Into India

When we left North Dakota, spring was just getting genuinely under way. Day time highs of 55F/13C, nightly lows around 32F/0C. A crisp and delightful menu of seasonable spring weather. Stepping off our Lufthansa flight into the Indian night, I was instantly swaddled in a sultry humidity so dense I could taste it. Being a couple days out of a shower as I was, this did not provide for a pleasant sensation. However, since I didn't have another plane to catch it was not enough to prevent me from smiling. We made our way off the jet with the exhausted masses. The baggage claim was blessedly near by. For the first time in my life I grabbed one of those carts for people with too much luggage because we had way too much luggage. Our largest bags were among the very first that came out on the conveyor. Yay! Then we waited for our other check bags while I took in the glitz and splendor of the Mumbai airport.Twenty minutes later I was getting a little anxious when our two smallest check bags came out very last onto the conveyor. All is well that ends well. Now the dreaded ordeal of customs.

Except it wasn't. My wife explained to me that when Mumbai is your final destination all your check bags are checked by customs before you get them. Instead of going through what i expected of customs, we just went to an express line, ran our carry-ons thru a scanner, and explained to one of the agents that we would not be running our cats thru the scanner. He looked at us blankly, looked at the cats blankly, shrugged, and waved us through. By now it was about 2AM local time, so his giveadamn may have run its course for the day.

I had my messenger bag and my cat cross slung like suburbanite bandoliers. I had my baggage cart loaded five feet high. We were both sweaty and disgusting. We had arrived.

...

INTO INDIA

If you've read this far you you are probably tired of hearing about traveling with cats. In fact, if you're reading someone's expat blog you probably want to know what the destination is like. That commences... now.

That first day in Mumbai I was sans wife, sans Hindi, and sans cell phone.

My wife was at work. My attempts at Hindi had been directed through the app world via Duolingo and Drops. Duolingo is obsessed with teaching the Devanagari alphabet. I would roughly approximate this to a native Arabic speaker trying to learn English by sitting down with an English dictionary. It can be done, but would necessarily make one hate their adopted language. Drops is obsessed with teaching you how to say "spoon" and "wind" and other terms equally useless for hailing a taxi or buying a mango. My cellphone situation is a can of worms whose explanation can wait. I was, in short, freewheeling like 1992.

My only serious task for the day was to register the cats with the local branch of the Animal Quarantine and Certification Center. I know I said no more cat stuff - I'll keep it to a bare minimum. Other than that I had few pressing issues of the sort that I could actually address. We sprang out of bed at 7ishAM with all the zeal of people that had completed a transcontinental transplant about 3.5 hours earlier. I assume we ate something, Kelly called our driver, and off we went to drop her off.

Having a driver sounds pretty cool, right? Presidents and diplomats have drivers. Wal-Mart heirs have drivers. When I say we have a driver, that ain't what I'm talking about, at all.

It's difficult to imagine what traffic looks like in Mumbai unless you were the type of kid that ever pried the top off an ant hill. The roads have lines on them, it's true. These serve precisely the same purpose as as painted toenails and fancy neckties - strictly decorative. Traffic to the Western eye is the unbridled chaos of 10,000 people trying to go down a thoroughfare designed for 200. People pop in and out of "lanes" and weave and cut each other off all within literal inches of one another. And they honk as though the sound of the horn is the fuel source that makes it all go. Somehow, by seeming divine intervention, it all works with very few accidents and better flow than L.A. could pull off on its best day.

All of this is simply to say that having a driver is not some swanky luxury for the filthy rich. It is a basic requirement to get from point A to point B in one piece. Learning to drive here, to my eyes at least, is a full degree of magnitude more difficult than learning the language. Besides, one thing that is abundantly clear in India is that labor is so cheap it's practically free. Whatever The Job is paying for our driver, I know it isn't much.

It is true that our drivers probably cost a bit more than average in Mumbai. This is because they speak English. You may have read from various sources that English is the official language of India, or that "most people speak some English." This is a grand prank perpetuated on us by our forerunners abroad; a sort of hazing ritual for new tourists and expats. Many people do speak a language that bears enough similarity to English to possibly be classified as an English dialect, but even that is decidedly generous. In their defense, the locals here probably do think they speak English. But it will take you exactly three exchanges with a native Mumbaikar to understand what I mean.

