DAY 1

I've made it to my hotel here in Delhi (The Imperial). I only got four hours of sleep last night... but woke up early this morning with my mind racing about all that lies ahead.

The hotel is beautiful as you can see from the pictures. I started the day with a long breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel (I can see some of you rolling your eyes... nice start, huh?) It IS Sunday... a day of rest. Although the picture is a bit blurry (worrisome, with my new camera) you can see me ready to eat and reading the Sunday Times of India. Last Sunday I got to read the New York Times... I knew I'd miss that.

We'll see if a year of living in India can boost my language skills. Years of studying Spanish in high school and college didn't do much for my proficiency in Spanish... we'll try Hindi now. My waiter started me off "Thank You" = "Dhanyawd" and "Good Morning / Good Evening" = "Nameshty".

You have to turn your head to see my waiter... Does anyone know how to rotate photos in this thing???

This is very funny...

Ok, if I referred to my breakfast this morning as "Day 1"... I guess that everything "before" will have to be back-dated... I'll refer to it as "BI" or "Before India"
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Day "1 BI"
I boarded my flight in Chicago for the 14hr45min flight to Delhi. I am THRILLED that AA has a direct flight. I used one of my upgrades so that I could get this nice seat up in the front of the Boeing 777. The seat could swivel toward the window and could also recline to a flat-bed. A testament to the comfort (and my complete emotional exhaustion) was the fact that I slept SEVEN (plus) hours without waking up. I was on the plane for more than 16 hours (with a ground delay... I WAS at O'Hare) and I wasn't quite ready to get off the plane in India (they had roused me from my sleep to land).

(For those concerned... ie. Mary) I did get champange (pictured). It was very unsettling flying Delta last week... where they've taken champagne off of their domestic flights.

You can see Ray here chatting with the AA peeps... he's very friendly... and I was looking PARTICULARLY PATHETIC so the AA rep gave Ray a fake boarding pass so that he could come to my gate. I've never heard of that... but it was quite a treat. They booked some sort of "9000" flight and gave him a boarding pass... what a great airline (champagne, fake boarding passes = true customer satisfaction!).


Here is a photo to show you just how pathetic I looked... We were in the lounge before I left and I was quite upset. It is tough, after all, to leave your entire life for something completely unknown.

While I'm at it... does anyone know how I can "justify right" any of these photos?

So that these photos don't upset the reader... please know that I've recovered since leaving the US. I'm quite excited about what lies ahead. Reading the paper this morning, I couldn't stop thinking about different ways to cover some of these stories.

Ok... this is my first attempt at "blogging"... and it is taking me a bit to figure it all out (all at very high five-star business center prices)... so I'll wrap it up for now with one last photo... "The Dell" in it's final hours.
DAY 2 BI
You can see that Ray tired of my preparations (I did only sleep for one hour on the last night). Funny that I had left so many things until the last minute... We did have some last minute guests -- Brian Miller came over for the hookah (and to read the CNN Standards/Practices manuel) and our friend Kyle Sweeney stopped by too. We opened a bottle of Veuve Cliquot at 3:15am... a FINE tribute to "The Dell".

Ok.. more will follow...
Thanks for reading.

xo