AC mist on the plane
Wednesday morning I went to the gas station across the street to get some breakfast. Praj doesn’t normally eat breakfast and likes to sleep later than I do, so I went without him. It is only a gas station and a small one at that so the supply of food is very limited. I picked up an apple juice a bottle of water and two snickers bars. When I checked out the clerk told me the total was Rs 180. This seemed very high to me, I know the water there is cheap because we have been buying it non stop and I thought the snickers were Rs 40 when Praj bought them and I doubted the apple juice was Rs 80. I asked the lady for a receipt and then her English broke down and she looked flustered. “You can get another water, would you like some gum?” She squirmed. I told her I was good with what I had, if I could just have the receipt please. Then she handed me my receipt with a total of Rs 105 and my Rs 75 change. She had tried to overcharge me by 71%!
We are now headed to Kolkota(Calcutta) and will have visited the three largest Indian cities. When we got to the airport Praj asked the cab driver if he could change a Rs 1000 note for the Rs 150 bill. The driver told him that he could and then gave Praj Rs 350 in return. Praj asked him where the Rs 500 note was and the guy gave his best innocent face and then produced it, another honest mistake.
While sitting at the airport I watched a news story here where a member of parliament is accused of assaulting a bank manager. The member of parliament, like any good politician, denies these charges. The only problem with his story is the video the news has of him trying to punch and then slapping the bank manager in the face. The news channel is running his interview along with the tape in slow motion.
Once seated on our plane to Kolkota, Praj leaned over to me and asked, “Do you smell that?” I didn’t smell anything and from the look on his face I was glad I couldn’t smell it. Then as we took off I started to smell some foul body odor. I told Praj I smelled it and we both cringed. Then the smell became so strong, I knew it had to be coming from me, because there was no way anyone else could smell that bad and strong. I casually sniffed my pits, but there was not a hit of body odor, only deodorant. The smell would go away and come back and every time, I knew it had to be me, but it never was. Someone else on that plane smelled so awful that it convinced me it was coming from my body.
At the airport, I was waiting in line to get a prepaid cab, that way they cannot rip you off. There was a guy across the airport with a shaved head, but the hair on his ears was so long and thick that it looked like his ears had wings on them. When I got to the front of the line for the prepaid cab, the total came to Rs 295 and I gave the guy a Rs 1000. He gave me my ticket and Rs 205 back in change. “Sir, I gave you a thousand” I explained. Then he reached over to his drawer of money as if to show me that I had given him 500 not 1000, but he was giving me the rest of my change. Almost getting ripped off this many times in one day is beyond ridiculous, it really makes me wonder how many times I have gotten ripped off and not even known it. I will definitely be keeping my eyes open and asking for receipts from everywhere else.
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