Holding Pattern At JFK
USA | Wednesday, 26 March 2008 | Views [921]
It's March 26th, and Waldo is at JFK Airport in New York!
===> Read to the end; there's an important announcement!
Hi all you Waldo Watchers,
Well, I'm off again, this time to India. This trip has been a while in the works, but now I'm off. Lynda drove me down to Burlington from Sutton this morning in a series of short, wet snow squalls. My flight was at 11:30am, which left me a 9 hour layover here at JFK. So I put down my money and bought a day's worth of wifi so I could write all of you.
Just a word of wrap up from the last trip (which is why I'm calling this Where's Waldo? #17, a continuation from last time. If I ever write up Morocco properly, I'll call that Where's Waldo? #16.5!) Lynda and I left London for Marrakesh on November 17th, returned to London on December 11th, and returned to Canada on the 12th. We had a fabulous time in Morocco, and I highly recommend it. Since then I have been in Sutton helping out at Lynda's B&B and getting ready for this trip.
There are a lot of details of getting ready that are interesting if you are thinking about going yourself, but not if you are not, so I'll skip all that. (Ask questions if you are interested. Suffice to say that I needed a VISA for India and I got a 10-year multiple-entry VISA. It cost three times the price of a single-entry VISA but with the advantage that I can leave India and return (either during a trip or on different trips), all without the hassle of sending my passport off to NYC multiple times.
I also needed to get a regime of inoculations, which I did in Montreal. For India you need just about everything except Yellow Fever, and then you are good to go everywhere in Asia. I'm on Lariam, the weekly malaria pill, which is the way to go if you can stand it. (You take one pill three days in a row as a test, and you look for nightmares, erotic dreams and psychotic behavior; I was hoping for the second one; friends claimed they saw evidence of the last one!) After that, starting a week before and continuing for two weeks after, you take one pill a week. It does mess up your sleep though for a night or so the day you take it.
So here I sit in JFK, waiting for my 22:10 flight to the west coast of India, to Mumbai, which is the new official name for Bombay (since 1996.) There are 16.4 million people in Mumbai, and it claims the busiest rail station in all of Asia. I will have some company when I arrive at 22:30 local time tomorrow night after my 15 hour flight. Luckily I am meeting someone there, someone who should have landed from New Zealand three hours ago and should now be asleep in a room in the Byculla District. I just have to get there.
Anyway, here's the announcement. I am switching from an email newsletter to a blog. Hopefully before you look at it I will have uploaded this email as its first post. Be aware that I don't know what I am doing yet, so bear with me. Don't be surprised early on if there are some edits and changes to stuff you've already read. I'll do my best to make it as much fun for us all as this newsletter and your responses have been for me. Thanks again for reading along.
The blog is called "Travels, With My Rant." (Apologies to Graham Greene, and thanks to Carol Halls; Greene's 1969 novel Travels With My Aunt is Carol's favorite book.) I continue the Where's Waldo? theme on the blog where I am WorldWideWaldo, like my Skype name.
First, here's the URL: http://journals.worldnomads.com/worldwidewaldo/rss.aspx. Bookmark it! Visit it every once in a while, see where I've been, and feel free to leave a comment or two. Enjoy them, and send the URL on to your friends if you think they would enjoy it. There should be a few photos with most entries, though some may have none.
Speaking of photos, like last time, I will upload all my photos to the web at full size (Flickr! this time) and send you all a notice that they are there. Feel free to down load those you like, but please, not for profit. I will limit access to the photos to all you on my contact list. If you have someone who wants to be added, just contact me and I will add them. I'll let you know when I have any uploaded.
OK, that's it for now. Thanks for helping me kill the time of my layover!
Jay, aka, Waldo
