When we set out for Bangalore, India three and a half weeks ago, I did not anticipate the first part of our trip turning into G & G European vacation, but that's what happened. On our flight there, we had a layover in Frankfurt, Germany, and when we tried to board our plane to Bangalore they wouldn't let us on because the travel visas we had for the kids were on their old passports. The visas were valid--they were the same ones we got for our trip in 2023, and they don't expire for five years--but they were on passports that had been replaced with newer passports. The kids' old passports are set to expire near the end of the year, and you can't travel on a passport within six months of its expiration date, so we got them new passports a few months ago. We simply never thought to get new visas also. After all, one benefit of going to India this year is that we wouldn't have to get new visas. But obviously we didn't think it through completely.
Before I go on, let me take a moment to rant about how fucking stupid the six-month passport rule is. I understand you don't want people to get stuck in a foreign country with an expired passport. But six months?! What the hell?! We left in July and came back three weeks later, and that was the plan all along. We had the return tickets to prove it. What could possibly happen for us to not come back before the kids' passports expire in December? I mean, if we missed the return flight, we would have only had all of September, October, and November (plus a bit of August and December) to schedule a new one.
But a dumb rule is still a rule, so we got the kids new passports a few months ago, and because of that we got stuck at the Frankfurt Airport. S immediately submitted applications online for new visas, but they certainly weren't coming through in the next two hours before our plane departs, so we were spending at least one night in Frankfurt. As chance would have it, S's parents, who were supposed to join us on the plane to Bangalore, missed the flight because their departure from the US was delayed several hours, and they got rescheduled on a flight the next day, so we all got to spend a night at the lovely* Holiday Inn at the Frankfurt Airport.
*I'm not being sarcastic. This is a good hotel. It's not at all in the airport as advertised--I started to walk there by myself with three suitcases in tow (I was selected to stay behind and fetch the luggage), before realizing that was pretty much impossible, returning to the airport, and taking a cab--but they have a good complementary breakfast, really good free wifi, and a very nice, helpful staff.
We saw the in-laws off to their flight the next morning, and then tried to figure out what to do next. And it wasn't a chill, "What would you like to do on this fine Friday afternoon, my dear?" conversation. It had more of a "So, what the hell are we supposed to do now?" vibe to it. Nobody wanted to call it and go home, but nobody wanted to wait around in Frankfurt for the new visas to come through, probably three to four days, so we decided to hop a train and go to Paris. When the idea was first proposed, my initial inclination was, We can't just go to Paris, and then I thought, Wait, why not? S booked us a hotel in a neighborhood where one of her old colleagues now lives, got us some train tickets,* and we were off.
*S is so much better at scheduling these things than I am. Her trick is that she just does it, whereas I incessantly hem and haw in my mind, unsure if I'm doing the right thing. Her way is so much better. Yeah, you might make a mistake from time to time (like not updating your kids' visas), but I make mistakes doing things my way, too, and I carry around all this anxiety of constantly thinking I'm doing something wrong. I'd like to be more like S when planning, but it's not something I can just wish into existence.
The only major catch is that we had way too much luggage for a weekend train trip to Paris. S brought one large suitcase filled with nothing but gifts from the US for people in India, even though they now have pretty much all the same shit over there that we have here (with the exception of Kirkland brand maple syrup, which one of her cousins requested--and I respect that), and we packed as if we were going somewhere for three weeks, not three days. We couldn't leave our luggage at the hotel because we were checking out, and the lockers at the train station were shit (business idea: safe, reliable bag storage walking distance from the Frankfurt train station, any major train station, really), so we had to haul it all on the train with us. It ended up being fine. We were some of the first people to board, and I just hogged almost all of the common storage area with our suitcases and then quickly sat down, so that people wouldn't know the bags were ours.
Four hours later we arrived in Paris, and it was awesome.
Paris has a reputation as being one of, perhaps the, most wonderful cities in the world. As Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City says to console herself after (foolishly) following her artist boyfriend to the city late in the series: "I'm in Paris. Don't you worry about me." In the end, the relationship and the move didn't work out (that damn self-centered Baryshnikov!), but the quote illustrates the je ne sais quoi of the city. Just being there is (almost) enough in life. And I felt that, big time. I probably would not want to live there (too many annoying tourists like me), but as a place to visit, I don't know that any city I've ever been to can match its aura. Maybe Reykjavik. I love Reykjavik. I'd have to really think on it and compare notes from my previous blog entries to determine which city of Paris and Reykjavik has better energy.
