I made it. A miracle. Monday night I had my final presentation for real estate. During that presentation I got a voicemail from the agency I had working on my visa. They said that they haven't got my visa through yet and it was I should get on a flight to San Francisco in the morning. There goes more money out the door. I leave at 7:00 am, get to SF, take the BART down to 16th on Mission. I stupidly decided to take the bus from the station to the Indian consulate which took me another hour. So it's about 10:00 when I get to the India consulate and there is a huge line. Also, they won't let me in the door because I have a bag. I have to go outside and wait at the teller window. Luckily, and this is where the miracle comes in, I see Tomo getting his visa too. He is going to India on Thursday, so he drove up that morning leaving at 2:00 am. I wait outside for an hour and no progress. finally, someone comes down and takes my application number than goes back upstairs. I wait another 30 minutes than I speak to Jason, the young Asian guy at the consulate. I tell him the whole story and he says he'll see what he can do, but I probably won't get it until 5:30, but he will call me and give me an update. That's a problem because my returning flight is at 2:00. I figure that I can just get on a later flight, but doing laundry, packing and getting everything ready for the trip is going to suck.
Tomo and i go to have lunch and Eats. Very SF-style. I recommend. Tomo got his visa and was just going to take a nap and then drive back to LA. When we finish lunch I get a call form Jason saying that he everything is good to go and I can come pick it up. That's at about 12:45. I get the visa, Tomo saves the day and drives me to the airport and make it just in time. No Tourist stops, so I just took pictures out the window as Tomo drove.
Flying here. It really wasn't too bad. I attempted to do some reading on the flight and some work for REDCO, but It was pretty unproductive so instead I just watched a ton of movies. So we got here last night. We are 12 and a half hours ahead of of Utah so just take your time switch the am / pm and add 30 minutes. The flight was pretty decent. After I sat in my window seat, this really old guy in a wheelchair went to sit in the aisle seat. The flight attendant must have seen my fear of being stuck there for 15 hours straight because he quickly found me another seat. It was right behind the exit so I had easy access to get up and walk around and stretch my legs. That was great. We stopped in Dubai. It was vast and barren. I thought I was going to see tumbleweed roll on by. The airport itself was pretty impressive though. Flying out I could see the tallest building in the world.
We arrived around 10:00 and went pretty quickly through customs. We took a cab to our hotel. Pretty crazy driving situation here. Left side driving of course. The best part was when our driver missed our exit, but instead of just finding another route, he put his hazard lights on and then slowly backed up on the highway with cars whizzing by us. We are staying at a pretty great hotel. But we are going to be putting three people to a room. Last night was just two people, but it will be tight quarters when the third gets here.
So bad news, but I called the bank and they said they can fix it. I ordered new checks and someone stole them from my mailbox and has been writing themselves checks for the last two days. They stole over $2,000. I called the bank this morning and they said they can fix it. But it just makes me so mad that this guys got away with it. Although, I wonder if he will. I mean he had to cash it at a bank and it has his name on each check. So hopefully he gets hit by a bus.
This morning, I went around the city in a tiny taxi while Jack was working on his last test. the taxi driver took me to his friends shops and they just saw dollar signs when I walked through that door. They were relentless. But after getting cheated out of a ton of money earlier in the morning, I was pretty jaded and didn't buy anything.
The city is pretty cool. It reminds me a lot of Kampala, but greener. It's really smoggy today and has the smell of burn. I don't know if that is constant or not.
Tomorrow we are going to the Taj Mahal and then Sunday we go to the middle of rural India to do our on the ground work for four days.
