Shayna and Keith visit India

In March of this year, Shayna, my daughter, and her husband, Keith Bowman, came to India with some people from their church in Oregon.  They flew into Hyderabad, from which they operated for over a week and did their clinics and mission work.  Then, they took off up to Delhi and took the Golden Triangle tour of India seeing Jaipur, Delhi and Agra, where the Taj Mahal is located.

Following all of that, the kids headed for America and Keith and Shayna stayed a couple of days with us in Mumbai.  I had also flown over to Hyderabad on a commercial flight for Sabbath, in order to spend that day with the kids.  It was all wonderful fun and great to see Keith preach at the big SDA church in Hyderabad.  I don't know if the translator really knew what he was doing but it was still a great experience and one never to be forgotten time. 

While the kids were here in Mumbai we took them out to one of our favorite breakfast places and also took a photo op with our maid, Nanda.  The second day of touring, Keith wasn't feeling too great so he took it easy while Shayna and Karen and I did more touring around. 

When you are 10,000 miles from home it is really nice to have family come for a visit. 

This stuff is all old news because I have been so busy flying and because my main focus is on facebook now and the interaction with my FB friends.  I have started a website from my high school, Thunderbird Academy in Arizona and it has over 750 members now.  We are planning a big reunion in early April next year to coincide with the alumni weekend at the academy.  Should be a blast and Karen and I are planning on being there.

I hope this finds everyone doing great. I will post some more up here of our USA trip and the complete round-the-world tour that we completed in July of this year. 

 

Take care and hope to see you soon,

 

Dan and Karen

Dan Birthday

Hello family and friends.  Well, Dan had another birthday.  They just keep on rolling around so, after another trip around the sun, here we are again in late February and we did have a good time.  The day started with a trip across Mumbai to Bandra West where our favorite Mexican food restaurant is, Sancho's.  Sancho's was originally discovered in Delhi, where they had the original restaurant and we so enjoyed it there but then they closed it.  Once we moved to Mumbai we didn't know that there was a Sancho's here until we were at a gathering of American pilots late last year and the name Sancho's came up.  I immediately investigated and found the Mumbai location.  The chef for both of these restaurants is from Northern Mexico and he arranges with the Mexican embassy here in India to import authentic ingredients for his Mexican food dishes. The result is that it doesn't taste at all Indian, which was our biggest complaint about the other Mexican food restaurants that we had tried.  So, after a nice lunch, beginning with the pictured Fiesta Nachos, we each chose an entree and left with full tummies and food to carry out for a couple of more meals at the house. 

Then, it was time to drive just a few blocks away to a theater that I had found online just a few blocks from Sancho's.  It turned out to be alright and we saw Denzel Washington's latest, Safe House.  Good movie and it will definitely have a follow up movie to help finish the story.  For a big finish, Karen and I went to another mall where they have a nice electronic's store and I picked out my new Canon 1100D DSLR camera.  Over two years ago, when I first came to India, I bought a Canon 1000D, equivalent to the Canon Rebel or EOS 1000 in the US.  It is a start up Digital SLR camera and has been really a nice camera for me here.  Of course, Canon is continually making improvements and so I now wanted the improved version, which is up from 10 to 12 megapixels and also has the video option.  So, rather than sell my old camera to my copilot, who really wanted it, I am going to now have two digital cameras for our wild game safaris.  You really need two cameras, one with a telephoto lense, and one with a more normal lense.  I have found that quickly changing lenses while on a dusty jeep in the middle of the jungle is both unconvenient and dirty, as well as not good for the camera.  Next, I want a really powerful long lense to bring those tigers right up close.  Next trip to the USA, I will be looking at camera shops for a good deal on that.  Karen's mom will be here in a week or so for a visit and we'll be doing a tiger tour, hoping to get pics of the big kitties again.  I did see some on a trip I did in late 2009, before Karen came to India, but since she has come, we haven't been able to see any, so here's hoping.

