In the Beginning (by Ben)

It was Wednesday, the fifteenth of March, 2023. The day that has waited for me for twelve and a half years. I was in a car with Alison (that’s what she calls herself, but we all know her real name), my sister, and my parents on our way to the Halifax airport.               

When we arrived, Alison drove the car back home and we got out. Then we had the standard technical difficulties, and then we were on our way to the gate where we were waiting for the plane. We were flying with Air Canada to Montreal, and then Delhi, and I was dreading the fourteen-hour flight. The flight to Montreal was mostly uneventful except on the way down, where Clara was feeling plane-sick and then the inevitable occurred.

After the landing, we had three hours in the Montreal airport to do whatever we wanted. Our thought process was that the first thing that we needed to do was find where the gate that we needed to go to get to next flight. So, we found a gate with the right number on it, and it also had a lot of Indian-looking people. The only problem was that it wasn’t in the international area, so we were skeptical. So then, we went to ask the official-looking person if this was the right flight and why it wasn’t in the international area, and he said that it was the right flight, but they were going to move some barriers and such so it would be in the international zone. He also said that if we stayed after they’d moved it, we wouldn’t be allowed to leave. We opted to leave and get the fancy dinner that we were promised. We entered the international zone (the point of no return), and looked for a nice place to eat. We settled on a place called Resto-Bar. I can’t remember want we had, but it was a mix of pizza, poutine, and burger. After we ate, we went to the right gate, and called Stephanie and eventually got on the plane.

 

Now, the strategy with flights in general is to sleep a lot. I slept a bit, but not that much. It also doesn’t help that whenever I go on a plane, I get sick, not horribly just like a sore throat and a runny nose. That normally wouldn’t have made it to hard to sleep, but since I was on a plane, there wasn’t very much space to move and as at least thirty-five percent of people probably know, sleeping on planes just isn’t very easy. The flight as a whole didn’t have any very interesting things on it so I won’t write about it.

 

We landed in Delhi at eight pm local time and arrived at Julian’s apartment at twelve and still managed to get twelve hours of sleep (the most sleep that I can remember getting). We were in Delhi for three days, and during those three days, we went to Starbucks, went to a fort, slept a lot, went to a local restaurant, went again, visited old Delhi, and went on a subway to Gurgaon to get some alcoholic “loot” (and another Starbucks visit). All things considered, Delhi is very different from Halifax and the hardest thing for me was the people asking for money in the street, because turning down a kid asking for shoes in the mud, during a monsoon does make you think about your conscience. I think that’s mostly all we did in Delhi but I’ve written like, six-hundred words so that’s all I’m going to write today. Goodbye!