And now for this little rant...

Update from somewhere over the China Sea…

I will post more about India and post more pictures but first this editorial comment after leaving India.  

I loved most of what I saw in India.

I love the food

I love how friendly and kind everybody I dealt with on a personal level was (with some notable exceptions but this is a personal blog, not work related, so I won’t say anything about certain customers)

I love the chaos, now I know that sounds odd coming from somebody who has lived in a city that has had somewhat of a population “explosion” and is now >19,000 people for the past 23 years, but I do.  I don’t think I could live there, but I loved feeling it.

I love being in new places and experiencing new things.  I will be back probably 2 more times this year going to different parts of India and I’ve heard about the food in those regions and some of the attractions and I’m looking forward to seeing those.

But there are some things I most decidedly did not like.

I don’t like having every car and taxi checked for bombs before being allowed into a hotel lot.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the attention to safety, but it also kind of creeped me out.

I don’t like having my itinerary/passport/boarding pass checked 7, yes 7, times in a fairly small airport from the time I pull up to the departures lane till I get on the plane.

I don’t like having to repeatedly empty every scrap of metal out of my backpack at 1 airport and sailing through 2 others without a second look.

I don’t like being felt up by 1 security guy after passing through the metal detector.  I’m pretty sure he thought I had some device hidden in my underwear.  I thought about telling him we caught the underwear bomber but thought better of it.

I don’t like not being able to find any t-shirts for my grandsons in either of the airports we went through today, or hardly having any time to look for them because of the 7x document inspection bullshit

So enough griping.  I HATE whining and I refuse to do it.  I’ll be back; I’ll love a lot of it and not like other parts.  I’ll find t-shirts somewhere, somehow for Tommy, Nate, and Paul.  (I bought them Moscow Hard Rock Café t-shirts one time that the writing glowed in the dark and Nate wore hardly anything else for the next month, and I still see him wear Tommy’s some times, that might just be the best souvenir buy EVER.  (Way to make grandma* feel good Nate!)

On to China, but I’ll go back and fill in the holes on this India trip.

*  Yes I am called grandma by 2 of my grandsons.  When Tommy was born I was 44 and Sarah asked me what I wanted him to call me and I said “Clay, he can call me Clay”.  That was greeted with he CAN’T call you Clay!  And I said we had time to think that over, after all, most kids don’t talk the week they are born.  Well, when he started talking I said he can call me grandpa.  I liked that (George is Mimi) but Tommy kept saying “Gramma” and he’d get corrected and 1 day I said don’t worry about it… he can call me grandma, I don’t care, mom is Mimi so it won’t be confusing.  So they do… and now Tommy is 7-1/2 and Nate is 6.  And they will stop some day, and when they do it will probably break my heart a little, but that’s okay, it’s worth it now.  So… for the record, Tommy and Nate call me grandma and Paul calls me grandpa (and I just love the hell out of that too) and it has made for some interesting situations.  Like when Tommy asked Sarah why Paul called grandma grandpa.  And the look I’ve seen Paul give Tommy and Nate when they call me grandma sometimes.