The final part of Dan's birthday was to grab some dessert at our NEW close-by restaurant, TGI Fridays.  This nice restaurant was just completed and added to our nearby mall, R City Mall, just a couple of kilometers from our home.  We can take an autorikshaw (affectionately called tuk-tuk's) and be there in 10 minutes if traffic isn't bad.  That equates to about 75 cents.  So, I came home from the birthday having seen a good movie, a full tummy and a new camera to play with.  I will try to put up some of the new photos pretty soon here. I haven't ventured out with my new camera yet, nor have we had any flights for the last couple of days, but something will come up soon.

Part of our building excitement these days is that Karen's mom will be here in less than a week, my daughter Shayna and her husband Keith Bowman will be here in mid-March doing some mission work and then stopping by for a couple of days.  We just had a two day visit from Dr. John McGhee of Seattle, so we have been enjoying this period.  Shortly after Shayna and Keith leave, we'll be traveling to the USA to take advantage of our built in contractual vacation and possibly for Dan to do his recurrent training. Lots to look forward to and also lots to keep life interesting as Karen has big plans for her mother's visit.  They will be flying over to Lucknow, India, where our aircraft owner has his main home and estate, along with several on-campus guesthouses, one of which they will stay in while enjoying the benefits of the spa and gym, etc.  Plus, the campus is a gated community with not much going on so the roads are wide and quiet and there is no traffic.  It's actually quite tranquil there and, with the spa providing free services, Karen has come to really like Lucknow.  It will spoil you, and being that I fly for the owner, we are treated like Kings and Queens while there.  The tiger tour will be another 90 minute flight to Nagpur and then a drive to a nearby game park, though not the same one that we drove to in January.  We liked that one but thought we would try another one with Karen's mom and see what happens.  There will be plenty to do just around Mumbai for a couple of days while Keith and Shayna are here.  My friend, Ron Coleman, who flies for Continental/United airlines, first told me about the laundry.  Its a huge, outdoor commercial washing operation, where you see literally miles of water running in cement troughs while people are beating the dirt out of the cloth.  When you see the color of the dirt and water, you realize that the sun has to do a miraculous job of bleaching while things are hanging on the miles and miles of clotheslines that comprise this operation.  You see the amazing white sheets, linens for restaurants, etc, as well as people personal stuff and it just boggles the mind to process that this really works. 

Last Sabbath at our Mumbai Central SDA church we enjoyed the company of Dr. John McGhee and his amazing musical talents.  He put the new keyboard at the Mumbai church to work and gave the congregation an appreciation for what you can do to liven things up a little more.  One of my challenges as I play the keyboard there for church, is that they use the hymnals that only have the words in them.  They only have one hymnal with the music and it's the OLD SDA hymnal so it's numbers don't match up with the NEW SDA hymnals that they use for words.  Since I don't play too much by ear, I have to find out what the song title is, quickly look it up and see if it's in the OLD hymnal and then find that hymn before I start playing.  Trying to get someone to actually give me hymns for song service in advance, so I can look up the numbers, hasn't happened yet.  When I come to the US, one of the things I will be doing is buying a NEW hymnal with the music.  I have one, but it's safely in storage up in Pennsylvania.  It would be buied somewhere and it really wouldn't be fair to ask someone to try and go find it.

I have been really busy flying for the last couple of weeks, right up until my copilot's wedding last week.  Since we took that break, we have had a full week off and this never happens, but it's been nice to be home for my birthday and for visits with John McGhee. Next time we'll put some more exciting photos up and show you another side of life in India.  Since this bday this week, I have a maximum of 6 more years here, and that's if everything goes according to plan.  We'll look forward to seeing some of you very soon.

Smaller Indian Village Destinations

Hi friends and family,

Don't die of shock, I am doing a second blog just days after doing another one.  This hasn't happened in over a year.  I thought I would just put a few recent photos of my adventures up here and then give a brief explanation since life here is so different from back in the good, old USA.

