I'm back, baby!

So, I’ve returned. Hyderabad is just as I left it: loud, dirty, and stinky.
I haven’t posted in quite some time. I guess I haven’t had the patience to sit down and recount the very busy last few months.

Heather and I celebrated Christmas, just the two of us, here in Hyderabad. We mostly just slept in and lay around all day. We were both too preoccupied by thoughts of our impending trip home.

Halfway through January, we boarded a plane and headed for the U.S. After a 12 hour layover in Singapore, which sucked, we were back on a 13 hour flight home. It takes longer from the U.S. to India, because you are flying into the jet stream.

Once back in S.F. we had a day to collect ourselves and we were back at SFO headed for Heather’s family in Indiana. The morning we were heading to the airport we awoke to one of the biggest rainstorms to hit the Bay Area in decades. At least that’s what the news was calling it. It just seemed like a slightly heavy rain to us. But our Shuttle driver was acting like God himself might fall from the sky at any moment. He drove the entire way to the airport at around 30 miles an hour leaning forward in his seat as though he couldn’t see the road, and pulled off towards the shoulder every time a car approached him from behind. He’d shake his head and say “This guy’s crazy! Look how fast he’s going in this weather.”
I wanted to hit him over the head and scream, “It’s just rain, you pussy!” But I felt this would not get us to the airport any faster, so I just sat back and watched the cars zip past us like we were standing still. At one point a bus passed us and it whipped up some turbulent air and mist from the road. I thought our driver was going to shit himself. He came almost to a complete stop and muttered something like, “Holy shit. That was close.”
But it wasn’t.

Our flight to Indiana was uneventful and Heather’s sister Heidi came to drive us from the airport. It was a nice relaxing drive back to her mom’s house from there, and the next day we got to meet Heidi's son Simon for the first time. He was born a few months after we got to India.
He’s an amazingly well behaved kid who seems perfectly happy to do anything at all, as long as you don’t try and make him sleep. For the entire 2 weeks we were there, he slept for a maximum of 3 hours at a time, day or night and cried ‘bloody-murder’ if you tried to lay him down.
Both Heather and I got colds from all the sleepless traveling, but once we were feeling better we had a good time.

Back in San Francisco we got to see my parents and all our friends. That was nice, but it made coming back to Hyderabad that much harder. Heather had a sales conference the first week we were back and then she had to fly back to India without me. Then there was a week of debauchery with the fellas. Then I had to come back to India.

After flying to L.A. where I was to make a connection to Singapore, I found out I left my ticket back in San Francisco. I thought this would be no problem, but boy was I wrong. Apparently I had been issued a paper ticket. It never occurred to me that this might be the case, since I don’t even think I’ve heard the term “paper ticket” since I was a wee lad. So forgetting ones paper ticket means one must either go find it, or one must buy another $1300 ticket to India.

Balls!

So I spent the night in L.A. at a hotel, got REALLY hammered with Jesse Kane, and then flew BACK to San Francisco the next day, got my ticket, slept for a few hours, and got on ANOTHER plane to L.A. the morning after that. Then I had to sit around LAX for 12 hours before my flight to Singapore. The Singapore airport is set up to handle passengers with long layovers. There’s tons of shopping, lots of restaurants, places to sleep, and even health spas. The International terminal at LAX is equipped with none of these things. A restaurant or two, a couple bars, and one crappy duty free shop. I was tired anyway so I just found a secluded corner and slept most of the time.

The flight back was not too bad and I got to see some good movies, and to my own surprise I even slept for a while. Then once in Singapore, I got a massage, got a cheap hotel room for a while, did some shopping and was back in Hyderabad the next day.

All in all we had a great time at home, of course, but I would have rather not gone, because it just reminded me of what we miss:
Friends
Clean air
Clean clothes
Clean water
(OK, anything clean)
Not getting stared at
Variety of food
Variety of People
Being able to walk down the street and buy a soda or some toilet paper or whatever
Public transportation
Paved roads
Non-scary hospitals…

The list goes on and on, but I’ll stop before I get depressed.