Another cliff-hanger

I am feeling bad about not posting in a while, so I am writing two posts in one sitting. The fridge story below is a to-be-continued; here is another one...

We are taking a train to Darjeeling to spend Christmas with a friend and her family. We'll be gone for about 5 days. It will be wonderful to get out of the city and travel to a really beautiful part of the country where we can deeply breathe in the air and our boogers will not turn grey and black.

Train travel is fairly inexpensive, depending on what class you travel. We are traveling sleeper class on the way there and it is only $6 each one way. However, there were no sleeper class tickets available on the way back so we will travel A/C 2nd class and the tickets are $24 each, still not too bad. You can book online, but if there are no more tickets, you can get the foreign quota seats. Lots of the trains reserve seats for foreigners to encourage tourism. However, you cannot book foreign quota tickets online. You must go to a railway office. It took us three hours to find the right place to get these tickets! But if we had not gotten them, we would have been numbers 131 and 132 on the wait-list.

I think there is a conspiracy between the railway and the travel agents. The railway site does not say where you go to get these foreign quota tickets and it is quite the hassle, as evidenced by our "three hour tour" to get them. We found out from our counter agent that the travel agents often charge 1-2 times the cost of the ticket in fees. He started explaining that a $10 service fee is no big deal to most foreigners, but it is quite a bit of money for a local. I am inclined to agree. I would have paid $10 to avoid the hassle we went through in addition to all the time spent asking around and researching on the internet. However, I am glad we figured it out, although it meant walking around at night in an area we were unfamiliar with. Jerry was getting worried that we would get jumped. I wasn't. We all read the Chasing the Perp story, right?

About the railway office... It is divided into two parts - one for nationals and one for foreigners. The divider is a low wall where the bottom half is wood and the top half is glass. On the national side, it is just a large area with ticket counters. However, on the foreigner side (that you can easily see from the other side), are couches, coffee tables, nice pictures and ticket tables where you can sit in comfy chairs while purchasing your tickets. Oh, and the "nice" side is carpeted, too. Golly! Do they have to be so blatant, especially when both sides are basically sharing one large area?!

Anyhow, this train journey is going to be quite the adventure. We have been warned about theft on the trains and how we have to buy a long chain and padlock to secure our suitcases to the train seats. And our friend was telling us today all the ways we can "hide" our things from would-be robbers while we sleep, including our shoes! I have never been on an overnight train before and it will be neat (I hope) to sleep on a berth. I have always wanted to do this, but never thought it would include safeguarding my shoes and other belongings from thieves. I wonder if they would steal the socks right off my feet?! I guess I better not wear my SmartWools. But I did not bring any other kind. I suppose I will need to buy socks that can be stolen before we leave.

Unfortunately, the train does not take us all the way to Darjeeling. We get off at a station called NJP and then line up to buy tickets for a car that will take us into the city. We get a ticket with a number on it and find the car in the line of cars with our corresponding number and then share that car with several other passengers going to Darjeeling. At the ticket counter we can request to sit in the front, middle or back seats. Our friend told us that the driver will probably try to "sneak" another fare into the car and ask us to just scoot over. (Dena and Jeremy, remember the shuttle van to the Getty Museum?) We are to firmly tell the driver, "No! We paid for two people to sit in two seats, not three people in two seats!" I am guessing that we will have to practice this in charades as we do not know the language, yet.

So, another to-be-continued....