About a week ago we spent the night in Belgaum, India, near GOA, while flying one of the four holiest men in India, according to the Hindu Religion.  His title is Shankaracharya and when we flew him, we got the most amazing handling in Indian airspace that I have ever seen.  Direct to altitude, no level-offs, direct to destination, no turns, and asking for our descent request before we started even needing to go down.  Very unusual.  When the man, who speaks no English or Hindi, only Tamil, his native language, was coming down the steps of the plane, we asked for pictures and I put my arm around him for the snap, which got me "shouted on" by all the Indians present.  I guess you are not allowed to touch him, so that was a faux paus.  I immediately placed my hands together and apologized to the audience, which was accepted.  That's him coming down the aircraft steps in the bottom picture here.  He traces his lineage back to Lord Shiva, which is one of the Hindu gods and so he occupies a very special place in Hinduism.  According to my copilot, there are four of these guys, one for each geographic sector of India and this one was from the South of India, not far from Chennai.  We flew him for two days and while staying in Belgaum, I snapped a photo of our pool at the 3-star hotel where we stayed, which was probably one of the nicest available in this town.  Our rooms were huge, with two inter-connected rooms, one for sleeping and one with a couch and chairs and a second window A/C unit, which would probably be needed at certain times of the year.  I was on my way back from the gym, where equipment was basic and I was the only one there, but the stuff did work and I had no complaints.  Not every one of our trips is to some exotic location with 5-star hotels available, so don't think we are always living high.

The second photo down from the top is taken with another Citation XLS that belongs to the Maharashtra government here in Mumbai.  I was giving a flight check to the chief pilot, who is a friend of mine, and we were at the Vadodara Airport, which just so happens to be my copilot Vipul's home town.  I had been there before a few months ago on a charter but Captain Buhariwala chose to fly there for his Proficiency check and so I got to see it again.  Plus, I got to fly in this fine aircraft again, which was nice.  It is actually newer than ours, so it's the newest Citation XLS in India at the moment.  The captain and his wife are good friends of ours and we have been out to dinner with them, but the best part is that he is a good pilot and I enjoy flying with him and his copilot for these flight checks.  They always appreciate my understanding of this aircraft and helping them to understand and operate the systems is fun.  This time I had him do a short field landing because India has many airports that are around 4,000 feet long and I want to make sure these guys are sharp on coming in to these shorter airports, which require a lot more skill than landing at Delhi or Mumbai, where the runway is over 2 miles long.

The third photo is of our Air Hostess on this particular day, Rupinder.  She was made available because our own Parizad broke her leg on the local express train here the other day.  She will be out for 4-6 weeks while that heals up.  Vipul had taken me to the train station in downtown Mumbai to watch thousands of people get on and off these local trains during the rush hour.  The trains only stop for about 15-20 seconds, during which literally thousands of passengers get on and off the trains.  You have to preposition yourself near the door when it's time to get off and not before.  If you get too close to the door, you will be forced off by the motion of the crowd.  If you are too far away, you will never reach the door before it moves on.  I guess Parizad was traveling with her brother and some friends during a busy time and got pushed down by the crowd, and broke her ankle.  She weighs all of 95 pounds and was not in the women's area because she was with her brother so got into trouble with the bigger guys getting on and off the train.  Ouch!  Anyway, we have had two rental air hostesses in the last two weeks and this is a picture of Rupinder.  She says she was offered a job last summer by our company but they didn't reach an agreement so she has been free-lancing and ended up working for us this day.  Most of these air hostesses are in their mid-20's, agewise, and make around $100-$120 USD for a full day of flying with us. 

