It has been a month since I arrived in Hamilton,ON Canada. A truly exhilarating experience for me. Everything about this phase of my life is worth remembering.I guess if I put stuff down it will help. Right from the start when I took out own desi Airbus from Chennai to Mumbai to eating out at Himalya Indian Restaurant at Stoney Creek,it has been one hell of a roller coaster.
First things first. The "packing tension" one feels before emabarking on a faarin trip is immense. You really cant priortize for periods of the order of years i.e If ure going to be out of home for more than a year or so you will find that everything you can think of will be useful at some point and it is hard to drop some things from your luggage.However airlines have an obvious limit which means you drop 100s of pages of Journal Papers and A4 sheets which you wanted to carry hours before your flight.It is even more irritating to be reprimanded by the bugging Indian Airlines official regarding the weight limit and that you may get fined. Finally the guy relents to incessant pleading about grad students being poor and cost of living in faarin being high and all.He adds a warning that the other official mite not be as generous as him. That turned out to be true but in a quite opposite sense. No other official through my journey raised a finger about luggage rules. The supposedly serious security check also turned out to be simple with people getting to take cabbin baggage quite contrary to rules of the time. But everything was not fine. Had a major scare at Frankfurt where the officials of my connecting flight to Toronto told me that my ticket on Air Canada was not confirmed and that I had to wait till 10 mins before departure to find out if I had a seat or not... That shocked me out of my wits and I started cursing my Travel Agent.But luck and The BIG G's grace was around and I got a seat afterwards.
Thats all reagrding the air trip.Was over joyed to find Prof.Bhaduri waiting for us(was travelling with Arindam/Arindan) at Toronto airport.What a fabulous human being he is.. More on My first month at Hamilton in the next post..