The challenges are manifold. First, Indian English has British roots. Being an American, I frequently struggle to converse with the folk of Great Britain simply due to idiom and phrasing. On top of that you get various Indian formalisms. It's similar to the way the Japanese have a gradient of formalisms for referring to elders and authority figures. Third, there is sometimes seemingly bizarre word selection. Fourth, in Hindi questions are defined by the specific words and grammar used. This means that Indians often do not understand the use of inflection in English that signals that a question is being asked. Everything just sounds like a statement. And of course last is the notorious Indian accent. Even when everything else lines up properly, the totality of the mangling applied by the Indian accent can make literally anything incomprehensible. And I suppose I should include the sidenote that Indians will fully refuse to recognize a request to speak more slowly or clearly. Consider the following illustration from an encounter with an agent of the Indian government, with a four year degree and ostensibly some years of intensive English study:

Me: Hello, my name is Fulton Fortner. I'm here to drop off the paperwork for my cats. (Offers folder full of documents.)

Government Agent: Myplisask yogur nimsar.

Me: I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch what you said.

GA: Myplisask yogur nimsar.

Me: I Am Sorry, I Speak Very Little Hindi. Kya aap angríze bólti hai(n)? (This is the latinized representation of the Hindi question, "Do you speak English?" )

GA (angrily): Ya ya! Myplisask yogur nimsar!

Me: ... ... ...I'm sorry, could you say that more slowly, please?

GA (rolls eyes): Myplisask yogur nimsar!

At this point a timid young assistant sidled over from where he'd been working a few meters away. Blessedly, he had half the accent of his boss.

Assistant: Aikskoos me suhr, she is askink, "May I Please Ask Your Good Name Sir."

He delivered this quotation with such effort at good pronunciation that a gossamer sheen of perspiration materialized upon his brow. His superior rolled her eyes superciliously again, saying, "Yesyesyes." Never mind that I had answered this question before it was ask-stated. This interaction proceeded along these lines for another 45 minutes. It was a true delight.

This is essentially the degree of proficiency I'm talking about when I say our drivers speak better English than most. So far the only people I've met with full and comprehensible command of English fall into two categories. These are my wife's co-workers at The Job and the beggars and scammers in all tourist areas. More on those little stinkers later.

I had decided to engage an instructor and learn Hindi months before we arrived. With what I know now, I feel the same motivation to learn the language that the starving jackal feels to attempt an attack on dangerously large and powerful prey.

I quickly found that this is a long way from the norm for expats here, regardless of their origin. When I tell a fellow expat that I'm learning Hindi they look at me as though they don't quite get the joke I am making. When I respond to Indian taxi drivers, retail workers, servers or bartenders in Hindi they literally gape at me wide eyed for a full second and half giggle before they compose themselves to respond. This entire dynamic is baffling to me. Why in the blessed name of Lord Ganesha would anyone want to isolate themselves by living for years in a place where they cannot understand what the holy hell anyone is saying??

That's not for me. Especially considering that many Indians that do speak intelligible English suddenly can't quite understand you when you are asking for something they don't quite feel like doing. I like very much to know what the hell is going on.

En Route

Somehow I've made it this far without explaining why this was all entirely worth it. I was thrilled to move to India. I have a restaurant background, and only Spain beats India in terms of what I wanna get into my mouth. That came out kind of weird, but I'm leaving it. There's also all the history, the art, the culture - and the incredible food! Mumbai is a coastal town, and my biggest food weakness is sea critters. We're spitting distance from Goa and the Maldives. I'm a mountain junky, meaning there is no topping the prospect of visiting the Himalayas. The Uttarakhand province is adventure paradise. In various parts of India there are jungles and elephants and tigers! Then there are the collateral benefits. Living in India means it is super cheap to fly to the rest of Asia and to Europe. Wifey and I could finally explore Germany, Singapore, Slovakia, Japan, Thailand, Norway and more. If she gets time off, but that's beside the point. There are endless reasons that I was absolutely stoked for the transfer.

