Every once in a while, world travel can provide you with a flashcut juxtaposition so staggeringly various that it makes you say, "Oh yeah! That why I ever hit that 'Shuffle' button in the first place".
Less than a week ago, Genevieve and I found ourselves somehow drinking duty-free scotch in a deep bathtub in a luxury hotel room in Bombay, free of charge. 24 hours later I was crawling through muddy water, descending with my friend Alain into the massive system of catacombs underneath the city of Paris.
First I'll explain the hotel. This begins in Delhi, where we were scheduled to fly from to Paris via a brief layover in Mumbai, a.k.a. Bombay. At the counter we were informed that our connecting flight was something like 9 and 1/2 hours late, and we would be put up in a hotel there. After a few hours of the standard Air India delay, we boarded the short flight to the south of the continent. We arrived in Mumbai around 1am India time. We were among a small group on our flight that were held up heading to Paris or connecting there for Newark. Now we began our most prolonged and direct contact with the horrible torture known as Indian bureaucracy.
Indian bureaucracy was probably established by the British during their rule and the years since have steeped it in older forms of Indian bullshit to produce it's modern glory- an utterly dysfunctional behemoth controlled by corruption, nepotism, obfuscation, confusion and customary forms of disinformation and non-communication.
At the Air India desk in Mumbai we were told to wait for someone who arrived awhile later and told us to wait for someone else. Eventually, after 4 or so of these characters arrived and formed coalition, they called some other people, and the discussed what they were told. Finally we were informed that we never should have been allowed on the flight from Delhi, but put on a domestic flight and not checked through customs. They told us that they had informed Delhi of this, but they had failed to distribute the message, thus laying the blame on them, as if this had any meaning to us. Therefore we had officially already left the country, which meant that we were kind of like refugees. After endless phone calls and few clashes with the unresponsive Air India staff we were told that we would be sent to a hotel but we had to, of course, wait.
Eventually we were driven to our accommodations, which turned out to be the nicest hotel room we'd stayed in during our whole trip. We didn't get in to the room until around 5 or 6 am, but we took baths, watched satellite TV and had an amazing sleep in the most comfortable bed we'd slept on in months. In fact, we slept right through the complimentary breakfast, but were up for the lunch, which was a pretty awesome spread of south Indian and continental foods, including a Dosa bar. Then a taxi took us back to the airport. In the backseat there was a complimentary copy of a Mumbai newspaper with a front page article about the story behind our delay. It was some typically Indian clash of family pride, class, and bureaucracy. Think it had to do with the family of some Air India employee demanding seats that were already occupied, and the management refusing to bump anyone up to first class. This brouhaha lasted for hours, and when the plane finally went up it was way off schedule. Then an old lady started had a seizure en route to Paris and they had to dump their fuel and turn back. In the end, the plane had not been able to travel to Paris, and thus our flight was delayed. It was the kind of absurd melodrama we saw in an in-flight Bollywood movie the next day. They love it.
When we arrived back the airport we, surprise, had to wait some more for someone to find our passports. Then there was another round of madness-inducing red tape when I needed to collect money from western union in another terminal. The airline wouldn't release my passport in fear that I'd flee (sorry, India, don't flatter yourself). So i walked to the western union office in another terminal without it. When i found the place, they said they wouldn't give me money until they saw my passport. I asked them at least to see if the money was available. He hit some keys on his computer and appeared to get the answer. Then his boss said something in Hindi behind him. "I cannot tell you that. It is a secret." he said with a straight face. So I stalked back and pleaded with the other middling zombies at Air India to give me my passport, using Genevieve as collateral that I wouldn't run away. He gave it to me on the condition that I'd be back very soon. I took the passport back to the other terminal and presented it to the Western Union office (which was also a government post office) with a half-crazed smile. First they told me to wait and literally rearranged papers on their desks for five minutes while I stared laser beams into the tops of their bald heads. Meanwhile workers were taking a skillsaw to some floor tiles behind me and the sound was like an amplified dentist drill. When they got around to talking to me, they had me fill out a new form (the one I already had wasn't good enough) and fill in every input, even ones that aren't required. Before they even fired up the Atari-era computer they actually asked my how tall I was, which I thought was some kind of joke, but no, it was a necessary detail. They took all this info and attempted then to logon to their system. I watched as they tried again and again, checking if the modem was connected at least three times, as the minutes ticked away and Merzbow and Thurston Moore continued their skillsaw performance behind me. I think I was literally insane by the time they called me behind the desk to show the message in archaic dot matrix font: Invalid Login Data. I knew my code was correct, and that this message meant that they literally didn't know how to get into their own system, but in typical Indian fashion, they told me "It's a problem with your money order."
I gave up, we went and waited for the plane, took more valium, slept through half the flight, watched "After the Sunset" and that fabulous Bollywood movie, ordered many mini bottles of red wine, juggling which of our stewardesses we ordered from so as not to arouse suspicion. Finally we landed in Paris.
Next: The Catacombs.