Hyderabad

The newest consulate in India is Hyderabad and since it just started adjudicating visas this year many of its ELOs have come to Chennai to do some training. Being plain awesome, they decided to invite all of us from Chennai to go visit them. Ten of us accepted including me and Natalie. We left right from work, fitting five of us in my hatchback with our bags and my driver to get to the airport. Tiny little plane, Nat and I seated in the very front FACING some nervous looking couple. Oh, I forgot to mention that it was Kingfisher Airlines (yes the country's equivalent of Budweiser has an airline...classic). The meal consisted of a cole slaw sandwhich and strangely cut up potatoes that pretended to be applesauce, dismaying Whitney. We arrived and were amazed by their beautiful, clean, orderly airport. You feel the high tech wave as soon as you get off the plane in Hyderabad.

We go to dinner at this peaceful restaurant with a Buddhist theme where I got myself a beautiful, juicy, heaven-tasting steak. The difference in the experience all had to do with the small details that for some reason they can't figure out in Chennai - the music was in the background allowing conversation to be in the foreground, the waiters are trained to not put their hands in your food or to rub their hand all over the rim of your glass when putting it down, we all got our own menu, they actually had the wines on their wine list, waiters walk around instead of reaching over people...it is amazing how much of a difference these little details make. Dinner ruled. So did bed. We stayed with Janice and Jerry and Abbie(Janice is the ELO, Jerry captains a ship in 3-month on, 3-month off intervals and yes he has dealt with pirates!!!!!, Abbie is the beautiful golden lab). They have a great apartment on the first floor but also have a "rooftoop palace", a little apartment on the roof!

My morning was so great. I woke up and watched the sunrise from the rooftop, going downstairs to make coffee by boiling water and putting it through a paper towel with coffee grounds...yum! Finally got to do some reading on Ghost Wars. Gotta stop and talk about something I read here. This is a quote by Ronald Reagan:
"My problem with Bill was that I didn't understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can't ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I'd just nod my head, but I didn't know what he was actually saying."
He is talking about Bill Casey, the CIA director at the time. Seriously, if you are the president and it is your CIA director and the Cold War is going on...YOU CAN ASK AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT!!!! This both made me laugh and cower in fear at the same time. So Reagan really wasn't lying when he said he did not recall...except maybe it was that he never actually heard. WOW.

The rest of the weekend was pretty sweet too. We saw beautiful old buildings and palaces and arches. The town is much more Muslim and the architectural style reflects that. The city is old and walking around the streets has a real charm. Chennai, being the Detroit of India, appears to not have as many older buildings, most are more or less big concrete blocks, at least in the neighborhoods we are mostly in. There is a large stone Buddha statue in the middle of their (stinky) lake. Originally when they tried to take it out the barge sunk and many people died. It stayed on the bottom of the lake for I think 20 years before they raised the money to raise it out of the water. I got pics. When leaving the lake, there was a crowd staring over the side and a police van. The driver told us that they are fishing a corpse out of the lake. Huh. We ate at a Bollywood themed restaurant and I couldn't tell the wax people from the real ones. When we went to brunch at the Marriott the waiters did a choreographed line of cakes that they brought out to us (still don't know why). My favorite part was the confusion they had after depositing the cakes...they all kinda looked at each other like "Now what?" and then ran into each other trying to slink unnoticed back into the kitchen.

All in all a great time. Oh, when we tried to go home, the check in lady informed us that Kingfisher had sold us a flight that did not exist...maybe they had been sampling too much of their other product? So we spent a lot of quality time at the airport. Difference with the US? The airline offered nothing for the inconvenience - no free flight, no meal voucher, not even a bottle of water. Nothing. Oh well, I made it home.