hi honey, i'm home!

Catherine and I arrived home late last night none the worse for wear although hardly looking our best. Tom picked us up at the airport and his first reaction was to laugh at us. “You look like a couple of drowned rats,” he said. Yeah, 37,004 hours on airplanes will do that to you. Our first flight in the epic journey home was about 14 hours (give or take--all the time changes confused us) and that just got us to London.
I am far too jet-lagged and addled to sort through my impressions of India yet except to say it was absolutely wonderful and thrilling but may also be the Most Confusing Country Ever. No matter what we thought we knew each day, we quickly realized that we didn’t. I did get comfortable with the whole concept of the bucket shower after it was explained to me by a smarter traveler, and I even got to like it. So there is that.
Let’s do the math, shall we? Two weeks, 11 airplanes and seven hotel rooms, including a houseboat and two rooms in one hotel because our India-based travel agent confirmed our reservation with us without actually confirming that the room was available at the hotel. The hotel management was nice enough to move us to another room that came available instead of kicking us out. The trip was kind of like that all the way through. Count on nothing, you know? We learned that, too.
I want a do-over on this trip because two weeks was hardly enough to get our bearings. There was so much we didn’t see or do … Granted, it’s a whole sub-continent and two weeks is barely a blip of time and included travel days and three days of wedding festivities, at the wedding of a friend of Catherine’s. (It was a small wedding by Indian standards, just a few hundred people. I’ll tell you about it someday.) But still, I feel like I did a bad job of the trip because the learning curve was so steep. So much I would do differently…
Next time. And there will be a next time, somehow.
It is now tomorrow in India and jet lag is starting to make me queasy and cross-eyed so I will end with a small moment of homecoming culture shock before I collapse back into deep, painful, drooling jet lag sleep.
Our last pee in India was in the Bangalore airport bathroom, which had four stalls with both Western style toilets and squatters, typical nefarious puddles of water on the floor, typical Indian lack of toilet paper (fortunately Catherine had supplied us with 12 years' worth of little Kleenex packets) and a woman sleeping soundly on the floor. She was the restroom attendant, who had spread newspaper on the floor to sleep on but was nonetheless sleeping on an airport restroom floor. Catherine gave her our last 50 rupees. That's just a few dollars but it could at least buy her a few months' worth of clean newspapers. (Actually, the floor couldn't have been much harder than the beds in our first hotel, into which we flopped with exhaustion, nearly giving ourselves concussions.)
Our first pee in America was at O’Hare in Chicago, in a huge, hushed, gleaming rest room with at least a half dozen stalls with automated toilet seat covers, automated toilet paper rolls, automated flushers and automated faucets. And nobody sleeping on the floor.
It was kinda different.