There was the big city angle, too. Kel and me are both small town Montana kids. At one point I lived in Billings. That means my largest population experience was double hers. For the last 12 years the biggest town we've lived in had almost 50k people. The move we were about to make would take us from Williston, North Dakota, a town of 30k, to Mumbai. We'd also never lived anyplace where shoveling snow didn't claim a large chunk of one's time. Now to go to a place that gets around 8 feet of rain a year at an average temperature of 80°. In the name of my metric integration that means 242cm of rain at 27.2°C.

We wanted an adventure, and there was no better place for it. So it was time to get on that plane.

...

It was a very plain plane. It took off from a decidedly underwhelming airport. It was delightful.

The Williston airport consists of little more than a service counter and a TSA checkpoint. And a vending machine. The preboarding area is in a trailer dumped in behind the airport. There has been no effort to disguise this fact. It is a setting designed to minimize expectations. This is for a reason.

To fly out of Williston, one boards a "jet" with half the seating capacity of a school bus. It is hot. It is loud. It is cramped. By all appearances, the designer of the jet must have hated anyone that might be so insolent as to board his aircraft. I say "his" with confidence since these little bastards were built in the 1970's. My wife is always saying some nonsense about how it's not that bad. She is an even foot shorter than me. She also obviously suffers from some debilitating form of chronic positivism.

In spite of these failings, our little pile of crap on wings did have some redeeming features. The flight to Denver was blessedly short, clocking in at just over an hour. It would allow us to put the karry-on kitties all the way under the seat in front of us. That wouldn't come to seem important until later on.

Anyhow, we checked our bags containing all our remaining clothing and toiletries. It came out to something like 250lbs. Not terrible. The lady at the check desk was extremely amused by our pet situation. No matter where you are, when you have two cats as carry-ons, you get some looks. It's actually pretty fun. The crates are difficult to see into, and add a sense of mystery. Quincy, feeling abused, would occasionally offer a low, plaintive meow. That's what really furrowed the eyebrows and started the furtive whispers.

Then it was off to the TSA line. This little process involved extracting our grumpy felines from their enclosures and carrying them through the metal detector. The security theatre agents clearly had strong concerns that my cats were terrorists and I was their dupe. They eyed the lot of us distrustfully.

I figured that around takeoff we would really be in for a treat as the cats got their first taste of air travel. I expected yowling and thrashing, hissing and various fluid expulsions. Instead, I got some mild, pitiful cries from Quincy. Jimi was, as the saying goes, calmer than a Hindu cow. Landing certainly scared the living daylights out of them, but their respective reactions were much cooler than anticipated. Chock up one pleasant surprise! Even with all the noise (we were the first seats behind the wing) and a little rough air, the first leg of the trip went stunningly well. I was deeply suspicious. I thought it best to lie to Quincy at this point and tell her that the worst was over. It would be difficult to overstate the degree of this deception.

Our tickets had been booked by an agent at The Job. They did their task masterfully by getting us seats literally 30 rows apart in the flights after Williston. Upon arrival in Denver the first task we undertook was getting seats next to each other as married couples sometimes do. This also gave us the opportunity to pay for an upgrade. It was undoubtedly, completely, absolutely worth the couple hundred bucks to do this for the next flights. We also had to pay a per cat fee just as we had in Williston, but $125 each is such a small price to pay for the contemptuous affection of our little companions.

A note about customer service with Lufthansa: it's gonna take a little time. By that I mean a lot of time. But they will get it done. The staff is friendly and works super hard to be accommodating. They also seem to be writing the code for their computer system on the fly. It took 3-5 people around 40 minutes to get it done, all expressing Jedi-level concentration the entire time. And they made it happen for us. I love Germans.

With our tickets fixed up, we sat down to relax with the fur babies for a little bit. I bought carriers with a sweet fold-out sides made of mesh so they could move around and get some daylight and fresh air. This also got the attention of everyone in the vicinity again, and much amusement was had by all. Then our brief layover was finished and it was time to saddle up again. They were displeased when I folded up the accordion sides and Kel and I each took up a cat and boarded.

I've never flown anything but the cheapest economy seats, ever. Kelly flies all over for work and has a bazillion miles and gets upgraded all the time. So I was like a kid in a candy store with my extra 2.2" of leg room or whatever it is. I got a fancy tray table that folded into the arm rest, an adjustable head rest.. I was traveling in style!

