Day 1 - Feb 13th

Oh, don't worry, Sir. Your flight has been cancelled!

Do you want to be greeted like that at 5 in the morning when you fly from Frankfurt to Mumbai via Milan? I don't. But this is what happened. Due to some technical difficulties my flight from Frankfurt to Milan was cancelled. Yeah right, technical difficulties. I guess more because of lack of passengers, but anyway... So they put us on a Lufthansa plane to Milan an hour later (8 o'clock). No Problem - I should still have enough time changing planes in Milan.

Arriving in Milan they made speaker announcements for all passengers flying onwards to Delhi - urgently come to counter X. I am flying to Mumbai but this sounds odd so I go also. Oh, yes, Sir. Good you came - we meant all passengers flying to India, hihi. Hihi your ass, this is chaos like nothing I have seen before. So they give me my ticket for the flight to Mumbai. Take a good look at it. Anything strange you can see?



Yes - it says No Seat. I have only realised it downstairs when waiting for the plane. And I asked the lady at the counter about this. She said, No problem, Sir. The plane is a free-seater. But people around me all had seats, it seemed. So I was a bit worried. After a quick Abblitzen in the Alitalia Lounge (You have to wait for everybody to board the plane and then look for a free seat) it was clear for me I could not do anything but wait and see. After all, this was my first vacation in a long time and the main thing was to arrive in Mumbai, where I would be picked up. So I waited and in the end got a seat between two fat men flowing over to my seat (No, really). The trip was OK, they even had onboard entertainment. They showed little Manhattan - a lovely movie about a small boy living in NY falling in love for the first time. Ohhhh.

Looking back at how the boarding of the plane went, it was a crashcourse of the chaos of India still to come. First they told people, that only the ones with a seat on the tickets should board (this is when I realized I wasn’t alone …). Makes sense as they don’t want to have people standing around in the plane because they don’t know where they would sit. So what happened? Everyone rushed to the counter including the ones who did not have a seat. This is where I remembered Preetis quote of Indian men being hopeless. The Alitalia ladies also forgot about the first class passengers and started to fill the plane with normal people. When the first class people told them that they would like to also board the plane they were told to wait until all the rest had boarded. So I heard one of the Indian ladies going Come on everybody, back to the lounge – they cannot leave without us, we will delay the plane! Hallelujah!

Arriving in Mumbai is the craziest thing I have ever seen in my whole life (this trip being my first to Asia – I have been to Singapore, but that doesn’t count now …). We finally landed at 23:00; I got my luggage and left the airport. We have been told that there will be a car waiting so all we have to do is find it. Ha! You leave the airport and are greeted by 5000 people waving 7000 shields with names printed on them. They are all shouting also to make this event livelier. What a view! I should have taken a photo but somehow I was a bit worried it would be my last with my new camera so I didn’t. So finally I found my name written on a cardboard with 10 other names! It was a great pickup, they led us to a bus with Air Conditioning, we waited for some other people to arrive, they put all the luggage on the first seat and we left off. I don’t have to mention that the entire luggage fell off in the first curve. After a quick reshuffling exercise we went on. The trip to Pune should take about 4 hours so it was time to sleep. This sounds logical to people used to proper roads. Over there the road from Mumbai to Pune was filled with holes – so it was jumping time!!! I plugged in my radio and listened to some music and watched the side of the road. As it was already pretty late, there was not too much activity; people were sleeping, some stray dogs running around, nothing special. The music on the radio was kind of cool – a perfect introduction to this new country. I don’t remember when but I must have fallen asleep at some time and woke up literally flying in the bus after probably hitting one of those holes. Then some people started to discuss something containing the words “Prabhat road” in a very angry manner. I had to get off at Prabhat road, so I told them in my best English. They calmed down, I have no idea what this was about, but they threw me off the bus at a place and showed me the house called “Nisarg”, which was to be our new home for the week of the wedding. You can imagine my relief of hearing my name once the bus has left – Simone and Blanca were calling me from one of the windows. I have arrived to Pune!



This is my first photo of the traffic in India. You are sitting in a Rickshaw (a 3-wheeler used to rob tourists by driving them from point A to point B for a ridiculous amount of money). You can see a red light and also that nobody is really interested in what that means. You can also see a small Ganesh on the windshield. This was taken on our way downtown to Pune club to meet with Preeti and go shopping for the wedding.



We had a first taste of the delicious food in the The Blue Nile where Preeti ordered for us. What a great place to eat. After lunch we stayed in this area and recorded a new version of It’s my life as a thank you for Preeti in a small studio. I don’t know why, we just did. When the guys started to play our version on the speakers, we quickly moved on … Unfortunately the CD has been lost I am afraid, so I cant put up an mp3 for your listening pleasure ...



Blanca asked me to take a photo of her with some stuff in the background. I don't know why she looks so excited, the Streber ...



Picture of the day:



So we spent the Monday evening in a sizzler place enjoying the hospitality of Paritosh and his future wife, Kasturi. Plus we got introduced to Sujal, Kasturis best friend. This photo was taken by Paritosh, so he is not on it…



Here is another one of the happy couple:



And another photo of another happy couple – Eugenio and his sizzling friend before the cannibalistic event:



What followed after dinner, was a very intense experience for most of us including Simone and Blanca. Unfortunately I have forgotten the name of it but I remember that it contained Rose leafs.



We had very mixed feelings about it ranging from OMG (Simone) to OMG later Wow (me) to Wow (Eugenio).



And this concluded my first very long day spent in India. Like in good old days, Eugenio took on the role of crowd control and collected a very important phone number – that of Sujals, who happened to be a party-tiger as we will see later on…



Coming back to the apartment all alive some of us did not want to go to bed just yet. So we decided to check out the place in more detail. After all, Preeti has stayed at this place for quite some time – there should be some skeletons hidden around here. So it was time to look around the place where we were staying. Preetis family has put us into a great place. 3 bedrooms, each equipped with a bathroom – two of those even had western toilets and a huge living room plus kitchen. Check out these pics of sweet little Preeti with her dad and mum that we found framed in the living room. Oooh!



Plus we found a scandalous third picture hidden in the frame between the two pics above. We have still no idea who these people are but they seem to be getting married … I don’t have to mention who found the photo now, do I? I do anyway...



After these developments it was not easy to go to bed, but we did our best … By the way after this night I started to envy Preeti. When I think of the long afternoon hours that I spent “bed-testing” at IKEA – I can sooo see Preeti walking into IKEA and yelling: “Gimme the hardest bed you have please”. And actually I slept like a baby.

You can check out all the pics of day 1 here.

To be continued…