8 Aug 1998

Hi all,

Sorry for the brief silence but the last couple of days have been hectic like crazy. Been thrown into the deep end of the pool here but I am getting ahead of myself. Let me take the story from the beginning.

The journey to Denmark was a total disaster, to say the least. It was Tue 5pm when I boarded my flight and we are told we have to wait for other delayed flights to arrive so people can connect to our flight to Brussels. After about an hour, we roll onto the tarmac and suddenly all the lights in the cabin go berserk. We go back to the gate and when the craft is checked they tell us something was wrong with the hydraulic system which would take an hour to fix.

An hour later, when we roll out of the gate the lights go potty again. Back to the gate and this time they realize the radar system in the tail fin was gone. Fixing it will ta e an hour. Another hour later we roll out and guess what lights go blinking crazy again. Back to the gate and now they find the entire radar system is screwed up and needs to be replaced. This will take another two hours. They decide to serve us dinner. We eat dinner and three hours pass by. We get impatient so they allow us to get off the craft and sit in the terminal.

A few more hours slip by and it is 2 am when they decide they are done with their “two hour job” and we can finally fly. Of course most of us are not too happy to use the air craft any more but still we humor them. We roll out of the gate and bingo you guessed right once again the lights are still doing their little disco. That is when some sense finally kicks in and they decide to cancel the flight till 3 pm the next day.

Now we have to find hotels to stay in and it is pouring like crazy in chicago. Somehow they manage to find some hotels halfway up to madison and give us cab fare. But all this not before we stand in another line to rebook our tickets for the next day which took another 3 hours. When we finally get to our hotels the guys have no idea the airline had booked tickets and they refuse to give us our rooms! That is when a few of us really lose it and bully our way in(I know you don’t believe I can do that but still …)

Wed 3 pm

thunderstorms, visibility down to a few feet. We wait. Storm clears and we wait for other connecting flights. By now we have an incredibly strong sensation of deja vu.

Late passengers arrive and as if on cue the storm kicks right back in. We wait longer. Storm clears, we roll off and there is a line of about 50 air crafts in front of us. By the time we take off, it is 7 pm, a good four hours
in the plane on the ground in O’Hare. But at least we leave the country.

Thur 12 pm

Copenhagen airport. Get out to baggage reclaim and find one bag missing. I turn around and see a longer line at the lost luggage conuter th n at the carousel! It was almost as th ugh it was the norm for luggage to get lost. So I file my complaint and they say the baggage could be anywhere from Milan to Munich and they will have to let me know in a couple of days. I have all my money and clothes in a separate bag so I decide I can wait for the other bag to arrive later. In fact, as I soon found out, the loss of the baggage turned out to be a major bon.

Leave the airport, ask for directions to Ulfborg and am told there is no such place. Panic kicks in. Is this just one big scam or what? Have I just been led on? I ask the guy to confirm with another person and he is very indignant when she also says she has not heard of it. Now I am really scared so I ask him to call someone else who might know and finally I get a postiive reply that it is in West Jutland, several hundereds of miles away and I need to take a train . I take a bus to the Central Station and I almost miss the stop b/c the signs are in Danish and the driver forgot to yell out the stop in English. Scramble out just in time and struglle to lug my bags across the street where I get a cart which cost me 20 bloody kroner (7 korner to one dollar). Then I try making a telephone call and man one would think using a telephone would be the
easiest thing in the world but I felt like a toal jackass not being able to figure it out and what was even more amusing is that no one else seemed to know how to use it either.

Finally I sneak up on a 10-year old kid and ask him to explain how the drasted machine worked.

The train leaves at 2 pm and I find out it takes 5 hours to Ulfborg with two change of trains! By now I was ready to turn into a God fearing religious fanatic as long as I could just get to this place in one piece. I get into an unreserved compartment and the whole junta from Denmark piles on and all of them smoke their lungs out! It is shocking to see the
number of people that smoke, and that too in public places. Anyway changing trains twice in that crowd with one massive suitcase and three hand bags was worse than getting on and off a train in B’bay at peak hours.

So that was a great beginning. The last two days have been spent in meetings, one after the other after the other, in deciding this, that and what not. I guess this is a fact of all “community schools” that like to do things by consensus rather than by majority vote.

Another thing that seems to be common to most of these places is that they have a pig-headed egotistical authority figure at the helm. Lots
of politics. In all, very amusing stuff for some one used to it all.

Anyway I will not be here in DNS for long. No I don’t mean I am quitting! 🙂 My job will be at a school 150 kms south of here (Skærbæk) and I will be there for most of the next 3 months starting tomorrow. I will return to DNS once every two weeks or so to meet my other team members who are working in different schools and to prepare for the trip to India. I will
have access to email there but I am not sure how much time I will be able to spend on it.

Will try my best to keep up with my correspondence. Tel is not the best way to get in touch so just keep emailing. I am sorry this is another group mail but I am going to have to do this often b/c the schedule over here is mad, really really mad.

Of course I will try to keep up our individual correspondences as well but some times it is easier to write up my experiences just once and mail it to all of you. I know it sounds impersonal and I know some of you hate the idea of group mail but I will be able to go into greater detail if I write once every two weeks or so to all of you and tell you what has happened in the meantime rather than repeat myself several times over. Of course if any of you would rather not receive these long updates from me, let me know, and I will take you off the list.

I better stop here. Hotmail is slow enough on a pentium pro 133MHz machine in the US. Imagine what it is like on a 486 on the other side of
the fat pipe. Wokay. Will tell you more about Denmark, the schools, my schedule and other thoughts in later emails. Do write even if I don’t reply immediately. I promise I will eventually. So keep writing ….

Take care,
Arvind