This weekend we were on a political flight since it's election time here in India.  This means that you fly into places you wouldn't ordinarily go because these politicians need to connect with people out in the villages.  We flew into two VFR (visual flight rules) airports that had no operating control towers or any kind of instrument approaches.  This gets interesting because if you haven't been in there before and you are trying to find the airport, all you have is some Latitude-longitude coordinates and then you search in the haze for what you hope is a runway that you can recognize.  We found both of them, even though it gets a little dicey when the visibility is only about 3 or 4 miles.  The client did bother to get us a hotel rooms for the 3 to 4 hours that we were waiting for them in each location but even though it may have been the finest in town, it was marginal and probably wouldn't rate anything above a 2 star hotel.   I snapped the next photo of the menu at our restaurant for lunch because I got so tickled at the misspelled English.  The Hindi word for 3 is "tin." Which is pronounced "teen."  I thought the menu was talking about only 3 beers available, even though we weren't drinking beer, I was laughing at that when my copilot pointed out that "Tin Beer"  is actually beer served in cans.  So, then I got that straight but pointed out that Budweiser had become "Badweiser" and I know my folks would have loved that name for any kind of beer - ha!  The Kingfisher should have been one word and the Royal Challange was another typo so they were 3 for 3 on that.  But, the air hostess was horrified at the lack of cleanliness of the chairs and furniture.  It's just another world out there, nothing like Delhi or Mumbai at all and worlds away from anything you would see in America.  I was entertained by the 25 year old's naivete about life in the villages just a few miles from the big cities.  She could not imagine what they "do" and how they have any "life".   After seeing the typo on the menu I gave her the nickname, "badweiser" and told her she had a lot to learn.

Karen and I were at home the other day and went to the mall for lunch and a movie.  Only problem was, the movie we wanted to see in English wasn't showing for more than 2 more hours and we were already tired and stressed from having run around the mall with literally thousands of people having a holiday on "Republic Day."  We have never seen the malls this crowded, it was totally unreal.  One of the stores had two salesmen with bullhorns, inside, trying to outdo each other across the aisle.  Loud doesn't begin to describe it.  But, anyway, we didn't want to bother to go home in traffic and more stress, only to turn around and come back to the mall, so we just decided to buy tickets to the next Hindi movie, which was just starting, and sleep through that movie in order to get some rest so we would be up for our English movie.  The whole plan worked great, except for the fact that Shah Rukh Khan was starring in the movie, he has been my passenger, so I had some interest in the movie, AND, they constantly break into English in these Hindi movies.  They call it Hinglish.  So a large part of the dialogue was in English and it was a bang, bang action movie and those scenes could be done in any language, they are universal, so we didn't get as much sleep as we thought we would, but still felt rested and only paid 3 dollars each to have a couple of hours rest.  When I went to the theater box office window to buy the tickets, the guy said, this movie is in Hindi, I said, "I know."  And then I asked for the tickets anyway.  I think he thought I didn't understand Hindi.  Doesn't he know I have been living here for nearly 3 years now???  Shame on him for thinking that - ha!!

I spoke to another ex-pat pilot who flew the holy man and he said he is a nice guy.  He was nice to me.  Karen has issues with the fact that he did jail time for a murder-for-hire situation a few years back.  A couple of the local pilots that knew I flew him brought that up, too, but Vipul, my copilot, is a believer, so it is interesting.  Having him on board did cut through a lot of red tape with ATC.

Take care my friends and have a great week.

Dan

Belated Happy New Year 2012

Baby tiger track

Hi friends and family,

This blog will be extremely short as I have to get ready to go fly here in just a few minutes.  I realized that, again, it's been awhile since I put anything up here.

Karen and I recently had the privelege to go to Nagpur, India, and do a 3 day tiger safari.  Of course, you always take the chance that you won't see the big cats, but just the experience itself is worth the trip and there is a good chance you will see them.

We didn't this time but made a vow to go back and try again because the experience is just awesome.  This is the morning photo, as the sun comes up, of our little resort by the gate to Tadoba National Park, in Central India.  The first picture above is of baby tigers that they know are there and are watching out for.  We didn't get a chance to see them or mom but it was so exciting to be that close to the wild kitties in their home domain.

We also recently got back from South India, Kerala, where we were able to spend a week with friends and then also tour on one of the backwater boat trips and then drove several hours up in the mountains of South India where they grow tea near Munnar, India.

