Hopping Between Airports

So it was just about one whole day since we took a flight from Udaipur to Delhi and it was already time to go to the airport again, and take another flight to the place that's going to be my home for a significant, but uncertain, period of time.

Some friends of mine from work planned to surprise me by showing up at the airport. Naturally they needed to know the exact time and terminal where they could catch us, so they had to let Jatin in on their plan. What they didn't know is that my husband is really bad with surprises. He plans a surprise, but cannot keep it to himself and lets me in soon enough. As he did that evening. So it wasn't a surprise, but it still felt really, really great that so many people would drive all the way from Noida to the airport, just to spend ten minutes with me. It says a lot about how much these people care for me. It felt wonderful to see all of them again that evening.

Once the goodbyes were said and we were inside the airport, it was a series of routine security checks, followed by a not so routine one. Apparently one of the X-Ray scanners wasn't working, and they were checking everybody's carry-ons manually. That put an hour long delay on the flight.

Now most of the people who know me well know that I cannot fall asleep while travelling. But I thought that a fifteen hour flight with comfortable seats would be different. But no, I could only manage to catch fifteen minute naps every so often. I refrained from watching an in-flight movie so I could sleep, but it didn't help, and eventually I did switch on a movie and pretty soon, lost all interest in it. Add to that the fact that my husband is a little too accustomed to sleeping on planes, and that he needed to go to work the morning we landed, so he slept all through and I didn't feel like disturbing him. So you can imagine, I was a little frazzled and, given my normal tendencies, desperately wanting to take a bath, by the time we were ready for landing. But I don't really know what happened when we did land. We were at Newark airport, and the flight from Delhi had just landed, and we were in the queue for customs. There were about a ton of Indians who'd taken that flight. So the airport looked just like Indira Gandhi International, look of the airport and general crowd wise. But there was a weird feeling. A wonderful, weird feeling. I felt really happy after landing. Because of the delay at Delhi, we missed our connecting flight to Boston. And the next flight was full. They put us on the one after that. It was a little tight for Jatin, but we were somehow really happy, both of us.

We spent some time walking about the airport and exploring the area in general. The first thing I ate in the States was a fruit cup, from which Jatin picked out a piece of watermelon for me. Yup, he already knows my three big obsessions in food - chocolate, rajma, and watermelons. He makes sure that I stay away from the first one and have enough of the other two.

After much delay, we did land in Boston, and took a bus from the airport to the suburbs, from where Jatin's former landlord came to pick us up. He's a really nice and helpful fellow. Once we were home, Jatin took a quick shower and headed off to work, and I did what I'd been dying to do - take a nice, long shower and a nice, long nap. Felt really good to be sleeping so peacefully in my own home. Somehow I never felt anything like jet lag or homesickness once I was here. It feels good, feels natural, feels right.