You know you're in a whole different world, when the passengers waiting to fly out of your airport cheer when they finally see a plane land on your runway.
Granted, it wasn't our plane, but at least it proved that planes could actually land on said runway.
Our plane did finally arrive, and a series of small successes (including: the plane being able to take off and not lose our luggage) got us to the Delhi airport.
So the story with the flight back to Chicago from Delhi . . .
Well, surprisingly enough, there aren't a lot of flights out of Delhi to the US. In fact, American Airlines has one, Continental has one, Air India has a couple and that's about it. Since it would have cost us about $4000 for a one way ticket to fly anything other than American Airlines (if they even had a free seat), we were pretty much stuck trying to get on the next American Airlines flight.
Enter Jason LaPorte, the brains of the American Airlines operation in Delhi - not to mention perfect english without anytime spent in the US or other english speaking country. The flight that night was overbooked by 7 seats, so even though he put us on standby - he wasn't hopeful. However, he was able to bump around people to actually confirm seats for us for tomorrow's flight - which was a huge improvement when we first called, which had us waiting four more days for a flight out of Delhi.
We were REALLY close in getting on that first flight - in fact, they had us go through the initial security questions, and Jason said just to wait one minute, while he confirmed the seats. Of course, Murphy's Law - four incredibly late passengers arrived in those 60 seconds, so we failed.
Back to the hotel
