Infinite Improbability in Florida : The journey

I am somewhere over Iceland right now, nearing Greenland and inspite of the window seat, I cant see anything besides a lot of clouds. Northwest is playing "The Notebook" which is terribly unabsorbing and I have just had my lunch. Now I still cant understand how could this be called Lunch. If I consider US timing its somewhere around 4:30 in the morning, India its 5:30 in the evening and Holland its nearing 11:30 a.m. Nonetheless its vegetarian pasta, bun with cheese and butter and chocloate mousse with vanilla and strawberry cream which I just relished. I have a glass of red wine and some 7UP still unfinished on my table and every now and then I steal in a sip.

Northwest is no great shakes of an airline. Specially if you consider it in comparison to Singapore Airlines. Infact when I had boarded at Mumbai, I was a little disappointed. The seats didnt have personal video monitors, so there was no way I could have had the selection of movies which I did on my way to Hong Kong. Moreover, in the flight from Mumbai to Amsterdam which is over 9 hours of flight time, there were stupid stewards who werent exactly cordial. Its got to do with the fact that this flight was from India and had mostly Indians, that NW could do away with such shabby service. The flight from Amsterdam didnt have any really cordial flight staff either but the service was better than what it was on the first flight.

Thats what I was typing in the plane but ran out of laptop battery so here is the rest of it.... Time 7:49 a.m. IST Sunday 02 January 2005 . BTW I still keep the indian time on my laptop so that I know what must be all of you upto when I am here writing this mail....

The flight from India was mostly in night. I started at 01:20 a.m. and reached amsterdam at 6:00 a.m. (local time). For that purpose, I didnt have too much of a view. However, Europe from the top is beautiful. When you fly over it at night, it looks like a lot of protozoas linking to each other through tentacles. The central part of the protozoa is the bright cities - so many of them, and the tentacle are those connecting roads. It looks beautiful though and infact the first time I had seen one of the cities at the horizon, I had thought I am seeing the rising sun.

Amsterdam looked like a sleepy city waking up when I landed there. There was a slight mist and a winter chill (Temp - 6 degree C). It was still dark but I could see the lighted buildings etc and even those multi storeyed flyovers were visible from the plane. The airport is huge and houses a lot of shops. Levi's, raybans, Food courts, GAP... it has most of everything, Samsung and Sony, Swiss chocolates and Swiss watches. I had a 4 hour stay on the airport and more than 3 of those 4 hours were spent walking about. I don't remember too much of the view of the city from there apart from the fact that I saw a very beautiful sunrise over the city. The junta around were mostly Europeans and the thing about Dutch junta is that everybody is really huge. Its not just the guys who tower over 6 ft but also the gals. In fact the girls were not pretty, they all looked so disproportionate with very tall and wide body frames and small head on top of that.
The flight from Amsterdam to USA had better service. The airhostess weren't exactly cordial but there was atleast the small talk which is so very very ingrained in the US life culture. They dont say 'Yes' to a request, they say somthing like "There you go" or "Yep, we all set" or something on those lines. Infact I will touch upon this small talk thing in some subsequent mail because it really is so visibly American thing, so very very unlike the twitchy Britishers.
The flight takes off into the Atlantic, which is what we have to cross to get to US. Since it wasnt cloudy I had quite a view of the sea below. Every now and then there was this vessel carrying something across - men, material. The entire sea looks like one whole sum of lots and lots of different water currents. I mean its like foam and then some clear water and then foam and then clear water. Must be because of all the waves but I had always thought, that sea from the top would look calm and peaceful - something like what it seemed in Jurassic park when they were travelling over to the Park. Its quite different or maybe thats because I was at such a height. The part where we enter over Iceland and the place where I had taken out my laptop to write this mail to all of you was essentially covered with clouds. So there wasnt much that I could see. It was like clouds clouds everywhere - somethng like what Antarctica would look like when you go there - or atleast thats what I used to think - about Antarctica. The clouds did continue for sometime and with no view outside I slept the rest of movie Notebook and then wok up to more clouds. Then just got absorbed in the next movie they played - after 'Notebook' - Spiderman II. It was somewhere when Doc Oc comes looking for Harry Osborne when I peeped out of my window and it was there that I saw a sight which was what made me think about what the Indian, I met at the airport, had said about Canada. Okie, had missed out on this - I had met an Indian settled in Canada, returning to Mumbai and he had said that he was going back to India because Canada was covered with Ice - several inches of it. Well, I saw some rocky mountains covered to the hilt with ice. I mean it looked like a dirty white bedsheet because it was pristine snow and every here and there the mountainous rock was visible, grey and dirty. There were these frozen rivers and lakes in the middle and it all seemed pretty close. Now I am not sure how you pictured what I saw but it wasnt very pretty - not that it wasnt scenic but it felt depressing. A huge large wasteland - wasting away - with no signs of life - except for some shrubs or small trees - the tundra vareity or whatever thats called. And then this continued for almost 5 hours. Infact I was almost angry at the scene not changing because that signified the huge extent of this wasteland.

At 12:00 noon local time my flight landed a Minneapolis. The sight from the top was my first view of the United States of America - It looked white. There were these single storeyed bunglows with snow all around them. The roads, strangely, were totally free of any traces of snow. The houses are exactly like what we see in movies. With lawns all around boulevards that connect all of them to the main streets.

Minneapolis airport is also huge. The first thing you do is go to immigration. Even as you step in, there are these notice boards saying - "We are the US Immigration department - We will treat you politely and we will do this for you and these are all your rights and Blah blah". When I made it to the immigration guy, he took my passport, scanned it over and stuff, took my index finger prints and then asked me "Whats your Status?". To which I smilingly replied - "Single". He smiled back and told me that Status means the type of VISA - mine was L1. So its Vikram Bahl - status L1 who arrived in USA entitled to stay in the country till Feb 01 2007. I was to call Arun and Anu on reaching US which required me to have a $1 coin. So it was McDonalds and the double cheesburger to the rescue. It costed me something like $1 and 69 cents and it was a very preplexed, almost bewildered cashier who took the $50 bill from me and returned me $48 and 31 cents. Its only now, after staying here for a week that I have realised the infinite inprobability of a guy coming in for a double cheesburger sandwich and paying his check through a $50 bill. Nonetheless, after expending 15 minutes and $1, I was finally able to get across to Anu and Arun over the phone for a total time period of 4 minutes.

My connecting flight to Tampa was at 3:49 p.m and I was to arrive at Tampa, Florida at 7:30 p.m. EST. I dont remember anything from the flight because by that time I was so tired of flying and so tired other wise that I slept off the entire flight barring ofcourse the 15 minutes they serve food and Mountain Dew.

My ex project manager - Sameer Kapoor and my ex project QL - Shashi Kant were there at the airport to recieve me. Collected my checkout baggage and in a Dodge Stratus - made it to 9912 Balaye Run drive, Apartment #203, Tampa, Florida 33619.

One final thing which I just thought I'll let you guys know. The US custom department does examine your baggage. They open it. So if you have put a lock - they break it open. So it was an open bag and a broken lock pasted to a slip that told me this happens. When you all would be visiting the country - just remember to take out the locks at your port of entry. So I could have removed the locks at Minneapolis before rechecking my stuff post Immigration.

Thats it - in as many words - my over 30 hours journey with a flight time of over 24 hours from Mumbai to Tampa, Florida.

So now that you are through with reading the epical story of Vikram Bahl's journey across the proverbial 7 seas ... Watch this space for an account of how I spent my New Years eve...coming shortly.