (let it suffice to be known that it was an …experience) and then off into a car headed to our new home. I am pretty sure that I could spend 15 pages writing about the traffic system of India but I will try to break it down into a few sentences. There are no lanes. There are no side mirrors (they get clipped off in particularly tight squeezes). There is no road rage but there is a cacophony of horns that are always going off to let the cars with no side mirrors know that they are being passed. To top this all off: there are no rules. Baishakhi (our fearless leader on this program who grew up in Kolkata) told us in an almost motherly tone that it would be best if at the beginning we simply didn’t look out the windows and trusted our drivers as the weaved through impossibly tight spaces.

Physically intact, though perhaps mentally scarred by the number of times I slammed on the brakes of the car in my head, I finally made the treck up the two flights of unairconditioned stairs into my new room. I am sharing the room with Stacy, a rising sophomore at Duke, because of our unlikely common traits. These common traits basically boil down to the fact that both of us have the immune systems (and perhaps luck) of a dying salmon. Asthma, sinus infections, and overall poor stomach health are a strange series of characteristics to bond over but we did just that. Unpacking was a whirlwind of colorful clothes and Clorox wipes as Stacy and I settled into the place where we would be spending the next 8 weeks. The room itself has air-conditioning and is extremely spacious with two beds, a table, chairs, and a wardrobe. The bathroom is constantly muggy due to the fact that the window doesn’t close all the way but all in all I was impressed with the accommodations. I was also impressed with the 8 inch lizard that appeared on the wall. Due to the fact that my roommate and I fled the room and the caretaker’s broken English explanation of where the lizard went when he went after it with a boom I would say that the is a 50-50 chance that the lizard has now taken up residence under our sink.

Currently, I am sitting in another room on the second floor (not to be confused with what Americans would call the third floor since the numbering starts with “ground” and goes up) writing this post as the other people in my group watch a Hindi movie (which is very gripping and suspenseful based on the music and their gasps) or tinker around on their computers. It is very easy to feel at home here in this foreign place. Maybe it is the hospitality or the homey rooms but whatever it is I am finally able to relax since that first moment that I stepped on a plane. 

This was an unusually long post, they won’t always be like this, but I had a lot of ground to cover! More to come soon on our exploration of Kolkata and battles with a 12 and ½ hour time and 30-degree heat difference...