Because it was such a slapdash trip, a lot of the major attractions were unavailable. The Louvre was sold out, the Musée d'Orsay was sold out, Versailles was sold out, but there was still so much to do there (Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Champs-Élysées, etc.), and just being there was amazing--walking around, popping in and out of cafes, eating street food on The Canal. Heck, just sitting in our hotel lobby, sipping complementary espresso was cool. We stayed at this really cute, retro boutique hotel (but they still had wifi and AC, thankfully), and it made me realize that I'm a sucker for decor. I wouldn't have necessarily thought that previously, being kinda robotic and practical by nature, but it's absolutely true.
So, Paris was great. (I'll put up some pics below.) But it was also very stressful because of the whole waiting-on-visas, not-knowing-if-we're-still-going-to-India thing.* S did some research online and learned that you can actually travel on your old visas, as long as you have your old passports with you. (They told us something similar at the airport.) So, when the new visas didn't come through by day three, we came up with another plan. We booked rooms at the Frankfurt Holiday Inn again, and had S's sister go to our house, get the kids' old passports, and FedEx them to the hotel. They would take about three days to get there, so by the time they arrived, and we were able to book a new flight, we would only be about a week behind schedule, which would still give us nearly two weeks in India. When we first booked this trip, I was secretly (okay, not so secretly) dreading the length of it, but, with a side trip to Europe first, it turned out to very much work in our favor.
*It was also incredibly expensive--like, dip-into-our-emergency-savings steep. But it was worth it, and we're about to eliminate a huge expenditure from our household books, which I'll get to in a future post.
So, we took the train back to Germany. And of course, right before we left, the new visas came through, so we had the old passports shipped for nothing. (But we didn't know that at the time. One thing this whole ordeal reinforced is that it would be a lot easier to make good decisions if you could see the future.) We could now book a new flight to Bangalore with the next big battle being who was going to pay for it, us or the airline. I won't keep you in suspense: It was us. After initially telling us, we could book a new flight on our existing reservation for a $150 change fee, they then called us back and told us that it would actually be a $150 change fee, plus a $6,000 fare adjustment... per person. Yes, that's right it would be almost $25,000 to travel on our existing reservation.
There was no way we were paying that. I would have rather stayed in Frankfurt and committed crimes until they deported me. So, we had no other real option but to book an entire new flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore.* It was a fraction of the $25,000 alternative, but it was a large enough fraction to make us wince. S in currently trying to get us some compensation from the airline (Lufthansa), under the premise that they never should have let us on the flight in DC--it's obviously not great business to strand people in a foreign land midway through their travels--but I'm not particularly optimistic about this prospect. It was mostly our fault, after all.
*We also could have just gone home, which we did briefly considered. But that would have put us in a similar position of having to alter our existing ticket or buy a new ticket, so it didn't really get us anywhere financially. Not to mention, S's parents were already in India, and they and a whole bunch of her other family members, including a few who might not be around "next time", were expecting us there. It would have been a colossal disappointment to not make it to India.
So, after S spent basically an entire night on the phone--a night filled with curses, threats, and tears (of which I received the brunt, for some reason)--we got our tickets and checked-in for our flight to Bangalore. Of course, the next day, the old passports we had shipped to Frankfurt got delayed, and we got an email from the hotel staff saying they had arrived literally (and I mean that literally) ten minutes after we went through airport security, so despite being less than a mile from the hotel, we couldn't collect them.* But whatever... the airplane ascended into the sky, and we were finally on our way to India.
*I actually got a notification before we went through security saying our delivery had arrived, so S cabbed it back to the hotel to pick it up, but it wasn't there. Either it was actually there, and the hotel staff didn't realize it until later, or the delivery person scanned the code saying it got delivered a few minutes before they actually delivered it. Whatever the case, we ultimately had the hotel send the passports back to DC, and they are now in our possession once again, even though we don't, and probably won't ever again, need them for anything, other than to look at them ten years from now and say, "OMG, look at how cute you guys were back then!"
About six hours later we arrived in Bangalore, and it was awesome.
Bangalore is a very different city from Paris. It's dirtier, nosier, and more crowded, but it has it's own infectious joie de vivre. There are people out all the time, everywhere. As we become more siloed in our houses back home, it's especially refreshing to spend time in a city where people still go places. The ice cream shop is bustling on a Wednesday night at 10 pm; the mall is crowded from open to close (and there are no vacant units); food stands lining the streets sell to patrons at all hours of the day. It's a beautiful locus of constant human interaction. On our way into town from the airport, in the wee hours of the morning, I saw a group of guys, four of five of them, just hanging out in front of a closed tire shop. They seemed to be laughing and joking, and I thought to myself That's what it's all about. Just hanging with bros--doing nothing with people whose company you enjoy. We all need to spend more time with our bros, chilling outside the closed tire shops of our lives.
