Jan 2006

We took our luggage to the green channel and loaded it on the belt. The luggage was scanned and retrieved on the other side. After a couple of bags were scanned the customs officer in the white uniform asked what I had. I said a bottle of alcohol and everything else was within limits and there were no dutiable items. He said that I had a camera. I said yes it’s for our personal use and we’ll be taking it back with us. Then he said there is jewelry in the carry-on bag. My wife explained that it was costume jewelry but he insisted that I show it to him. So I opened the carry on bag and showed it to him. He asked how much it worth was. I said not much it was from India, we’re taking it back for a social function.

I told him we have nothing to declare and we have another flight to catch. He said you definitely have something and if I send you to the Red channel area you’ll have to pay duty. I asked how much would that be, he replied “two hundred to two hundred fifty dollars”. I said I don’t have that much money on me and I don’t think I have anything that would require so much duty. He asked how much I had; I replied “twenty five to thirty dollars”. He said okay pay thirty dollars and you can go. At that point I could have argued and then he would have opened every single bag I had to get money out of me. In the back of my mind I knew that I have to get on some kind of list for the next flight; I wanted to get out of customs as soon as possible. I was willing to let go of thirty bucks to not having to waste another hour and not having to open my entire luggage. He called over a uniformed security personnel and asked him to collect thirty dollars. We went into a back room which was run down and dusty. There was another person paying money to another security person/police. I quickly opened my wallet and gave this guy 30 bucks came back to my family, collected my luggage and moved along to find the airline counter.

This type of treatment is a disgrace and they only target resident Indians; any foreign traveler would be oblivious to paying any bribes and would not have any issues. Half of the Indians would argue, they would be willing to open their bags and get out of their situation. They know their odds are about 50%. This has been going on for years; I was put in the same situation years ago but got out without paying anything after half an hour of arguing with the bastards.

Corruption and bureaucracy is rampant in India; this is a prime example. Bombay Airport needs to be privatized and the government needs to put in better controls. I couldn’t believe this is still happening in 2006; obviously it won’t change over night.
I met up with the other two passengers that were with us from the baggage claim; they went through the same ordeal. The elderly lady couldn’t speak English. The professor was helping her along; the customs officer wanted money for her luggage; she only had about 500 rupees ($10) with her; this guy paid $25 for her so she can get out of customs.

Now we were out of all government controlled bureaucracies; I thought the airline would now take care of us and we’ll be home soon. Air India had other plans for us.

We get off the plane relieved that most of our journey is over. We land at 3:08am Indian Standard Time on Saturday, 14th January. At this point I’m thinking the flight wasn’t too bad, let’s just catch our connection and we’ll be home in a couple of hours.

As we walked down the hallway, we were asked if we had a connection to Bangalore, Hyderabad or Madras; they had some information for people connecting to those flights. When I asked a few air india personnel for Ahmedabad we were told “downstairs”. This is the same way you go to clear immigration and customs. I was surprised but no one was there to answer any questions. We just went along with rest of the people. My gut feeling was there was something wrong. We stood in line for the immigration, in a couple of minutes we were cleared through immigration and went towards baggage claim. We’re supposed to be doing this at our final destination and not in Bombay. At the baggage claim we found other passengers wondering the same thing.
We found one of the airport staff who explained that our connecting flight was cancelled or already taken off and we would be told what to do by the airline after we get out of customs.

So we stood at the baggage claim with about two hundred other tired passengers expecting that our baggage would arrive soon. There were only two or three belts and we were the only flight so it wasn’t like they had a lot to do. A few bags trickled in after a few minutes…every five minutes a few more would trickle in. it took us about an hour to get our bags. I checked to see if they had marked our bags with an “X”, this would mean that our bags were to be searched by hand at customs. I didn’t see any. During this hour my son was getting restless, he kept wanting to play with the luggage belt and almost got knocked down by a moving bag. We also met a couple of people from Chicago whom we knew, one of them was a professor at Harper college and another was an elderly lady.

At this point we don’t know how we would catch another plane to get home, we were among many people in a big heard trying to get our bags and clear customs. We were treated more like cattle than airline passengers.

With the same passengers and different crew we boarded plane to India. This new crew was also courteous and attentive. I have noticed that with Air India the younger the crew the better off you are. The older flight attendants are often arrogant and act like they are doing you a favor. We had one of those on the flight but she usually stayed in the back and didn’t serve us all the time. The flight was the same; we were served a couple of meals with the same rolls for each meal. I was getting tired of the same bread rolls; can’t they come up with something different?

Ellora - name of Air India's plane. Ellora is famous for its caves -- hummm, may be they shouldn't have named this plane Ellora.

