To the big apple and back

First, the good news - my country count has gone up by 1. The big one - the USofA is done with. The largish (big is not big enough a word, and giant is too big) apple has seen one more soul pass by.

Now for the middling news - its no great shakes. Times Square, central Manhattan, Broadway are kind of ok.. a bit touristy, massively densely populated, of course. Though not pretty, what with the sky not very visible amidst the giant towers all around, yet not foreign either. Truly cosmopolitan and not at all unwelcoming (which Europe can be, I must confess!!) It didn't help, of course, that I had to travel for 36 hours each way to spend 36 hours in the damn place. The resulting jet lag was quite an experience, to put it mildly.

And now for the bad news - one of the torchbearers of the Indian renaissance disappointed me. Jet Airways, with its promise of great service, flat beds, all new aircraft, great food, etc etc seemed the ideal airline to fly. And yet, twice within the week, once while going and then on the way back, the supposedly new aircraft developed technical faults - resulting in a delay of 14 hours at various airports one time, and a relatively mild 3 hour delay at the other. Though I must admit here that once the damn planes did take off, the experience was quite quite nice (among other things, great crew, and the most amazing movie - Paris Je' T' Aime with the perfect accompaniment - a nice bottle of red wine - but more on that later). But I think Jet needs to pull up their socks especially on punctuality and maintenance if they are to compete with the BAs and the Continentals of this world, let alone Singapore Airlines or Cathay. Would be interesting to see how Kingfisher fare when they start international service - though of course I think they will start with flying Deccan to the gulf.

All in all, the week was nothing to write home about!!