Guess Where I Am?

Nope, not Istanbul. I'm in Delhi, my favourite place in the world. My flight out of Kathmandu was delayed for five hours so I missed my connection to Dubai and Istanbul. Royal Nepal airlines has refused to accept any responsibility because they claim I didn't have the required amount of transit time in Delhi. The fact that they delivered me to the airport five hours late is apparently irrelevant.

I won't go into all the details of my day (mainly because reliving them would probably cause me to burst a blood vessel) but trying to deal with this has reminded me of why I hate India so much. To top it off, when Royal Nepal booted me out of their office after reneging on their promise to put me up for the night, I wasn't allowed back into the terminal building to exchange some cash. This is apparently a security measure - only people travelling are allowed into the airport and since I'm not leaving until tomorrow morning, I wasn't permitted to take the ten steps inside the door to the money exchanger. The fact that I had disembarked from a plane a half hour earlier didn't matter to them - I guess all that they could see was my intent to bomb the place. Anyway, there I was on the street with no hotel to go to and no Indian rupees for a cab, food or lodging.

Of course it all worked itself out, as it always does. A cabbie offered to take me to a nearby hotel and stop at a bank on the way. He was actually pretty good and took me around to several hotels until I found a suitable one, but he certainly got paid handsomely for it. Since I hadn't planned to be in India I didn't really have a good handle on local costs and exchange rates (not to mention the fact that I was so blinded by rage that I couldn't think straight), so I was a bit slow in the negotiations.

My biggest concern (other than having to spend another night in this god-forsaken country) is that I'm losing a day in Istanbul which I can ill-afford since my time frames were tight to begin with. I won't get there until Friday evening so can't even get the ball rolling on my passport until Monday morning. This story still has the potential to have a happy ending, but it's getting more and more remote.