I don’t know how they expect me to fly halfway across the world without a little TV monitor right in front of me. I actually did watch two movies on the plane, even though I had to watch them on the awkwardly placed common screens.
The Indian movie was bad. Really bad. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to recount it in clichéd “boy meets girl” format:
Boy sees girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy finds out where girl lives. Boy goes to girl’s apartment. Boy professes love for girl. Girl does not reciprocate. Boy goes home dejected. Boy attempts suicide. Girl finds out that boy has attempted suicide over her. Girl decides to give boy a chance. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy and girl spend gobs of time together. Girl attempts suicide (scarf on the ceiling fan style—nice touch). Boy finds girl attempting suicide. Girl reveals that she is in debt. Boy robs bank for girl. Boy finds out girl is actually married to someone else and that she and her husband have schemed to get him to rob a bank for them. Boy plots revenge. Boy fights with girl’s husband. Girl dies.
My favorite part of the film was that not only were there two attempted suicides, which seems like a lot, the second of them was just a trick, the woman’s way of letting her fake boyfriend think she’s really desperate.
The other movie was Sideways, a movie that several of us were excited to see. But I think that everyone who watched it ended up somewhat disappointed. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best movie to watch in the middle of the afternoon on an airplane, but I still think that film critics must be chronically depressed human beings. If you create a movie where people just kind of trudge around through the molasses of their own introspective miserableness, you’ve got a cult hit and a critical masterpiece on your hands.
Our stopover was once again in Paris. You know, you hear a lot about people who go to Europe, and they come back hating the French. Well, I went to India, and I came back hating the French. And it wasn’t just me. We saw a lot of tourists in India (we were often mistaken for British or Australians), but the French tourists just seemed a little more annoying than the others. There was a big group of them at the hotel in Jaipur who seemed obnoxious, and ever since then it seemed that the people who were most likely to be irritating in some way were the French people.
In India you could get a Coke for 15 rupees, or about 30 cents. In the Charles de Gaulle Airport you can buy a Coke for about three Euros, which is about four dollars.
Many of us had pretty much the same experience flying into JFK. We were greatly anticipating being back on terra firma in the United States and not having to worry about the dirtiness, the smell, the way people treated you, the animals all over the place, and the way just about everything was substandard. As soon as we got into New York, the elevator didn’t work, some of the people were rude, and there were pigeons at the gate. Still, they were our animals and broken stuff and rude people.
Next stop: Cincinnati. We were greatly looking forward to Cincinnati because we had a four-hour layover and could have hamburgers and get our first glimpse of the NCAA Tournament. The burgers were good, and the tournament was better. I got to see the end of the Michigan St.-Kentucky game, which turned out to be a classic. It was a good game, but really it was good to be watching any kind of ballgame again in the United States. That’s when I really felt like I was back home.
It became obvious pretty quickly that not too many of the scheduled flights were making it out on time. Our flight was supposed to leave at a few minutes to nine, but we were pushed back gradually, and we didn’t actually leave until almost midnight. During our long wait, every one of us slept at one point or another. I taught Texas Hold ‘Em to Shinji and Lili.
When we finally got back to Austin, the entire airport was closed except for us. Shinji and I caught a cab back to Oak Park, and I spent about as much on that cab as I had on all of my rickshaw rides in India. And the cab ride didn't even raise my heart rate.
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