The original plan was to go to both Mysore and Bangalore, but we cut out the Mysore part because of the whole arriving-a-week-later-than-expected thing. We did, however, go to the city of Shimoga for a night. We stayed in the presidential suite of the Royal Orchid hotel. There were two bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large central living area, and a conference room--like a full-on long-table, giving-a-financial-report-in-a-commercial type of space.* It was about half as expensive as our rooms in Paris. We only stayed one night, spending time with some of S's family, particularly her bedridden, eightysomething aunt. I'm not sure why we didn't stay longer. I don't ask many questions in India. I just go with the flow. I follow the family from this auntie to that uncle to a second-cousin once removed, eating dosas and drinking coffee all the while.
*This was a stark contrast to the single room we booked in Bangalore. Initially, we had two rooms each with a king-size bed. We can't yet trust the kids to share a room of their own and not kill each other, so S shared with Lil' S1, and I shared with Lil' S2. However, Lil' S1 is the size of a small adult man now, and understandably doesn't like sharing a bed with his parent, so we got him a roll-away bed. But then Lil' S2 wanted to sleep with S instead of me, so it was the three of them in one room and me by myself in the other room. This was both lonely for me and not very cost effective, so we got a second roll-away bed and all crammed into one room like a happy family.
As with our previous trip, we spent the bulk of our time in Bangalore hanging out with S's cousin and her husband and their 13-year-old son. (They also have a 19-year-old daughter who's away at college.) The son is between our boys in age, so they can all hang out together, and they get along pretty well. It's actually very sweet if you can catch them interacting at the right moment. All their birthdays are in August, so we did a bunch of fun stuff in celebration. We went to see the new Spider-Man movie; we went go-karting and bowling; and we ate a lot of cake and ice cream. We also, somewhat randomly, played pickleball and something called paddleball. Well, I didn't actually get to play paddleball. Somebody official kicked me off the court because I was wearing flip-flops ("slippers," as he called them). India can be a weird place. You can drive a motorcycle on the shoulder of the road against traffic, with your wife riding side-saddle holding a small child on the back, nobody wearing a helmet, but you can't hit a ball with a racquet for a few minutes without proper footwear.
It wasn't a very touristy trip (it never is), but we did do something semi-touristy. We went on a tour of the ISKCON Hindu temple where S and I had our wedding way back in 2011. I'm not a religious man--I'm not even that spiritual--but I found the experience to be very moving. It felt like "the real deal" (to quote Timothy Ratliff about the Buddhist monk in Season 3 of White Lotus). We couldn't see the room where we got married because it isn't open to the public, and we had to hustle through the tour because they were closing soon, but that's fine. Had we stayed longer, the kids inevitably would've started fighting and ruined the experience, anyway.
The one thing I'll say in the negative about the temple is that their bathrooms badly need a renovation. They're buzzing with flies, and they have the disgusting, literal hole-in-the-ground toilets you'll find sometimes in India. I think the temple wants to keep things humble and traditional, which is why the bathrooms are like that, but they also have a gift shop and a snack counter that only accepts cashless payment, so I think they could update the toilets to something more modern and less putrid.
Anyway, I'm kinda running out of steam here, and we didn't do anything else too exciting in Bangalore, so I'm going to put up some pictures and call it a post. Actually, wait, I do have to mention the return trip, because it was the perfect bookend to our travels. It's always longer flying east-to-west, because the jet stream winds blow in the opposite direction, so we had a seven-hour flight from Bangalore to Frankfurt, followed by a four-hour layover, and then what should have been a nine-hour flight to DC. However, there was some stormy weather along the usual route, so the pilot had to take a detour, which added about an hour to the air time. That sucked, but much worse, we now didn't have enough fuel to make it all the way to DC, so we had to land in Philadelphia, a mere 140 miles from our destination, to refuel. That took about two and half hours, and then it was another half-hour flight from Philly to DC. When it was all said and done, it was a legit 26 hours straight in airports and airplanes. Well, at least we avoided rush-hour traffic on the Uber ride home.
Until next time...
[People dancing on the banks of the Seine]
[We couldn't actually go in the Louvre, so I just took a picture of the famous pyramid entrance, designed by I.M. Pei (as any good crossword puzzle solver knows)]
[The Eiffel Tower]
[Notre Dame, no hunchbacks spotted]
[The interior of the hotel we stayed at in Paris; I spent a decent amount of downtime sitting here, sipping espresso, and playing my word games]
[A bridge spanning the Main River in Frankfurt]
[ISKCON Temple in Balgalore, where S and I had our big (medium, by Indian standards) wedding ceremony]
[Canal Saint-Martin in Paris]
