Better late than never

This is actually being written on May 1, 2006.

Ha! Whaddaya know? You *can* backdate entries on here (though not, apparently, add italics. This host may not last). If I *had* been up at 8 the morning after my arrival, and blogging, I'd be a different person. But then, we'd also have had to have internet up and running (which it still isn't really, about on par with our hot water, six months later), so India would have to be a different place, too. Me, I'm working on it (read: finally blogging). What's India doing, I'd like to know.

So here's what I remember, patchily, six months after the fact, from the leap once more unto the breach (and after this, I swear to god, I'm giving it up):

- Running into a colleague (of, ahem, a different agency) in the departures area of Dulles, who was leaving for London that same night. At that point, I didn't envy him. Yet.

- The officious Indian woman at the check-in counter who must've detained us for forty minutes. One of my bags was apparently not just expensively overweight, but in the second tier of their pricing system, at 73 pounds. The other was 65 pounds, and, yes, she did make us stand there in front of a growing queue of very understandably murderous passengers, and have me titrate the most easily reachable stuff -- and why do I always seem to pack "delicates" last? -- and reweigh the bags until both were 69 pounds.

- Charlotte (that's the tabby) started wailing as soon as I took my seat in Business Class. I flashed a reassuring smile at my seatmate, a taciturn military man on the way to Frankfurt who seemed alarmed by me and positively undone by my mewling bag. "She'll settle down in a minute," I told him. "You won't hear her over the engines," I offered, twenty minutes later. Two hours later, and Charlotte was still going strong. The woman sitting in front of me -- I could only see the back of her head, but it looked like a rather posh ponytail -- called the flight attendant over. I could only hear the flight attendant's side of the conversation:
"I don't know, I think it's a cat."
"Yes, they *are* allowed."
"I see. Yes, I understand. I'm sorry. Yes. I'll look into it."
(conspiratorially) "I quite agree!"

I slunk back into coach, and quietly switched cats with K.

On the second leg of the trip, I was sitting next to an Argentinian businessman of a certain age, who wanted to tell me, in heavily broken English, about the book "The Kite Runner." He also kept kicking the bag under the seat in front of me that contained the (silent) Monty.
"Please don't kick my bag," I kept telling him.
"What is it? China?" he asked.
"No," I said, "a cat."
"Oh," he said, looking puzzled.
The next time I asked him to stop, he tried again.
"Is it something breakable?"