Day 1? A Chaotic Arrival - A Joshua Post

Hey friends, it's Josh. 

This is my first update here in some years! My family has been updating as we travelled, but I felt it appropriate to post an update about our arrival to New Delhi now that we've slept a night in our hotel.

This is pretty comprehensive of the entire journey here, so there's a lot you might've already read.

Everything started with chaos the night before we left. When checking in online for our flights, Volren realized he did not have his passport. This led to a hasty, chaotic scramble at 2 AM to get Volren back to his room to find his passport. Along with this chaos, the struggles of getting our e-Visas printed the night before our flights. Luckily, taking Volren back to his room led to us solving both issues.

After a brief rest, and a hasty breakfast at the house, we called ourselves a Lyft to the airport and began what would be more than 24 hours of time in planes and airports before we arrived in a hotel to sleep in. It all began with what has become tradition for Serriff; realizing that he had a knife he was not supposed to have. The TSA officer helped us send the knife home by mail, since we had so much extra time before we needed to board. 

After clearing security, we realized that a few boiled eggs did not a breakfast make, and so we made a stop to get some food before making our way to the gate. We went to a Jamba juice in the airport and got waffles, little egg bakes, a pretzel and smoothies. The pretzel wasn't amazing, and neither was the egg bakes; the pretzel was kind of bland, and the egg bake was cold in the middle even after they heated it for us. The twins got inventive and used the waffles with some ice cream at the Tillamook Dairy shop to make waffle ice cream sandwiches. After having my larger than planned Jamba Juice smoothie, though, I sadly didn't have room to eat ice cream. 

When we finally boarded out flight from PDX to AMS we were fortunate enough to all sit together in the same row. I sat in the middle between Volren and Serriff and slept through a lot of it. I woke up for meals and snacks and even got to wander around a bit during the flight since it was not very full. We even had time to play some Dominion on my phone using pass-and-play! The food on the flight was nice, Manicotti was the vegetarian meal option for dinner, and it was very good. The non-veg option was chicken makhani, which Serriff got and enjoyed. In the morning before the flight, there was only one breakfast option which was a nice egg bake wrapped in pastry. The twins were experiencing motion sickness by this point, but they ate anyways. After touching down and a much faster deplaning than we are used to for domestic flights, we were in AMS airport. 

As we visit airports and hotels, I am going to provide feedback and opinions about these places. I'll try to be objective, but my opinions are my own as well. We have an AirIndia domestic flight to take us from Jaipur to Pune scheduled for Sunday, so I'll give opinions on that sometime next week. 

Amsterdam Airport (AMS) Schiphol was not super easy to navigate in my opinion. It has a super space efficient branching hallway design for it's different lettered terminals which is super cool, but confusing for a first timer to the airport. Additionally, since our boarding passes weren't printed by KLM, but by Delta, a different SkyTeam member, Delta didn't know which gate our flight to New Delhi would be in. Normally, this would be no issue. Check the screens and see where we were going, but since we had several hours, the flight was not posted on the screens in the AMS airport yet. We didn't know that when we reached an information Kiosk, we would be able to check were to go, so instead, we talked to a security officer who was friendly and helpful with getting us where we needed to go. 

While its navigation was a struggle, it shined in its diversity. There were people from all walks of life speaking a wide variety of languages all around us. It was reflected in the workers, like security and in shops or restaurants, but also in the food on offer. This is a particular strength over American airports I've visited. They had interesting fusions and combinations, like a hummus and pomegranate sandwich or the brie and truffle tapenade pizza that I bought. There weren't a ton of options for American classics beyond McDonalds behind security, so it's worth taking into consideration if you are a picky eater. I loved the food, but I would've been very excited to find a place to get some soup near the food court. I am sure there were places further out form the center of it all to get other food we missed, but it's a bit of a pain to find these places unless you know where you're going or you stumble on it moving towards your flight.

Now moving onto other amenities at the airport. The free wi-fi was fast and reliable and easy to connect to. Loved it.  There was a distinct lack of water bottle refilling stations or drinking fountains in Schiphol, so that's something to consider when visiting. I think it's related to Europe's bottled water culture, but it's worth being aware of. Even if I hadn't forgotten to pack my water bottle, I couldn't have filled it in Schiphol. I did have an opportunity to use a restroom there and it was not a great experience. The stalls were quite small for an airport, where carryon baggage should be accounted for in restroom designs, and the urinals were not designed well, so the men's restroom carried a strong odor of urine. Since I had a relatively short layover, it wasn't a huge issue, but if you were staying for more than 5 or 6 hours, it would definitely become a problem. 

Moving onto the flight from Schiphol to New Delhi, I can't say too much. This flight, since Volren and I booked separately from Dad and Serriff, we were separated by something like 14 rows of seats. I am pretty sure after discussing it that we all fell asleep and awoke to a dinner being in front of us which was quite nice. It was a paneer dish which was quite tasty. I spent a lot less time asleep on this flight and even discovered that KLM provides free messaging services for people on their flights as long as the wifi works. This means when we are in the air, you can text us using WhatsApp if you have our phone numbers. Nothing major happened, and we got a sweet bread snack. Volren and I were both asleep, so we missed the breakfast that they were handing out, but Serriff and Dad say it was very good. 

After deplaning chaos emerged out of order. To begin the New Delhi Airport requires you to scan your passport if you aren't an Indian National to get access to the free airport wi-fi. You do this at a kiosk and get up to 4 hours of free wi-fi. Serriff had some issues with this, and several people demonstrated how it was done for us before we all figured it out well enough to make it work for us.  That killed 15 or 20 minutes. I did not appreciate the difficulty with connecting to the wi-fi. Maybe it's a security concern, maybe something else, but it was not appreciated nonetheless.

Then it was off to paperwork and customs. Paperwork was relatively easy to do and getting fingerprinted was pretty quick. It felt like things were going too well until I realized I'd forgotten my bag by the paperwork counter. After speaking with a very generous customs worker, I was allowed to retrieve my bag with no extra hassle. Close call there!

Then we went and had out bags scanned for problematic items, and moved swiftly out to find our driver, but we found our grandfather first! Ajoba was waiting for us with our driver and it all went quite smoothly getting to the driver's car. The shuttle to the parking lot was a bit of a tight fit, but we managed. 

After driving through the Indian streets and realizing that Indians split more lanes with busses than any American motorcycle could dream of, we made it safely to the hotel. I would've posted this several hours ago, but the hotel was having issues with its power when we arrived, which meant the Wi-Fi it offers was not stable enough to post to the blog until now. 

I've eaten a wonderful Indian breakfast complete with a cup of lychee juice, and right now Dad and the rest of the crew are out sorting out Indian SIMs so that we have phone numbers and data while in India. We have some plans for the day, but I don't want to spoil anything.

I expect we'll post a photo dump post later tonight when we have some spare time to collect all of the photos from the flights and from the day out and about and if nobody else does, I'll make a recap explainer of what we did today. 

In the meantime, I t