Last time I went to India, I was in the comfort of a group of lovely people right from our 4-hr pre-departure delay in Heathrow till the middle of the night when the taxi came to take me back to the airport for my return flight 6 weeks later. This time, I was going it solo.

I left Bangkok for Kolkata late afternoon and got chatting to a Danish and a French guy in the custom forms / queuing / waiting-for-someone-to-check-something-really-minute-that-someone-else-had-checked-just-20-seconds-earlier debacle that started pretty much as soon as we hit the ground in West Bengal. The Danish guy had travelled lots in India before so it was nice being around someone who was totally unfazed by the bureaucratic ridiculousness of everything. Unfortunately I had to bid them both goodbye as they caught a taxi into town and I got ready for killing 12 hours in the airport waiting for my early-morning connection to Port Blair on the Andaman Islands. And I don’t think that would have been too hard if I hadn’t had to leave the building to find an ATM that would take Visa cards. Because getting back into an Indian airport is a bit of a mission.

First they wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have a printout of my ticket. Electronic copy is ok but there was no wifi so I couldn’t access my emails to find that. So I got sent off to the Air India office and got them to print it but even with that they wouldn’t let me in because it was 7pm and my flight was at 5am which meant no access to the departures building until midnight. Fine, I thought, no big deal, I can chill by the ticket offices until it’s technically the date of my flight. But then I needed the toilet and after trying 3 different entries (ensuring them that I’d happily leave the building again afterwards) and the Air India desk, I got directed to the airport manager’s office to check if he would authorise it. And that was just the most hilarious thing I have ever experienced: I get into the office, he’s chatting with someone so I politely wait my turn. When they realise I’m not there on a social visit, they break up their conversation and I tell the manager that I’ve been told I need to speak to him about going to use the restroom because its 8pm and I’m not allowed into the building till midnight. He says he doesn’t think that’s possible which I (wrongly) assumed was sarcasm but he says he’ll check (and I’m thinking ‘with who?! You’re the airport manager and you can’t let a passenger through to use the toilet?!’), picks up the phone and dials some numbers. He chats to someone (or maybe he’s just humouring me and he chats to no one) for about 15 seconds, hangs up and says to me ‘no madam, restroom is not possible’. Totally deadpan, totally serious. I thought that was so beyond ridiculous I didn’t really know how to respond so I just just held back a laugh and left the office and decided to try my luck at arrivals. But it turns out the military guards will stop you if you try to enter the arrivals building (and they carry guns so I wasn’t going to be getting on their bad side) so if anyone ever finds themselves in a similar situation at Kolkata airport, just head straight for the restaurant underneath the parking garage outside arrivals (ignore any taxi touts along the way although there were actually only a few and they weren’t as pushy as I’d expected them to be), walk through to the back and enter the parking lot and, voilà, you’ll find a man at a little wooden table who will collect some amount of money from you (the smallest I had was a 10 rupees note which I handed over and he didn’t question it so either I guessed right or I way overpaid) and let you use the slightly randomly out of the way (non-western) restrooms that exist there. And just FYI, I’d recommend making sure you are travelling with someone who can look after your luggage while you undertake this, it’s a lot less fun when carrying around an extra 25kg.

I spent the night trying to sleep on those uncomfortable airport seats next to the airline offices and when it was finally time to check in, everything started to go a liiiittle too smoothly. But then I got to the gate and started boarding and then I was back in India. Because the airline could scan my boarding card but then, before being let onto the bus to the plane, a lady in a military uniform needed to check the tags on my hand luggage that were supposed to have been stamped at security. Now, I never got any tags and the women’s line at security was a bit of a push-and-shove and people were waiting for ages for their bags to come through the x-ray and some security guy did point at my bag and signal where the tag was but I figured it was one of those totally unnecessary things that only he needs to check so I just took the approach that works in South America which is shrug your shoulders and assume it’s not an issue until it actually is, and then just chat your way out of it. But at the gate, there was no chatting my way out of those missing tags. Instead, I was told to speak to the guy that managed the boarding queue who seemed as confused by the fact that my hand luggage had no tags as the lady in the uniform was. But he has a boarding queue to manage so he knows he needs to help me get this sorted and asks the check-in counter if they have any spare tickets. Which they did but they didn’t have a stamp. So off we go to the next gate which also doesn’t have as stamp but the 3rd one does so the guy in the military uniform there asks to see my bags, looks into the first one for about 2 seconds, realises that’s too much effort so just asks me what’s in both bags and stamps the tags before I’m even done with one bag’s contents. Then it’s back to the gate my flight is leaving from and up to the lady at the door again who looks at the tags and waves me through. She’s done her job, I guess, but it sure felt completely redundant. So I ended up boarding along with the 4 people who had missed the first 7 ‘final call’ calls but had made it to the gate for the 8th one (apparently those final call threats don’t work out here).

So my first 12 hours on Indian soil were probably a good reintroduction to the ways things work here. I wasn’t surprised, I knew what to expect, but it’s pretty obvious that the laid-back Latin ways of handling things have become quite ingrained in me. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes to break that but hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later or I will find myself in some unnecessary (and unsuccessful) discussions.

Today I’m listening to: Local Natives – ‘Colombia’