Though our flight out of JFK was not scheduled to depart until 9:45 pm, we arrived at the airport at about 1:30 because Chris, as his final duty in the US, had to take part in a consultation with the Department of Homeland Security. This sort of creeped me out, but he seemed rather sanguine about the whole thing. We had to check out of our hotel at noon anyway (the Ritz-Carlton Battery Park is extremely nice, by the way) and our friends Ryan and Pauline, on their way to Camaroon, happened to be at JFK at the same time. All told, it just made sense for all of us to go early. The plan? For Ryan and I to park ourselves in a bar and drink beer and/or whiskey until Chris and Pauline were finished with their consultations. A lovely plan, if I do say so myself. And it came off without a hitch. I don't know about Chris and Pauline, but Ryan and I had a grand old time.

That said, I went to sleep immediately upon boarding our flight to Frankfurt. And I managed to sleep most of the way. Beer and whiskey will do that to a person. Being in business class made it possible for me to sleep in style too. Your tax dollars at work, folks. Thanks! Unfortunately, I woke up to a slight case of motion sickness and felt kind of oogy during the last hour of the flight. Beer and whiskey will do that to a person too. Throughout the ooginess, however, I used my extraordinary powers of imagination to recall, quite viscerally, my experience with seasickness. You all remember that, right? You should, because I talked about it for weeks afterward. Having been seasick, I could easily remind myself that things could be a lot, lot worse, and so my motion sickness wasn't so very bad after all. If you ever feel bad or sad or mad, just remember my seasickness and you will feel better instantly. Well. It works for me, anyway.

Landing in Frankfurt 20 minutes late gave us about 20 minutes to run all the way across Frankfurt airport to make our connection to India. And with motion sickness, that was really fun, let me tell you. But we made it and, upon scanning our tickets for the flight, the nice Lufthansa lady at the gate also asked to see our baggage claim tickets, which she also scanned into a computer. I was very impressed by this and remarked to Christopher that technology must have decreased the number of lost suitcases drastically. I also mentioned at this time that, incidentally, I had never lost a bag in my entire life (the set up is too obvious, I know, but that's really how it happened). Horrified, I dropped the last syllables of that sentence to a whisper, as if I could take it back or pretend that I never said it if I didn't actually finish the statement. But alas. The Fates had already been tempted.

Slept some more, ate some food, watched a movie, read a book, etc. And after 15 total hours of flight time, at about midnight Chennai time, we finally landed in the city of our residence. It was all very exciting. Waiting for us were two representatives from the consulate who had been assigned to come and fetch us. Introductions, handshakes, how was the flights, etc. Waiting for our luggage to appear on the scene, we made small talk until one or another of us heard the nice Lufthansa people paging a Mr. Chris. We all just looked at each other in a sort of resigned way and tromped over to the information desk. Of course, our luggage had not made the connection at Frankfurt.

Too tired to really process this information, we proceeded to answer the nice lady's questions about what, precisely, was in our four suitcases and how much it was all worth. Feeling a little put out that they would be trying to put us through customs when we didn't even have our stuff, we just tried to remain as polite as possible. No one, neither myself nor Christopher nor the FSO (Foreign Service Officer) with us nor the FSN (Foreign Service National), who is native Indian, seemed to really understand what was going on. We were just escorted around, our passports taken and photocopied, etc. Then, the Lufthansa lady quotes me a rupee amount. I was astonished. They were actually going to charge us customs tax for luggage that was somewhere in Germany and that would not arrive in Chennai for one or two days. I said something rude. I was not having fun.

More escorting around, more Indian nods of the head (this will be gone into in detail in another story), more confused looks, and then they hand us back our passports and about 16,000 rupees in cash (~$350 USD). And now it dawns on us that they were trying to determine the value of our bags in order to compensate us enough to survive until our bags arrived (buy clothes and toiletries, for instance). Suddenly, we love Lufthansa again and go get in the car to go home. And it was in the car that I learned my first Important Lesson About India, from Hilary the FSO. “Just because we speak the same language doesn't mean that we understand each other very well”.