Short Note from Kolkata

I have lost my sense of humor for airplane travels in developing nations. That is what I told myself as I got off the plane today in Kolkata, even knowing that I was going to the fancy pretty new airport there. 

No longer am I amused by having to get on a bus to ride 10 meters/50 feet (not a conversion, merely two examples in two different systems of measurement). I tried once in Yemen to walk around the bus to the plane, and I got yelled at. Now it is one of my greatest joys to be ushered off a plane via ramp directly into an airport, instead of be crammed like a sardine into a bus full of sharp elbows and excess hand baggage.  Today has been full of sardine busses and elbows—sharp ones and pudgy ones.  I was also not amused on the recent flight from Thailand to Delhi to be sitting in front of a man who was convinced that the inflight screens in the back of our seats were touch screens (they were not). He tap-tap-tapped away at the back of my head like a deranged woodpecker for 10 minutes before giving up or having someone inform him of the remote control in his armrest. No longer am I amused by the jerk who puts his seat back as soon as the flight attendant who told him to put it up for takeoff has passed by. Nor do I find it as funny as I once did that as soon as the wheels touch down on the tarmac, half the plane is up, retrieving their baggage from the overhead compartments, ignoring the screams of the distraught flight attendants. I once found it funny that Yemeni men answered their phones from the sky, but now I glare at the Indian man who ignores a call from someone, but leaves his phone on for the rest of the flight. I’m not even amused by the girl with the Miley Cyrus haircut—I’m just annoyed that I know that she has a Miley Cyrus haircut. I’m also annoyed that I had to go through security AGAIN in one of the world’s most annoying systems, getting new tags for my HAND LUGGAGE and waiting in endless lines because there are so many people in every country that I ever live in. WHEN AM I EVER GOING TO GET TO MOVE TO MAURITANIA (or some other mostly desert country with minimal population)?! I am slightly gratified, though, that I managed to keep my tweezers in Guwahati, even though their overly zealous x-ray checkers found them in the x-ray. No where else in India have they ever had a problem with tweezers. This lady scanned my bag twice to find the tweezers, but then couldn’t find them digging through my bag in real life, and I played dumb just to see how far she would take it. She ended up saying, “Well, it’s just tweezers…not scissors, right? Go on.” I took the win. Then I went back to hating the sweet old lady in the sari who was wandering around dazedly in the security check line.

It was going to be a great loss to the world, or at least to myself and whoever reads this blog, that my sense of humor was gone. But then this happened:

 

My sense of humor returned in the form of a cow trying come in the back door of the fancy new Kolkata Airport. I even laughed in the face of a man who was genuinely trying to be helpful by telling me that door was not the way to the domestic terminal. And I still have my tweezers. All is right with the world--until I have to fight my way through the baggage claim in Ranchi...