12 hours in the air

Today & yesterday, the 14th & 15th of december in whichever time zone, I christen as TERMINAL day. I have been through 3 terminals so far and am typing from the third terminal, waiting for th flight to get to the 4th one.. This is a story of me going from europe's second biggest airport to Abu dhabi international, where I spent 20K rupees(USD 500 approx) in 3 mins and then reached fly ridden Chennai.

The first terminal was CDG(Charles de Gaulle, Paris). That was the mother of all terminals I have seen so far. I spent the night there and took a couple of tours in the free bus to see the complexity of the whole place. It has more flyovers that most small indian cities have roads. Complication seemed to have been the aim of the whole place, or is it because of the volume of passengers? I don't really know, but I know this much. Between 12am and 5am the whole place is DESERTED. Not a soul in sight for miles, except of course homeless people and one or 2 passengers here and there who are spending the night since they have no options(like yours truly).

Before I got there, I read a lot of reviews about the airport and how the staff are the most annoying and unhelpful people hand picked to annoy non english speakers! But, and there's always a but I never had any of those problems. The place was deserted yes, but thankgully for me, I was able to find a nice lady who advised that I should go to 2E or 2F to spend the night beacuase those are the new terminals so it shouldn't be crowded and should be warm. And right she was, I spent a lot of time there, tried to sleep and succeded for about 1 hour until the rotating door which almost worked like a fan blew air at -2degC on me freezing any dream song and dance sequence I may be involved in ;).

So, at about 5 am, I rode the bus back to the terminal where I was suppposed to board my flight and without any hitches, was on my way to the plane on time and found myself, sick from sleep deprivation. Helped an old french lady communicate with the waitress who didn't speak french and moi did ;)..

That aside, I spent approximately 8.5 hours on that flight and reached Abu Dhabi with enough time to change terminals(which I might add was super simple) and a nice lady in a Hijab told me where I could buy a laptop. Now, I went downstairs and a nice pakistani guy sold me a white aspire one for 1499 AED(still dunno how much that is in rupee). And might I add that it took me 3 mins to do that. With that done, I went through another screening and without awaiting another minute, unpacked my new netbook with a cap of a pen, hurt myself(Imagine how restarted my hand eye coordination should be for that to happen!). Anyways, the little thing is all I imagined and more, but it has XP, which I might add makes the little 1.6GHZ processor weep. Will soon replace with the UBUNTU netbook remix, we're talking 6 hours battery backup baby..

The big question now is, will this replace the INSPIRON which I have now.. Don't know, will have to confer with upper management(read parents) and then decide. I think it would be nice though, but I don't carry it around much and the keyboard is super small. Decision pending..

In the next 20mins or so, I was on the flight to India and left the glittering skyline of Abu Dhabi behind only to be replaced by the pitch dark of the Indian ocean. End of the 3.5 hours uneventful flight, I landed in Chennai and was greeted with a warm 26Deg C winds, thank you god..

But as I type this, awaiting information on when my flight to bangalore will leave, I can't believe that I have lost track of what the value of the rupee means. Anything less that Rs.200 looks super cheap, I keep thinking that I would pay twice that..

However, since this is the first time I'm in chennai and since I'm not a big fan of loud tamilians, not really feeling at home here. But, there remains just 120mins between me and meeting my loved ones. That makes it worthwhile I think, you stop caring that in the last 50 hours, you've had eyeshut of just about 3 hours, that you have had to carry 20kg of baggage through the treacherous paris Metro and that you just overshot your budget for the next couple of months by a long shot. Right now, I don't care.. I just care at what time the Jet guys tell me where to get on board that flight, reach BLR on time, and get home.. Catch up on family and SLEEP, the way you can sleep in the place you call home and no matter where you've been and what you've seen. There's only one place you call home, and that place is all that drives me now.

Lets c