(Early edit - for people who REALLY read this and just want to see some more adoption-related photos, please also find your way to a second post.)
Hello everyone! We recently returned from India after traveling there to complete an international adoption. It is not the main point of this post but I have to say… you may therefore say hello to Kriti Shane (!!), and Rebecca, with me behind the camera.
(I’m not as photogenic anyway so it is best I remain behind the camera.) That photo was taken at the Lodi Gardens in Delhi, a 15th and 16th century mosque and tomb site (and garden). Let me give you one more because people like cute photos, this is us on our last day having lunch at the Dilli Haat market. (Rebecca and Kriti had food momentarily, it just hadn’t arrived yet, so don’t get the wrong idea now! Also that was some spicy fried rice.)
Edit: Someone tells me there should also be a photo of myself in here somewhere. OK, here you go, from Isa Khan’s tomb site. Guess we should have had a separate post just about the adoption - live and learn! :).
And we’ll add one more of Rebecca teaching some English this morning.
OK! I am going to write a longer, more culturally-themed post here that will be titled something like “observations after spending a week in India”, and you’ll get more photos in that, but because that post will be longer that will come later. For now, though, and while it is fresh in my mind, I wanted to give you some shorter observations just about the traveling.
So, a few observations after flying internationally
One, US airport security is particularly irrational, and we should fix that. On the way home we flew out of the Delhi airport, and they are quite serious about airport security in Delhi. Security, both passenger screening and facility security, is handled by India’s Central Industrialized Security Force. Many of their personnel on site were armed, some with military rifles… this is not the TSA. You had to drive past a guard checkpoint that was doing random ID checks to reach the terminal building. Once there, you had to show your passport and itinerary to another guard to be allowed into the building. Once inside the building, then there was the actual passenger and baggage screening, which was more aggressive than what you’d receive in the US, which is one reason they had separate screening lines for men and women, the women getting a curtained booth for screening to protect their modesty, but you men just stand on this platform and put out your arms, please! (Interestingly to me, at other sites in Delhi that had security screening, if the only guard there was a man, then I would be screened, but Rebecca and Kriti would just be waved right in, because a man could not touch a woman, even if that man was running security. Darn female privilege! :) )
So after all that we should certainly be considered safe enough to fly to the US, right? No, once you actually reached the gate, US bound passengers got another screening mainly, near as I could tell, because those aggressive Indian guards didn’t make you remove your shoes, probably because they are worried about real threats, not pretend ones. So we got screened again, sans shoes this time, because twenty years ago an incompetent terrorist tried and failed to blow up his shoes. But we know this US-specific precaution is necessary because meanwhile the rest of the planet, which does not force passengers to remove their shoes, has suffered a wave of shoe bombings as a result… oh wait, no they haven’t, this is all dumb. (In fact this is quite parallel to the fact that low-COVID-restriction places have done just as well as high-COVID-restriction places, but the latter simply ignore that fact and insist that everything they are doing is quite necessary.)
Maybe we should follow the data, then, and end this security theater now. It’s been long enough. (And a more general lesson we need to learn is that, in a nation of 330 million people and instant communication about anything bad that happens anywhere, we need to give up the “something bad happened once, so we banned it” mindset. Humans are just not well “wired” to live in and respond to a world of instant, global communication. Some of our risk aversion instincts, that work well when our knowledge is confined to the happenings in a small community, cause us to do wacky things in the present global technological environment.)
Two, I was reminded that PoliMath said long ago that it seemed to him that you could buy your way out of most COVID restrictions if you had the money. Wickedly, permission to show your smile therefore became a privilege and marker of the wealthier. I had that thought again both leaving from and returning to O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Don’t want to wear a mask while you’re waiting for your flight? No problem, just pay to hang out in a terminal bar the whole time, apparently that is safe enough. (How can that be? Obviously, because it would also be safe enough for no one to be wearing a mask anywhere. And I think about 90% of the people buzzing about know that now. But the people actually making the rules either don’t care or don’t actually have your best interests at heart.)
Three, flying in a Boeing 787 for the first time makes you think about where to draw the line on centralized v. decentralized control. That is a strange comment, you say! This was my first time flying on a 787, perhaps the most modern of commercial passenger aircraft. I was thinking particularly about the windows. On most commercial aircraft the window shades are pieces of plastic that slide up and down, and which are controlled by whoever is sitting in the window seats. But on the 787 there is instead a variable window tint which is electronically controlled by a button underneath the window… but because it is electronically controlled, the cabin crew can override the individual window controls and force all the windows on the plane into a certain tint. And on our two flights, which were both mostly overnight flights, they did. For takeoff and landing the windows were “normal”, but for almost the entire rest of the flight they were maximally dimmed.
The benefit of that kind of centralized control is that, well, if “one sinner ruins much”, that sinner was kept under control. Nobody could open a window shade and blind you with the early morning sun when you were still trying to get some sleep. Negatively, though, if you (like me) actually wanted to see out of your window, you couldn’t. We flew super far north (on the way home we went over the northern coast of Greenland), and I had wanted to try to see the northern lights - couldn’t see out the window. Or, on the way there, morning was just starting to break as we were passing near the western edge of the Himalayan Mountains and I wanted to see those - couldn’t see out the window. So that made me sad, but also got me to thinking about… overall, is it better that the cabin crew can control all the windows, or worse? (Keeping the windows on maximum dim did also make the plane into a sort of artificial environment. Your in flight entertainment system is working fine, but you can’t see out the windows.)
For the curious, I will end with a screenshot from FlightRadar24 of our actual flight path back (and I’m glad we got back before all these airspace closures related to the Russia/Ukraine war started happening).
THE END.
Congratulations! Now the real fun begins :)
Congratulations! May God bless your family!