I am spending Christmas this year in Pune, India. Priya and Martin have invited me (and four hundred other people) to attend their wedding reception here on Sunday. Again, Kai and Cissy are staying back in Singapore.

Pune does have an international airport, but the only two flights are to and from Dubai, and some exclusive business class plane to and from Frankfurt, so that I went to Mumbai first, which is about 170 km away. From Mumbai I took a very short connecting flight, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I spent a lot of time waiting at the airport, both scheduled transfer time and unscheduled flight delay. Bored in Bombay. It would have been much more interesting (and presumably faster and cheaper) to take a train.

Pune is in an interesting time-zone, GMT+5:30. I have never before been to a place where I had to adjust not just the hours, but also the minutes.

As with Jakarta, I have so far only seen more of the airport than I needed to, some scary traffic conditions on the road from there, and the hotel room, which is quite a bit better than the one in Jakarta (most likely because I did not book it myself), except that the Internet is not free and the registration for it via mobile phone (necessary to foil the schemes of terrorists and child pornographers) did not work due to some technical problem, please try again later.

But I also had an excellent dinner with Priya's father and uncle, who came to the airport to pick me up. Delicious South Indian food whose name I immediately forgot, at my request not spicy at all, with naan and lassi.