Thursday, March 22

Our final day in India!  We've enjoyed ourselves but it's definitely time to go home.  The original plan had us staying until early Saturday and flying back via London, but we decided to forgo the extra day we built in for contingency, and we found some alternate flights that don't require staying overnight in London.  So we changed our plans and flew to New Delhi, then took a direct New Delhi - Chicago flight home.  Here's the story up through our departure from New Delhi.

On this trip we stayed at the Oberoi again, I enjoyed my stay there last time and thought the food was great.  They also filter their water so you don't have to worry about making any mistakes.  The rooms are large and well-appointed, with a separate room for your luggage and clothes.  There's a butler for each floor as well, which we used when we got back from the office, tired, and asked them to take our laptops up to the room. 

Here's the room:



The separate luggage room. 

The bath.

Another outstanding shower. This one had a steam system as well.

All the rooms at the Oberoi look out over the center courtyard where the restaurants and pools are.  Nice.



Oh well, off to the office, which is in the Sarjapur area.

In this building  under construction, the slabs are held up with wood supports while they cure.

At the Bangalore airport, we were held up for a bit while this military jet did a test. It powered up and took off down the runway, then partway down released its parachute which it then ejected.  There were some chase vehicles that took off after it, presumably to remove the parachute from the runway so our 737 didn't connect with it.

You can just see the parachute ejecting in the center of this shot.

The chase vehicles going down the runway.

After takeoff, here's some views of Bangalore.



Some nice cloud formations.





There were ATC delays at New Delhi, as you can see we sat in the holding pattern for quite a while.  We were about 2.5 hours late.


Now on to our flight home.