Welcome to Delhi. Smoke?

After a relaxed morning in the hotel, we found that leaving Frankfurt was going to be more stressful than we thought it would be! It started out fine... a helpful porter took all of our bags down to Lufthansa check-in, and we had plenty of time before our flight. But then the charmingly perplexed ladies behind the counter told us that for baggage allowance, India goes by a complex formula of "total weight," (much less than the American baggage allowance) not number of bags per passenger, and we would have to pay some fees. So what was the damage? €2,900.00. Around $4,000.00!!!!

Not. Going. To. Happen.

After much discussion and many, many phone calls, it was determined that we would still have to pay a little extra. A little, as in €750.00, or around $990.00. Still a lot of money, but at least it didn't leave me about to faint as the earlier figure had. Note to self: never travel with the maximum allowance of bags, ever again.

But we thanked the women for being so helpful (they really were), and went on to our flight. It was fine, with excellent vegetarian food available. Sam wasn't thrilled to be on a plane again, but he was mostly OK, and there were plenty of other kids on the flight to camouflage his fussiness. We arrived in Delhi at 1 AM local time, and after some misunderstandings managed to find all of our bags and the driver who had been sent for us (we were waiting inside, he was outside, etc.) .

Our first impression of New Delhi? It smells like fireworks, even inside. We assumed that this was a holdover from Diwali, but it turns out that it smells like that a lot, because of the fuel that's burned by so many people (dried-out cow dung). Let me clarify that it doesn't smell like dung, just like burning. After some time living there you apparently acclimate to the scent, but the whole time we were in Delhi it felt like Wildfire Season in Southern California, complete with the smokey pseudo-twilight.

So at about 3 AM we headed over to the airport Radisson, where we had a reservation. Um, yeah. We had a reservation for later that day, and we were essentially arriving in the middle of the previous night. Check-in wasn't until noon, and if we wanted to get a room for the few hours of sleep before Mark had to go to work, it would be another night's fee. Our other choices were to hang out in the lobby, or their 24 hour "NYC" restaurant.

Or, or... call our friends Martha and Iftah, who are posted to Delhi!!! For people woken up in the wee hours, they were amazingly gracious and told us to come right over. We stored most of our bags at the hotel and took our first Ambassador cab. In two days we went from toting a car seat all over New York to holding Sam on our laps in a car with no seat belts. Oy.

They fed us homemade schnitzel, made great sofa cushion beds for us, and tucked us in for the rest of the night. Mark went to work a few hours later, and Sam and I hung out with Martha and Iftah as their HHE (furniture) arrived. Sam fell in love with every mover and demanded to be picked up. Sadly, we were unable to visit the monkeys that live down the road, but we did see our first cows and oxcart. Once Mark got back from work we headed over to the hotel (finally!), which was very luxurious, with reasonably-priced room service. Did you know that if you order a glass of milk from room service in India it comes with a glass of sugar water? It does.

After Iftah finished teaching his karate class we met up at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel for a great dinner, and some fun photographs:

My kid loves a hat, especially an improvised one. We were beyond thankful for the warm welcome to India, and felt just about ready for our journey to Chennai the next morning. Also, we're really looking forward to seeing Martha and Iftah again, maybe for Chanukkah or Passover.