Madrid to Kolkata

I got up early to get some steps in before the 14 or so hours of flights I was going to have. It was about 6 AM. Most of the people out are still out from last night. About 6:30 I was chatting with this guy who I just thought was drunk but it turns out he was there to pickpocket me. So, he got my phone, an hour before I was leaving for the airport.

I only got about 30 steps before I noticed, so I ran back the way I had come, ran a couple blocks in every direction trying to ping it with my watch. No luck.

After all that running, I wasn’t even positive where I was anymore, and was in a place I hadn’t been with only 30 min before I needed to leave for the airport.

I started walking in a likely direction and fortunately found a subway stop I had seen before and knew how to get home from.

That was a great start to the very long day.

When we got to the airport they were very strict about bag weight both for checked bags and carry-on bags, but not personal items. I thought we had at least 15kg of checked baggage weight to work with but I guess not so we paid $400 for our checked bag and had to rearrange all our carry-on bags.

It took a good hour to wind our way through the airport and through the scanners and by the time we got to our gate they were boarding.

We were in the second to last row, but the flight crew was great and asked a guy in our row move to give us more space. So Cal got a full seat to sleep on and slept for almost 8 hours.

That flight got us to Abu Dabi, and we didn’t have much of a layover there. We borrowed a stroller and hurried to our next flight which had just started last call when we got there.

This flight was packed and we were in the very last row. Only one aisle so they had to keep shuffling around to let people get to the bathroom.

We arrived in Kolkata around 3am and had the slowest immigration guy so every other person on the flight got through first. We still had to wait for our stroller to show up even after all that. So we were outside by 3:45 and our driver was not there. We waited and waited. Tried calling. We borrowed someone’s phone to try calling. We waited 2 hours before our driver finally found us. He was just sitting somewhere in the parking garage the whole time and we had been told to meet where the taxis were at international arrivals.

So we finally get in our room and find that they’re doing layoffs at work. As far as we know, neither of us have been let go, but I can’t even get into my work email anymore without my phone. Alright, nap time.