It took an insanely long time to get through the Indian arrivals process, including a 2-hour wait at the totally understaffed Thomas Cook money exchange counter. Since early November India has been cracking down on fraud/tax evasion by removing old 500 and 1000 rupee notes from circulation. This translates as a limit of 5000 rupees (about$US 70) a week on foreign exchange withdrawals. WTF!? Apparently ATMs are empty of cash a lot of the time. So far I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do to get cash to pay for things like metro tokens and the other incidentals of traveling. Someone on the queue at Thos Cook told me an apocryphal story about rich people having bags of cash delivered to their homes. I guess once my hotel taxi show up, I'll just go to bed at dawn in my b&b, and figure it out. I asked the clerk in the airport metro station liquor store to let me use his phone to call my b&b, which he kindly did. I was in the metro station to see if I could just take a train downtown. But they're not open until 4:30am. So I'm sitting at Entrance 6 of the arrivals hall waiting for the driver to show.
I'm surprisingly unstressed by this. Its always strange at the start of a trip to the 3rd world.
