Day 1 - January 9, 2015

The clock shows 3 a.m., and in fact it’s already January 10. We are in India.
For some reason, I felt like keeping a diary. Writing down the events that happen to me every day. I don’t know why. Volchy is trying to talk me out of it, but for some reason I have a persistent urge to write, most likely just for myself.
We got up early, at 6 a.m. Volchy managed to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast. I just had coffee. The taxi arrived even earlier than scheduled. There is something special about riding in a taxi when it’s night outside…
We flew Aeroflot, with a layover in Moscow (Sheremetyevo). On the plane they brought bad coffee and a sandwich, which turned out to be quite decent. In Sheremetyevo there is a pedestrian passage between terminals, very convenient. We got from one terminal to the other quite quickly. The layover between flights was short, so soon we were already sitting in a bigger plane, namely an Airbus 330. It takes five and a half hours to fly to Delhi from Moscow. I remembered that when we flew to Bangkok last year on the Arab airline Etihad, the service there was better than on Aeroflot. This was mostly noticeable in the little things. On Etihad they gave large comfortable headphones, each passenger had a pillow in addition to a blanket, and a disposable amenity kit with earplugs, socks, and an eye mask. Here there was a blanket and uncomfortable headphones.
The food was not bad. Chicken with noodles in some marvelous sauce. Though it seemed to me that all this airplane food was somehow fake. I thought that if I were offered to eat something like that every day, I wouldn’t last long before dying of melancholy. However, it should be noted that the chocolate cake for dessert was very tasty. I could eat that cake every day.
The flight attendants on Aeroflot were nicer, and they poured water without any problem when I asked.
The time passed fairly quickly; we ate, then I felt like sleeping. For some reason I wanted to listen to something classical, so I chose Vivaldi’s Four Seasons — I really liked it.
Then we arrived in Delhi.
We got our visa on arrival. Went through passport control. Collected our bags. While we were getting the visa, our backpack was taken off the belt and thrown into a general pile; we barely found it.
Went outside. Not hot, +9
We decided that walking to the hotel in the middle of the night was too much, and dealing with a taxi was also a bit nerve-racking. We decided to approach a more or less solid-looking booth with a sign that said “Prepaid Taxi”
Right away some little man ran up and started offering to drive us to the hotel for 150 rupees. At the booth they quoted 250 rupees. We thought it was too risky to deal with the little man, so we ordered a taxi at the booth. They immediately put us in a car. We set off. The driver didn’t know where to go. It was unclear whether he was joking or not. He started making something up about fog and blocked roads. He called the hotel, to no avail. He kept saying, “Madam, this is not Ukraine. This is India.”
With great difficulty, thanks to the navigation on Volchy’s phone, we got onto the street we needed, though on the wrong side of the road, and sped off. Hotels flashed by. But ours was nowhere to be seen, and the driver was clearly nervous — probably because he was driving in the wrong lane. We decided to get out. The driver asked again whether we were sure we wanted to get out at our own risk. Absolutely sure.
The hotel couldn’t be found. It was dark, some people were loading something. Stray dogs appeared from time to time. We went into the first hotel we came across to ask whether they knew the place we were looking for. We got a very nice young guy. He said he didn’t know. He called the number listed, and they told him the name in the booking was written incorrectly. It’s a hotel chain, and our hotel is probably called either this or that. He explained how to get to the nearest hotel of this strange chain (why not put the proper name in the booking?.... madam, this is India… ).
We went on looking.
Then I accidentally noticed a hotel with a similar name. We decided to go in. In a box at the reception desk there were some napkins with the name from the booking on them (that is, the name of the hotel chain). I realized we were roughly in the right place, though the guy at reception looked at the Booking printout like a goat at a new gate.
He called someone, couldn’t get through. Then he gave up and offered to show us the room. The first room seemed downright gloomy. We begged him to show us something else. The second option was a bit better, with a window onto the street and larger. We decided not to мучиться any more and stay.
We bought drinking water. In the room we boiled water with an immersion heater. Made coffee. Ate the cookies brought from Kyiv, baked for our housewarming by Katya’s Vadim, and the Nuts bar given by Grandma.
Then we went to take a shower, which turned out to be hot, hooray!
We decided to sleep in sleeping bags; the bed linen was completely stained.