The journey

I am writing this post on Thursday morning from Kolkata.  I arrived in India yesterday (Wednesday) at about 8am local time.  Kolkata is 13.5 hours ahead of Pacific time (when I'm doing to the conversion I just add 1.5 hours to Pacific time and flip the am/pm).

I'll post pictures of my hotel and Kolkata later, for now I'm going to focus on my travel experience.

Flight #1 - SFO to Dubai
As I've mentioned before I took off from the San Francisco airport (SFO) at 3:45pm local time on Monday on a 15 hour flight to Dubai on Emirates airline.  The flight plan took us northeast over Canada and Greenland and then southeast over Iceland, Western Europe and finally into Dubai.  I've created a very rough picture of the flight path below.

First flight in red (I think), second flight in yellow (almost positive)

During the course of the flight I did the following in something similar to the order listed:

1. Prayed fervently that the empty seat next to me would not be filled.
2. Celebrated when the empty seat next to me was not filled.
3. Played New Super Mario on Nate's DS and beat World 3.
4. Watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine
5. Ate penne pasta with what could generously be called red sauce, and more accurately could be called red water.  The folks on the plane eating meat were treated to a lamb curry over rice.  I can't say for certain what the lamb curry tasted like, but I can say with absolute certainty is smelled a heck of a lot better than my dish tasted.
6. Watched Hurt Locker.  In retrospect, not a good choice on a flight to the Middle East.
7. Watched four episodes of Better Off Ted while working.
8. Ate a mini tuna wrap.  Not bad.  Ate a second mini tuna wrap.
9. Cleaned tuna off of my shirt.
10. More Super Mario.  World 5 goes down.
11. Watched two episodes of Chuck.
12. Watched 500 Days of Summer.  No international relations repercussions with this movie.
13. Super Mario.  World 6 is done.
14. Watched two episodes of Pushing Up Daisies while trying to sleep.  Failed pretty miserably at sleeping, managed to see a lot of Pushing Up Daisies.
15. Turned down breakfast.
16. Landed in Dubai.

Overall the flight went much better than I expected.

Intermission - Layover in Dubai

The Dubai airport seemed very large and modern.

This was the terminal that my second flight was initially supposed to take off from.  It ended up getting switched to a terminal that, based on the amount of time it took to walk there, was in Los Angeles.

Every time I walked by this I was gripped by a desire to rake swirling patterns into the sand. Seemed like it would be very relaxing.

This is the English breakfast I ate at 9pm local time.  In my defense my body was convinced that it was 9am.  On plate we've got two eggs, fried mushrooms, baked beans, a roasted tomato and two hashbrown patties.  All in all, quite a good meal.

World 7 was defeated at some point in Dubai.  I also managed to email off some work and hold up the other end of an IM conversation.

My layover in Dubai was about 7 hours.  I took off at 3:30am local time bound for Kolkata.

Flight #2 - Dubai to Kolkata

This was my "short" flight at slightly less than four hours.  Frankly I'm not even sure this flight happened as the whole thing seems like a dream.  I sat next to a very nice lady who was on her way to Kolkata to visit her 98 year old mother.  They airline decided to upgrade me from the vegetarian meal I requested to a vegan meal.  Turns out vegans eat a pupu platter of beans for breakfast.  If I had actually be coherent while eating I would have been very disappointed in the vegan meal, as it was I just tried to avoid getting a bean stain next to the tuna stain on my shirt.  After eating I briefly lost consciousness and then we landed.

Epilogue - The Kolkata Airport

The Kolkata airport was much older than the Dubai airport.  I got off the plane and followed the crowd to the H1N1 interview area.  I had to fill out a questionnaire asking if I was sick, or had been sick recently.  They helpfully suggested that if I was sick I might want to think about canceling my trip.  There were a lot of people here.  I didn't notice anybody who decided to cancel their trip.  I guess everybody was completely healthy.

Lots of healthy people

I picked up my baggage (thanks Isaac and Tien!) from baggage claim and headed outside to find my driver. 
 

Outside the airport

 

Thankfully I was able to find my driver almost immediately and he took me from the airport to the hotel.  I'll talk about the drivers here later.

Summary

It took me about 31 hours to get from my apartment door to my hotel room in Kolkata.  I left San Francisco on Monday afternoon and arrived in India on Wednesday morning.  It was actually much less painful than I had imagined it would be, but still not an experience I'm looking forward to repeating.