The entertainment system was still broken; in fact they showed the same movies again. How is this possible? Don’t these people have a log? May be it was an opportunity for you to catch the part of the movie you may have missed due to audio and tracking issues during the first leg of the flight. I noticed a couple more channels with same English/German audio issue. This time I didn’t inform anyone.

We were given customs and immigration forms an hour or so before we landed. Before I start filling out our forms, a hand grabbed my arm from behind; it was an elderly woman who was occupying all four seats behind us. She made those seats into her own bed throughout the flight. Apparently she was the only one who was felt like Maharani on the flight.
She asked me if I can help her fill out her form because she didn’t know how to write in English. I went next to her and filled out her form and moved her luggage the way she wanted it.

The forms stated that we were allowed to bring in 12,000 rupees worth of stuff free of duty. This was about 300 dollars per person. So we had 600 dollars of allowance before we would have to pay a dime in duty. We were not bringing any where close to that amount. I had nothing of value that I would leave behind and my wife had bought some gifts of no more than $200.00 in value. So I declared $100.00 for each of us. I did not expect to pay a dime in customs and since our customs were done in the local city of Ahmedabad (AMD) we were certain that there would be no harassment. The very reason we chose Air India was this so we can avoid customs in Bombay (read the 2nd blog entry).

Right before we landed into Bombay, they sprayed the plane with anti mosquito spray. I have noticed other airlines doing the same, apparently no one wants mosquitoes on the airplanes but they are welcome on the airport.

I was relieved that my son had slept through most of the flight. We were very worried about him not wanting to sit in one seat for over 16 hour.

We were asked to deplane at the Frankfurt airport. They handed us pink passes to board back on to the aircraft in half an hour.

Frankfurt airport doesn’t have a lot of seating options outside the gate so I was standing in the middle of the airport observing people when I saw this guy and he saw me at the same time. It was one of my co-workers who sat nearby in the office. We both couldn’t believe that we met in Germany. He was on the same flight. We shared some flight experiences and decided to have a German beer at the airport. The airport restaurant/bar/shop employees were going through a shift change so they didn’t pay attention to us for several minutes. They were busy counting their money; I finally asked if they were open and one of them said “yes” and began counting again. Finally one of them took our order and we were served a couple of cold beers. As we sat there talking about various things, someone else came by and introduced himself and his family. I knew him from college but couldn’t remember his name right away. We got back on the plane at the last minute; I had lost my overhead space for my computer bag, I settled for some space four rows away.

Around midnight we were served with Dinner, I was hungry since I didn’t really have a dinner. The food was quiet good; they offered a couple of choices. I asked for some red-wine and they gave me an airline size bottle of a French red wine. They gave us real silverware which was a nice touch. Jim had chicken, it was a little, may be a lot, spicy for his taste buds, after a couple of bites he turned red and yelled “fire, my mouth is on fire”. He asked for some water and quickly received several glasses of water to put out his fire. He said he was not used to the hot food.

As soon as we were airborne the guy in front of me reclined his seat and it almost hit me; apparently his seat reclined a lot more than usual but he was oblivious to this fact or he didn’t care. When we were served with food, I had to ask him to take the seat out of its Maharaja position so I can open my tray table. He didn’t like it very much but every time we were served food he did that on his own. I didn’t have to ask him again.

Since I could not sleep, I decided to see what “entertainment” they had provided. Earlier they had made an announcement that they had a couple of Hollywood and a couple of Bollywood movies. If you’ve seen one Bollywood movie you’ve seen most so I wanted to see if they had anything I’d like. There were 21 channels available on the in-flight entertainment system. Each channel having A and B part so there would be 42 channels. Not all were available, in fact only 4 or 5 channels had something on them. The bad part was that the available channels were not all together, You’d have to go through the entire list to find the channels with “entertainment” on them. I quickly realized that all the movies had issues with tracking. The screen kept on flickering and the audio went in and out. It seemed that they had been showing these tapes over and over for months and the quality was really poor. I tried to watch an English movie and quickly realized that the audio on my right ear was in English and in my left ear it was in German, I think. So I had to watch this movie holding my earphone to one ear and with lots of tracking and flickering issues on the screen. After a few minutes I gave up.

Near the end of the flight I decided to use the lavatories. Right behind us was the entertainment computer and VCPs where they inserted the tapes. I saw this airline guy fumbling with the tapes, they were similar to 8mm camcorder tapes with hand written titles on them. I told the guy about the English/German Audio problem, he went to the computer and said it was fixed and thanked me for telling him. I was surprised that no one had complained about this and wondered how many flights went through with this setup. Apparently on one audits the entertainment system before each flight.

After a long 8 hour long boring flight I wanted to stretch my legs at the Frankfurt airport and walk a little bit; I was hoping they would let us off the aircraft. Sometimes on delayed flights, they just park the airplane, clean around you and off you go for 8 more hours.