the 'Cut

My trip to Calcutta was...interesting. The city itself is different than Bang. First, the state of West Bengal is Maoist...that means communist. But driving in the their airport you'd never know. Huge billboards dominate the landscape; capitalism is everywhere. Actually the day before was their elections and the Left lost a good portion of seats.
Anywho, the flight there, to my surprise, stopped in Chennai...our people forgot to tell us that. No biggie. Landed in Calcutta on time with Indigo Airlines, not bad. We had a car pick us up. Calcutta's streets are nicer than Bangs. At least those in the downtown area. Not many potholes. Same goes with the sidewalks. Smooth, relatively.
Hotel was posh. But gaudy. They tried to make it look very expensive, but it looks tacky. Lots of red, gold, and aluminum. Yeah, ick.
Very nice bed. Soft. AC turned on to 'freezing', hot shower. Good.
Training was difficult. Participants didn't have more than a basic understanding of English. All were engineers and had NO people skills. But they did have cell-phones, and they used them quite a bit. Distracting. Day one was rough, but we made it through.
That night we walked to the Victoria Memorial
http://www.victoriamemorial-cal.org/
The website is here b/c when we went it was closed for a light show! Whatever. We couldn't even walk around it from the outside. And it wasn't even light up! Strange. But I did get to see it a little bit. It's big and looks old. Lots of trees to block the view. I may go back....
Second day of training was a bit better, but more complicated cuz that's when the participants actually practice the tools we teach. They couldn't follow the case studies or read very well. Sapping to say the least.
Flight back...horrible. Air India is the worst. They crammed in one more row of seats to make the leg room suitable for midgets, dwarfs and sprites. Hobbits are too tall, so am I. I had never really tasted my knees before....
Oh, and we were delayed 1 1/2 hours.
We started our approach to Bang just over Hyderabad; 50 minutes out. Not sure why. Bang's new airport must have weird flight paths. Anyway, the landing felt like we had diamond wheels on top of diamond runway. HARD landing. That was the only time I actually instinctively grabbed the seat in front of me for stabilization. Ouch. Rome's Ciampino airport landing was a bit worse, but better...there it was more of a side to side jerk. What made this worse was the rather smooth approach. Then WHAM! Eeek. Finally we came to a halt and saw the beautiful new aiport (this was its second day of operation). Unfortunately it looks better than it performs. We took a shuttle around the whole airport to our terminal (yeah, no jetways here), got off...the doors to the terminal were locked. Had to walk back to another set of doors. No signs, just follow the crowd. Hey a clock! Wow, the first aiport in India with a clock. Cool. Baggage claim? Taxis? The road back was rather clear, 3 lanes wide which means you can squeeze 7 cars in them. Nice and smooth. Stop. Speed up. Slow down. Speed up..no..stop. Gun it. 110 kph....speed bump. Turn. stop. parked car just sitting there. Big truck with no lights (front, back or brake)...and it's 1am.
Car sick, air sick, tired, and hungry I went to bed.
I hope Beth had a better time in Delhi...