Comments on life, in English and French. tag:www.essaisdevie.net,2005:Typo Typo 2010-08-19T15:48:37+00:00 Frenya christoutain@yahoo.fr urn:uuid:ab18270f-5602-46a0-9bff-90afd394b8af 2006-07-27T23:47:00+00:00 2010-08-19T15:48:37+00:00 <p>July 16th, airport of Chennai, 5am.</p> <p>Well, the adventure continues. The trip to Mumbai was quite pleasant (I had a window seat on an exit row, really who could ask for more!) and the food was taste of what is to come&#8230; thanks to Air India! The really neat detail was that all female flight attendants wore saris. My arrival in Mumbai gave me another taste of what is to come: paperwork, lines and people who hate staying in line!</p> <p>The “line” story: I thought that southern italians were pretty bad about cutting people in line, but I see now that I just had not seen the world! Already in London, so not even in India, I noticed that most indians have a particular relationship with line making (or queue making as they say in India). I took Air India from London to Chennai and most passengers were indians. As soon as the boarding of the flight was announced, everybody rushed to the gate whether or not their row number was announced, of course that lead to a major traffic jam at the gate and a much slower boarding&#8230; not quite efficient! In Mumbai, we had to spend a good 45 minutes in lines in order to get a new boarding pass and go through security (quite enhanced since the train bombings of a couple of days ago), all of that to get back on the same flight&#8230; all right different plane but still all these steps look useless and complicated. The fact that a lot of people, males and females systematically cut every line really did not help the efficiency of the process. Days will show that it really is part of their normal behavior&#8230; quite frustrating when not used to it. </p> <p>Nevertheless, the second part of the flight went fine. We crossed the country west to east (about 1000 kms) in 1h30. Once in Chennai, we had to go through immigration: means one more line! But it went a lot easier that I could expect.</p> <p>“Love of stamps”: Since I am in the paperwork section of my thoughts, I have to mention that indeed India loves paperwork but maybe even more so the official stamps! Each time we go through X rays machines in the security checkpoints, we can be sure to get our bad tags or boarding passes stamped by the lady who checks you (apart in a little corner protected from Men’s view by curtains) to make sure that you do not carry anything dangerous on you, and by the security guard on the other side of the X ray machine. Fortunately, it is more amusing than annoying.</p> <p>One thing that I noticed both in Mumbai and Chennai is that the airports are quite clean. The decoration is simple but for the most part tasteful and seem to be using a lot of natural materials such as stone, marble and wood. Before I close this page, last but not least thing for the moment: I had my first experience with the traditional indian restrooms&#8230; not that bad if you are prepared and adequately equipped. For those of you unfamiliar with this system: restrooms in India are a hole covered by ceramic (like the “turkish” ones) and a faucet beside. There is a very good reason why people only eat with their right hand! </p>