Escape from Bangalore

Writing from the Frankfurt airport on Sunday morning German time and Sunday night Bangalore time.

I will go back and blog about my last afternoon and evening in Bangalore but I want to describe the truly third-world conditions at the Bangalore departure terminal.

Like most international airports, the departure scene in Bangalore was somewhat of a clusterfuck, with a United Nations of thousands of departing passengers all being forced through the same bottlenecks. Narita in Tokyo is no better, so I have no complaint there. And I had already known that the departure waiting area was bare-bones. Passengers are fortunate to have a coffee stand that stays open, as nearly as I could determine, all night.

No, what was truly bizzare was that when a heavy cloudburst hit the airport, the ceiling started leaking. Streams of water poured down onto the floor and then into some strategically placed buckets, right among the seats where people were exhaustedly waiting. Because flights were delayed due to the weather, all we could do was stand and watch the filthy water filling up the buckets as mosquitoes buzzed us. One of the buckets was nearly full -- it was at least 7 gallons -- before we were allowed to board our flight, about 90 minutes late, so I never got to find out what the staff´s response would be to the overflow.

Someone with a European accent who was watching the leak said to me philosophically, "Well, it rains all over the world."

"Yes," I said, "but usually not inside the airport terminal."

Update: Read this news story on the rain that night and its effects.