G and I are going to India towards the end of August. And I'm a little freaked out. Excited, but freaked. For one, I'm not even sure I'll be allowed in the country at this point. I might - just might - have sent my passport in too late. I've had months and months since the wedding to send in for a passport with my new name, and I waited til last week. And didn't think to ask for expedited service. Doh. I'm feeling like an idiot. And its not just that I have to have the passport back, but I also need to send in the passport to apply for a Visa. Suddenly, its looking like there might not be enough time before the trip to make it all happen. AND, even if I wanted to, I can't really go up to San Francisco and do the same day passport and Visa services since I don't have my passport now. So pretty much I'm at the mercy of the federal government. And we all know how confident that makes me feel.
And then of course there's the whole taking a white boy to India to meet my non-English speaking relatives. My brother offered up the opinion yesterday that he thought that I was brave but crazy, that it would pretty much be like hell. And I'll be drawing attention away from my cousin whose wedding we're going to. And maybe it'd be better to not ruin his whole wedding? Awesome, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. He pointed out that even we get stared at when we go, just cuz everyone knows we're from the US (my family lives in the boonies, so not much to do for people other than stare and gossip). Quite a cheerful dude, my brother.
At least we're a little more confident now that we'll actually make it to where my family lives. Last week we weren't even sure about that because the local flight we booked was looking kind of hokey. I was pretty excited to find a cheap flight from Madras to Trichy, where my grandparents are at. Normally, I've always had to take a train or bus over and its kind of a long ride. It was a bit odd. Everywhere I looked, the fare was about $250 round trip per person. Then I saw this for about $50. So I was already a bit dubious. But then the price jumped up to a $100, so I figured I should just book it. I went through the process of entering in all our information (including passport #s, phone #'s, what currency I wanted to pay in, etc). And then, right when we were supposed to pay, it told us to pick a payment method, but there were no options to select from! And it wouldn't let us move forward without selecting an option, so the whole thing was jacked. I waited, tried again from home. Same issue. All the contact numbers were local Indian numbers, so I was gearing myself up for an awkward conversation. G was in the middle of googling credit card issues with the airline, just to see if anything popped up. And all of a sudden, I don't know why but I wondered if changing the currency would make a difference. I hemmed and hawed over having to enter in the info AGAIN, and then finally went for it. G loved it, cuz that's the part where I get all mean and expect him to know the answer to everything and then blame him if it doesn't work. It was a great evening all around.
Anyway, I was entering info for the millionth time and G meanwhile was finding all sorts of people complaining about the website online, specifically this particular problem (the general feeling seemed to be that this airline would be out of business if there weren't so many people in India cuz their site sucked so bad -- totally agree, I don't think I mentioned that it crashed on me a bunch of times too while I was entering in our stuff, which was awesome). Anyway, turns out that changing currency from US Dollars to Indian rupee did the trick! Though our options then were: PG1 or PG2. Um, ok, I'm just going to guess that one of these is to pay by credit card. After it went through or kind of around the same time, G read that the airlines doesn't accept credit cards issued by foreign countries. So pretty much all last week we wondered if the whole thing had been a waste of time. And if everything about the trip was up in the air.
But finally, a few days later, our credit card showed the charge, so it looks like it went through. The cost of all of the drama: a whopping 94 bucks round trip for both of us combined!!
And my cousin says he'll book us a hotel room for the first couple of nights while we're in Madras, and make sure we get on and off the plane ok. So things are already looking up. Now, if only the US passport service could play ball, too . . .
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