We wound up seated in the 20's in a nice new Airbus A310. Plenty of space for carry on bags, tons of head room, excellent flight attendants.The free in-flight movies really are a boon on those 10 hour flights. The in-flight meals were good, too. There was, however, a small problem with putting the cats under the seats in front of us. The seats in economy plus are supported by a central column, and they have an adjustable footrest mounted to the back. The way this configuration worked out meant that only the person with the window seat could get the cat crate underneath. Kelly gets the window seat when we fly. Therefore, I spent about the next six hours trying to wrangle things such that there was a place for a) the cat, and b) my feet. Somewhere over the southern tip of Greenland I finally just decided to disregard airline protocol about how to stow pets. I turned the crate sideways and pulled it back under my legs instead of trying to force the thing under the seat in front of me. Voila! Suddenly I could sit comfortably. This was while i was intermittently napping and watching Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Sidenote: watch this movie, but not with the kids.

Kelly has learned to sleep like a champ in the air. Also, This was her third intercontinental trip inside ten days. She was dead to the world. Jimi, in her charge, maintained his silent vigil / intensive snoozing regiment. I dozed and watched bizarre and entertaining movies. Then, somewhere just over the edge of Northern Ireland, Quincy snapped out of her CBD coma and became very uncool. She was making all the angry cat noises and doing all the thrashing around. It took at least half an hour to get her to chill out. It would still be a few hours before i figured out why.

The landing into Frankfurt, Germany was a little up and down. Like in a bouncy,carnival ride type of way. I intuited that this was not a good thing. Sure enough, as we descended from the heavens like Perseus on Pegasus, I heard that telltale sound. It's a sound like an inverted hiccup. A sound like an esophagus that has infected sinuses. The sound of impending vomit. Drat. Nothing to be done now but assess the damage when an opportunity arose.

So we land in lovely Frankfurt. The view once we'd glided back beneath the cloud was at once serene and industrious. The geometric patchwork of fields in their spring splendor was a beauty to behold. Sadly, now that we were on the ground, it was dealing-with-cat-puke-time. I chose to view this as nature maintaining balance.

The Frankfurt airport is very nice except for two things. There is absolutely zero airflow. While it wasn't particularly hot, it somehow managed to be stifling. Secondly, to switch between our two Lufthansa flights required us to transit approximately half a mile of airport terminal. Luckily this gave us ample opportunity to find someplace to release our babies from cat prison and care for their issues, whatever those might be.

Kelly wanted to hurry up and get to our gate and recalibrate our seats as we had in Denver. I protested this and eventually got my way, which was to deal with the cats first and get to the gate second. We found our way to a handicapable bathroom well off the main concourse to use as a family unit. I was exceedingly paranoid that someone with both a disability as a pressing need to answer the call of nature would happen along while we were locked in the bathroom doing crazy cat person stuff, but that was the risk we had to take.

Jimi and Quincy were given a 15 minute furlough from cat jail so we could give them a snack and some water. At this point they had been confined for over 14 hours. Before we undertook the voyage, we had given the cats all they cared to eat and spoiled them to the best of our abilities for a couple of weeks. The day of the flight we'd taken their food away 6 hours before takeoff, and taken the water 3 hours before takeoff. This cruelty was in the interest off avoiding the inevitables of biology for as long as possible.

The preparations had worked flawlessly with Jimi. He wandered happily out of his kennel and greeted us in his characteristic fashion, which is to say he was practically wagging his tail. Quincy, on the other hand... I had heard her retching on the landing, but he is was merely the tip of her iceberg. I don't know whether it was a chain reaction or if the trouble had started with that little hissy fit over Scotland, but the smell hit me with alacrity. Out slumped a haggard and bedraggled black cat. The defeat in her eyes was the ghost of indignation left to rot. She was a mess of everything that could come out of her AND wind up upon her, in a sort of mermaid configuration. Going backward from her neck and shoulders the situation devolved steadily all the way back to her slimy little tail. Hoo boy.

