anyone have any good India stories?
I lost my passport the day before my trip home. My friends went home, and I was stuck in New Dehli negotiating with the US Embassy, Air India, the New Dehli police department, and the fleet of rickshaw drivers who were much more interested in showing me their bros antique shop on the other side of town than taking me to anywhere I needed to go. As a young, sheltered, ignorant American I was pretty much scared shitless for the entire 14 extra days I spent there (a major hurricane had hit Mumbai, crippling Air India's database and making an earlier escape impossible). The only solace I had was the hotels television, which had a channel devoted almost exclusively to reruns of Full House, and the tin of hash the Israeli's who had shared a room with me had left behind. Hash was rare to find in New Dehli, at least compared to the locations I had been to further North, because the authorities were much more strict within the city. After dealing with Indian bureaucracy all day long, I would come back to the hotel, flip on the tv, and smoke my brains dumb. 3 days before my newly arranged flight, there's a knock on the door, which was already unexpected, and when I opened it there were at least 15 police officers and 2 police canines to greet me. The smell of hash was overwhelming, and I had left the tin wide open by my bed. There is a very long, drawn out pause, and finally one of the officers issues a command and all policemen run up to the next flight. They literally do not say a word to me. Apparently there was a runaway. But I was literally shaking for the next couple of hours. I eventually made it home without reliving the plot to Midnight Express.
tl;dr - don't lose your passport.