I will put up a more complete blog here with pictures and more thoughts about our exotic vacations here.  We just feel so priveleged to live where we can take advantage of things that I have only ever read about in National Geographic or some exotic travel book. 

Right now I am on a trip with one of the holiest men in the Hindu religion in India.  Everywhere he goes it attracts crowds. He is one of four Shankaracharya's in India, this one if from South India and is called Swami Jayendra Saraswati.  This stuff is just so out of my field of view and if I had ever even thought I would be doing something like this, I would have told you it was a crazy dream or something.

And, here is a picture with Sushmita Sen, she was miss India and later Miss Universe 1994.  We had her on board for a charter in the middle of December.  Very interesting person and just another example of the people that I get to meet and talk to almost every week, it's something different.

And now I have to close but I will put up another blog with more photos and descriptions here in the very near future.

Karen and I are doing well and looking forward to our next trip to America.



We love you guys,

Dan and Karen

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Hi my friends,

I realize that I haven't been on here for a long, long time. I actually tried to write a blog about a month ago and something happened to it and it didn't load. I lost it somewhere in hyperspace so I let it go. The last couple of months I have been spending an inordinate amount of time in Lucknow, India, since that is where the aircraft owner lives and when we come here, unless we have a confirmed charter flight, they just leave us here. Also, interestingly, they really don't have long-term permission to park the aircraft in Mumbai, our home base. Sounds crazy, but it's one of those India things that would take too long to explain. We were in Lucknow for 23 days of October and it doesn't look like November will be too far behind. I just fly Karen over from Mumbai and she enjoys spending time here since they put us up at our boss' private guesthouse, where we are treated like VIP guests, with full availability of the gym and spa. Karen loves all the free spa services. We have both taken advantage of full massages, facials, pedicures, haircuts, you name it. I think the skin on my face and feet is in the best shape it's been in since I was about 4 years old.

Karen and I took a couple of days off and spent time with Dr. John McGhee, our good friend from Auburn, Washington. He is working on a very interesting new project, trying to produce a kind of soap opera program for the women of Pakistan, who are addicted to these programs, but these have a heath and spiritual twist to the stories. We saw the initial program, which was extremely well done by a great cast of actors, including the lady who played Ghandi's wife in the classic movie from the early 80's. Her name is Rohini and we spent a lovely couple of hours at her home with Dr. McGhee. Very impressive, and we hope that this wonderful project takes wing and can express God's love and care in an amazing new venue on Pakistani and Indian television.

Karen and I will do Thanksgiving alone this year at Lucknow. But, we are happy to have a great place to do so, under the care of our wonderful hosts. Probably won't have turkey like we were able to do last year in Gurgaon, with our new oven. We took the oven to Mumbai but are still waiting on the gas cylinder to hook it up to, so Karen can try to cook some of our favorite dishes in our much smaller kitchen. We will probably go out to one of our favorite restaurants here in Lucknow, called Barbeque Nation, and see if they, by any chance, have any turkey on the menu for Thanksgiving. Most likely we'll be eating chicken, and that's okay.

The Indian economy just keeps on rolling and my job security seems pretty well maintained if I am still interested in working in India. My plan now is to work here, if possible, until mandatory retirement at age 65. That's still more than 6 years away so you can see we are having our big adventure here. It's turned into more of an adventure than we thought it might.

We had thought about coming home for Christmas this year but decided its a very difficult time of year to travel and everyone has family agendas so we put it off til Spring, when I will come home for training anyway. I am hoping to go back to Thunderbird Academy for their reunion weekend. It will be my brother's 40th year and I knew lots of people from his class. We like the weather in Scottsdale that time of year so maybe we'll do it again. Plus, we can visit our kids and see the grandkids, too.

We love our new apartment in Mumbai and it's close to a lot of restaurant choices and good things that Karen can do, even when I am out of town. It's much more convenient and handy than our Gurgaon apartment was, which was kind of far out.