There were a few things working to my advantage in this unfortunate situation. We'd had the foresight to bring a jumbo pack of baby wipes and a handful of cotton rags. There was a sink and paper towels to one side and a toilet to the other. And finally, Quincy was feeling too dejected to offer resistance to a vigorous scrubbing. Working against me were the clock, my jet lagged brain, and the sheer intensity of cleaning required. At top speed I broke down the little cat carrier and scraped what I could into the toilet. Kelly went to work on the kennel, I went to work on the cat.

After 15 glorious minutes of scrubbing and rinsing and pressing and drying, the situation had been remedied as well as it could possibly be given our circumstances. Quincy was certainly not happy, but also no longer looked clinically depressed. That may have something to do with the fact that after the humiliation of being cleaned had ended, I had to cram her back in her carrier. Despite the surge of pure adrenaline this shot into her bloodstream, I escaped the task without need of stitches. Then off at top speed to the gate to modify our seats if possible.

The ticket modification was a simple repeat of the Denver process, except this time we are seated in the true middle of economy plus. The seating of the jet was configured 2 - 4 - 2, two seats, an aisle, four seats, another aisle, and two more seats. We were in the middle of the middle, with a fellow traveler bookending us on each side. The underseat storage situation was now a little screwed up for both of us, but now we knew better than to try to fight it and simply didn't follow the rules from go. Mercifully, the flight crew turned a blind eye.

And thus we got underway for our second "night" aloft. Kelly again slept reasonably well, and I napped, watched movies, and covertly played with my cat. The airlines have strict rules about keeping them locked down in the jets and terminals, so I just opened the carrier narrowly and reached in to soothe her. I watched The Shape of Water. Skip that one unless you like some weird shit. I demi-watched the new version of The Magnificent Seven afterward to cleanse my pallet. This movie is a Western that is actually a superhero movie. I recommend enthusiastically to anybody that likes fun and isn't a movie snob.

By this point my mind wasn't really working normally, but in the fun way. The airline food had taken a delicious turn for the ethnic and i was enjoying it more than any sensible person enjoys airline food, ever. The last leg of the trip went rather quickly, and practically before I knew it, it was time to step out into the adventure that is Mumbai.

New to town

Here I sit looking south across a sprawling urban skyline. The breeze through the balcony doors carries the unbroken and snarling opera of a very intense city. The breeze also carries a bouquet that is one part exhaust, one part ocean, one part pure energy, all tied together with the underlying scent of an open dumpster.

This is Mumbai (or Bombay), and by some counts it is the second largest city on the planet. It’s home to an estimated 22 to 24 million people and counting. One of the fastest growing cities in the world, Mumbai is a thunderous mass of growing pains. And now I’m here, just adding one more person to the heap. So for today we'll just round up and call it 24,000,001. For handy reference, that's a bit larger than Chicago. And New York City. And Los Angeles...

Combined.

This place is incredibly interesting. But before I get into all of that, you should probably suffer through a bit about me and how I got here. This little project is supposed to be as informative as possible while being no more boring than absolutely necessary. In the interest of giving useful stuff to my fellow expats, we'll start with the road to Mumbai.

My lovely wife got transferred here for work. She has the grown-up job in the family. I remodel houses and build stuff and cook things, so thankfully I am naturally portable. If I'd had a more structured career path there would have been many more difficult decisions and conversations. But as things stood I just couldn't say yes to a new adventure fast enough.

Going to Mumbai started well before the trip to Mumbai. What? Yes, a lot of ground work went into getting us here. For starters, we needed to sell about 99% of our possessions. The terms of the move package offered by The Job only let us take what would fit in an air cartage container measuring roughly 4'x5'x5'. I don't know the metric equivalent yet; I am poorly integrated. Sue me. So besides selling our house and both cars we also had to thin out personal possessions in the most aggressive manner.

Try this exercise for fun if you want: pull the stuff out of a closet in some room besides the master bedroom. Ideally it should have a single bifold door. Now put your household essentials in there. You only get to take what you can cram. (Clothes don't count. You can check a couple bags on the flight.) Then sell the rest. That's the essence of what we did. It's actually incredibly liberating to unburden yourself from all the stuff you don't truly need in your life. How many items do you own that you haven't used in the last year? Yep, me too. Plus it puts money in your pocket and lets you donate to good causes. Besides, to quote a classic film, the things you own (can) end up owning you.

