My trip to India

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.