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| This beautiful frieze greets arriving passengers in the Delhi airport |
April 15 Sunday-Monday. We have arrived at the Maurya ITC Hotel in Delhi, (or is it New Delhi?), India. Our plane landed at 8 pm after a 13+ hour overnight flight from Newark. I was SO happy I took my new self-inflating camp cushion. It made an astonishing difference in the comfort level of the seats. John refused to take his and I think is regretting that decision.
We had a couple of needless scares early in our journey. The first came at the Ft Myers airport when United told us our brand new visas for India had expired. The expiry date read 03/08/2013--which was even before the date of issue. Since It was Sunday, that was a real problem because all offices were closed. Fortunately, a young United employee came along who realized that everywhere but the US puts the day before the month, meaning our visas expire on August 3 and not March 8. Whew!, the next hurdle occurred when John learned our vegan meals had not been ordered for the flight. He was sent to three different people and the best he got was they would try. Sigh. But guess what. The meal choices were chicken or vegetarian. Duh. Absolutely NO problem. And the food was a ten for airplane food. Prior to that we had an early dinner of delicious Chinese at the airport. Eat, eat, eat. We are off to a great start. LOL. The flight crew were excellent. Our favorite was a tall, beautiful black attendant who was without doubt the happiest stew I've ever encountered. Our sleeping pills worked well so we even arrived fairly rested. Great start!
I had the good fortune to sit next to a beautiful Indian woman on the plane. She is an electrical engineer doing something with sound I didn't understand. Undergrad in India, masters from Wash U in St Louis where she lived for 8 years until accepting a new job in San Diego a couple of years ago. I'm guessing she is about 32-35. She was heading home to visit her family but for now has no plans to come back permanently, although she says she will have no problem doing that when the time to care for her parents comes. I asked if many women were in her classes in the states and she said yes, but then it turned out the women were Indian, Chinese, or from some other Asian country. We are making a huge mistake by not encouraging our girls to work toward careers in what we still consider male fields, especially since Asia is encouraging girls to compete in all disciplines. Clearly there is no reason but foolishness for us to allow our girls to succumb to being less than they can be. I would like to see schools actively working to overcome the peer pressure that discourages girls from competing in math and science. I don't think this is a figment of my imagination or there would have been at least a few American girls in her classes. This is almost as bad as not educating women at all since we are losing enormous amounts of female brain power to help us compete in an ever shrinking, more globalized world. It seems very odd to be saying this about the US just as we are embarking on a journey into a part of the world where women are thought to be horribly disadvantaged, but there it is.
Our hotel is lovely, clearly a five star. Too bad we will be here only to sleep. Up at five tomorrow morning for out trip to the Taj Mahal. Lots of pictures from now on, I expect. For now, here is one of the garden off the lobby. No access to it but now I have tried the "through glass" feature of my new camera. Cool! What I really want is a picture of the door guy in full regalia. But I don't want him to pose. I just want a surreptitious shot. We will see if I can pull that off this morning, but I suspect not. I hope there will be more opportunities.
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| Taken through the lobby window with iPad |
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| Our hotel in Delhi |
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| The lobby dome |
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