So we sold the house and both cars and started crate training the cats. That is right - the four-legged fur babies got to come to the (former) Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire with us. Our third fur baby, my dog Ace, has far too many neuroses to come to a big city. Or any city, really. Instead he got to go live at his favorite place, my parents' farm in Wyoming. It made me very sad, and still does. It was, however, the right choice for him.

Also on the agenda was all the health stuff. This included getting vaccinated for yellow fever, malaria, hep A & B, diphtheria, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, and a tetanus booster. Oh, and rabies. (I actually still have to finish up a couple of these.) That way I can pet all the stray dogs without a care in the world! We had to get our hands on our childhood immunization records, too. The cats had to get a USDA certified health inspection and their own battery of shots. If expatriating with a fuzzy family member, look into the process of the country you are headed to. Lots of this stuff has to happen on specific timelines. The U.S. NCBI has vaccination recommendations for many countries, and the agricultural department of most countries will provide pet protocol.

Remember that crate training I mentioned? Our precious little jerks were coming as carry-ons with us. That meant that we had to fulfill certain crate requirements from the airlines. To prepare our loving little shedding machines I started feeding them exclusively in the crates. I also never used the flight crates for trips to the vet; that was left to the old clunky plastic crates. My wife and I took Jimi and Quincy on car rides in their air crates, then rewarded them to excess after. Easy as that... It goes without saying that your pet might have different needs and challenges. You may not be able to fly them with you. But take heart - there are companies that specialize in moving pets. Should you have to deploy this option just know in advance that you'll need to budget it in a very serious way or just beat up a credit card or two pretty badly. Also, I strongly recommend grabbing some CBD treats from a handy dandy online seller. I don't have a control case for reference, but I am pretty well convinced that these were a lifesaver.

I'm not going to go into the joys of selling a house and cars. There are plenty of sites for that. I think. I don't care; I don't want to get into it right now.

I completely forgot to mention visas. Your company will probably do the heavy lifting on this, if you're doing a transfer type move. If not, you will have a whole other set of hurdles to address at the start of this process.

Now I've gotten us up to the last day. This consisted entirely of last minute preparations and frantic packing. Double check this, where is that, ad nauseum. I don't know that anybody ever does their final process any other way, but you definitely feel more stress when you're leaving the  indefinitely. Also, our finalization was extra chaotic and shitty because I failed to get ahead of the curve on several fronts. Badly. Sometimes I have a truly debilitating case of sophomoritis. This particular moving scenario made pushing things to the last minute more heartburn inducing than ever before. This led my wife to accurately assess a few of my numerous character flaws at about 65 decibels. And boy did I have it coming. But somehow it all got done.

This is the briefest possible sketch of the prep phase. Of course I have failed almost entirely to convey the emotional stress, endless nuances, and minor challenges associated with shoehorning all this crap into your life. It's not easy, and I don't even have (human) children to worry about. When you undertake this process, it is a good idea to figure out a system of rewards to help maintain a balance. Finish a task, eat an entire pizza. That's how I did it. You can copy me or figure out what works for you. I do recommend the basic system of Finish Task : Enjoy Reward. You'll have a much harder time on your flight and beyond if you turn yourself into a raving lunatic or suffer a fun-sized stroke.

Next up, phase 1 part 2

Next up, phase 1 part 2

Vaccination Recommendations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4896562/table/T1/?report=objectonly

Pet Stuff: http://aqcsindia.gov.in/import-export-of-pets-under-baggage.html

The Purpose

The Purpose

The objective of this blog is twofold. The first is to I share my escapades in the wide world with people that are interested, kind, or indulgent enough to find them worth a read. The second is to help my fellow wanderers avoid the various mires and pungi pits of the modern world outside our comfort zones.

Stylistically, I tend toward being long-winded and drifting out of focus. My posts will probably be too long, but that's ok. They're for me to write as much as they're for you to read. If you're reading in pursuit of the first purpose, I doubt this flaw with be critical. If you're reading primarily for the guideposts suggested by the second purpose, you may need to skim a little. I'll do my best to highlight the really useful stuff, provide links to pertinent information, and otherwise act as a sort of travelers' companion.

As I grow into this space, I will figure out how to best use this blog to share content and respond to feedback as it may arise. It will take time, so thanks in advance for your patience.

And away we go...