After a rather arduous journey, we’re finally here. And holy shit what a city it is. Yesterday after arriving, we took our luggage to our “base camp” (Antti’s flat) and after a nice, cool shower and a change of clothes, headed out to get something to eat and drink. We settled on a food court type of restaurant and had some stir fry. We then took the MRT — the local metro — to Swissôtel, a rather posh +70 story hotel and took the lift to a bar on the 71. floor. The view was amazing. After a G&T, we headed back home.
Archive for November 20th, 2007
19.11. We’ve arrived at our final destination. It’s a sweltering +31° and the humidity is pretty brutal.
The trip over here was interesting. Our flight from Helsinki to Mumbai was with Finnair. They’d provided us with a brand new Airbus 380, so the seats were comfortable and the personal entertainment was much more advanced than on the older MD-11s. The personal touch screen displays had a variety of movies, tv-shows and music to occupy our time on the flight — which was a cool seven hours. So as we touched down in Mumbai, we were pretty content with the journey so far.
Mumbai was like landing on a completely different planet. Since we were transfer passengers and had a connecting flight in four hours, we needed to find the Connecting Fights desk or something resembling it. We unloaded from the airplane and strolled through a series of corridors before finding a sign that said “International Transfers”. Unfortunately things weren’t going to be as easy as we’d hoped.
During the next four hours, we were taken on a tour of Mumbai Airport as an Indian lady wearing a Finnair uniform, took us from one side of the airport to another, searching for someone who’d know what the hell we were supposed to do. During this escapade we were searched, and this is if my tired memory serves me correctly, around five times; during which we never actually left the terminal. We just changed rooms and wings of the airport. It seems the security force at Mumbai Airport don’t fuck around :)