I am going to keep this kind of short, try to get it to publish and wish each and every one of you a very wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas Season. Since Mumbai stays quite warm throughout the winter, as opposed to Delhi, which got cold in December and January, we will enjoy moderate temperatures throughout the winter (think South shore of the big Island of Hawaii for weather comparisons).

We love you all and hope to hear from you soon,

Dan and Karen Clifford

P.S. The pics are from the Formula One race in New Delhi a few weeks ago. Our aircraft owner bought 50% of the race team and we got to go to the weekend trials. We had tickets to the race but traffic was so bad we couldn't reach in time for the race. Still had fun, though.

Buying vegetables and eating out

We were taking our taxi through Mumbai the other day and saw this place in the city where the farmers come to sell their goods.  Its amazing how they just sell their stuff right there on the highway.


The last picture is out of our apartment window in the afternoon sun, looking North.  You can see other highrise apartments in the area, plus our local go-kart track, if you look carefully.  It's a beautiful area and one of the remarkable things about it is that there are no slums visible in your window view, something that is very hard to achieve in any part of Mumbai.

Karen still has to worry about the supposed crocodiles in the lake and now we hear there are leopards in the forest around where we live.  I won't lose any sleep over this but it will give her some added things to think about when I am out of town - ha!

I actually put this blog together several weeks ago and couldn't get it to publish so we'll see if I can get it to go up today to give you guys a little better idea of what our life in India is like from day to day.

Love you all,

Dan and Karen

Good morning,

I see it's been almost a month since I last put up a blog. I know that some of you are on Facebook and see me there, some of you are on my email list and get those letters, and some of you are probably seeing all of this stuff as I put it out. This blog was my kids idea but I do have to admit that I have enjoyed blogging more than I thought I would. I just don't do it as often as I would like to.

The other day I was totalling up a logbook page and it really pointed out how little flying I have been doing lately. Since the first of June, when the move to Mumbai really got serious, I have only flown about 30 hours. Usually I fly that much in a month. Some of you have asked and I am on salary so it's not a monetary issue, it's just that I like to fly and to be busy, so this has been a particularly frustrating stretch for me. This last week we did have two flights, which was nice. One of them was actually a charter flight and it was down to Kochin, which is a place that I hadn't been to before down in the Kerala coastal region of Southern India. I was glad to get a chance to fly down that way, even though it was only a pickup trip and allowed no time on the ground at all. A couple of days later we had a trip for height verification on our RVSM (reduced vertical separation minimums). An engineer flew in from Bangkok and he had the equipment required to do our height verification testing. ATC around Mumbai was not in a particularly good mood and they sent us offshore for our test flight. That became tricky because the engineer wanted us to fly in a straight line for 45 minutes but since we were headed out to sea, even though we had slowed way down, we couldn't fly that long or we were going to get out of radio range, which would complicate things mightily. So, we flew as long as we could and then turned around before we lost communications. We headed back towards Mumbai but there was some serious weather on the way and we began negotiating for moving around the weather. The controller started us down, which we couldn't do during the test, so we had to turn around again and fly out towards the ocean again. Then, I went back in the cabin and checked with the engineer to see if we could trun around and fly back into Mumbai for the landing. He gave me the thumbs up so, we headed back in, but on the way in Mumbai had a couple of 360 degree turns to make room for other planes as we headed back in. With the Hindi/English thing going on, it's always an adventure. It's in times like these that I am thankful for my Indian copilot, who can speak their language, so to speak. Lots of explanation was required for the controller to allow us to fly at an RVSM altitude when we were seeking RVSM certification. It seems that we already were RVSM approved and the only thing we were going was getting our height certification from the engineer. Sometimes, it's just how you word things that makes the difference.

If you have looked at the pictures above, I am sitting in the pilots lounge of the General Aviation Terminal in Mumbai. This was something we didn't have in Delhi, so I have to appreciate the building and the accomodation of our private planes here. The parking here is quite interesting, with the runway just a few yards away, the big jets go roaring right past you. If they ever had directional control issues due to an engine out or something, it would get really interesting really fast. It is fun to watch the big planes, the 747's, the 777's and big Airbusses do their takeoff and landing thing just right in front of your eyes. The Mumbai runway is probably one of the most used pieces of runway real estate in the world. They do have a second runway but it runs in a different direction and so they are reticent to use it under normal circumstances, which keeps runway 27 very, very busy. Sometimes, they tell us we are number 20 for landing and it isn't too hard to be number 10 for takeoff. I try to save fuel by taxiing on one engine and also idling for long periods of time on one. At least here in Mumbai the taxi times are short, compared to Delhi. I have never, ever taxiied as much as I did in Delhi. Sometimes, it was a 20 minute taxi to a far away runway. Here, last week, we started, called for taxi, and tower told us to pull into position for takeoff, so it was less than 5 minutes from startup to takeoff, but this seldom happens. More likely is that you will do a short taxi and then wait 20-25 minutes for your turn to takeoff. Since airplanes are feeding in from several different takeoff positions, you often don't know your sequence and if you start your second engine, that will just about guarantee that you will have to wait another 10-15 minutes than you thought.

Our houseguest, Ankita, went home to Delhi for the weekend to take care of some business. She will be back on Tuesday evening so we have had some time to ourselves. Karen has not been feeling well, so has been sleeping most of the weekend.

We had something really interesting happen on Sunday morning. Our househelper from Delhi had called a few weeks ago to chat about something. She has been talking about coming to Mumbai to work for us here since she liked us so much. I couldn't totally understand what her conversation was about but she was trying to get it so her 20 year old son could come down and work for us. I had tried to tell her that we didn't have a position for him because Karen really doesn't want a male housekeeper around when I am gone so much. But, come Sunday morning, he shows up with his suitcase, at the front door and was expecting to go to work. Now, he spoke just a little English but not much. His mother speaks none. I had, at the most, indicated he could stay with us for a few days while he was looking for work but now that was going to be negated by the company of our little air hostess. I was eating breakfast, getting ready to go to church and the doorbell rang. In he comes. So, I called my friend up in Delhi for whom this kids mother now works and explained everything to him. He said Saina would be coming in to work on Monday morning and he would explain everything to her then. Of we went to church, with this very nice young man just tagging along. I am not sure how much he got out of the English only church service but he was just so nice. After church I called my copilot and asked him to please explain to this young man, Attosh, was his name, that we really didn't have a place for him to stay and that I was so sorry for the misunderstanding. I was willing to pay for his transportation back to Delhi, which is 1,000 road miles away. He said he would only need 500 rupees, which is about $12. I handed him that and he packed his bag and headed out. We were so relieved because we really don't have a servant's quarters in this apartment, like we did in the one in Gurgaon. Here, we only have three bedrooms, one of which is the office with the computer and all, so no bed in there. With Ankita here, there is no extra bedroom at all. Karen and I were sweating this out but after Vipul called and talked to our new helper, he was very nice and totally understanding that his mother had kind of misguided him and so off he went. I did get him to one church service in the few short hours that he was with us. Karen wasn't feeling well enough to go on Sunday morning so it was good to have someone to talk to the auto rickshaw driver.

Wow, I just got a phone call and the airplane has some interesting flights coming up. Also, amazingly, the management actually listened and did not take the new captain they were looking at. He just didn't have a good reputation here in the local flying community, so that is always alarming. I had talked to his former boss and they said they had restricted him from VIP flights. I had told them in an email last week that I thought all of our flights were VIP flights. I still thought that I was going to have to try and work with this guy and do some intensive training. But, we dodged a bullet and so I am breathing a sigh of relief and thanking my lucky stars.

Our taxi will be here any minute to take us to the mall. There, we are going to eat some lunch and try to take in an English movie - yahoo!!

I'll be back with more next time.

Dan