30. juni 2008

HOW TO GET YOUR MISHANDLED LUGGAGE BACK WHEN YOU ARE OUTSIDE DELHI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT:

1. Call the airplane company that you arrived with. In our case, Finnair, to check the opening hours of their airport office.

2. Get ripped off by taxi driver taking you there.

3. In office: They will take a copy of your passport, wrtite application for getting temporary access to the airpor inner area, write reclamation for your luggage. On the reclamation you have to write the content of the bags - but not the value of the content.

4. Go to office for-handing-out-temporary-permits-of-access-to-airport.
A. Present the case to Big Boss Of Office who is unmistakebly the most important person in the office. He discovers the fatale mistake the the pasport photo copies of Anja and Kathrine have been switched and are not attached to the right forms. He corrects the mistake. This is what defines leadership, and that's why he's the boss.
B. Take documents to pre-office and have five men write the temporary access permit form (two of them fixing unrecognisable machinery).
C. Fill out the rest of the form and sign it.
D. The forms are taken to Big Boss who stamps them. Only Big Boss has a stamp.

5. Enter airport. Present permits and passports to armed guard who lets you through.

6. Move toward custom area and show permits and passports to sneaky looking, flirtatious power sick armed guard og custom area. He stalls, acts as if there is a problem, which he finds funny, and the lets you in.

7. Check permits and passports with Big Boss of custom who has his own desk in the middle of everything. He orders you to value the list you wrote on the content of your bags. It is done. Big Boss stamps new unknown form and allows you to go to storage room to collect your luggage.

8. Go to dusty storage room with unknown form from Big boss of customs, passports, temporary airport permits, reclamation and a lot of other unknown forms. At this point just go with the flow. The Big Boss of storage room fill out several forms, which we suspect are receipts for picked up luggage. One of his six employees sitting around fills out a different unknown form which we signed (it could have been a guestbook of some sort). Another guy handed out our luggage in blue plastic bags.

9. Go to X-ray machine for having your luggage X-rayed. The senior board of customs tells you laughing that when you have written down the value of the stuff in your bag you have to pay 36% taxes of the whole thing. They didn't laugh because they were joking, because they where not.. If we had NOT written any value, we WOULDN'T have to pay taxes. The things in the bags are not import-stuff, but our own private stuff so...

10. Go back to Big Boss of custom's own private desk and fill out new form without writing the value of our stuff. Fortunately this particular form did not recuire any stamps from any other Big Boss. So Big Boss of custom did not loose face.

11. Go back to X-ray machine and senior board of customs and give them new form with no indication of value of stuff in bag. They stamp it. Fill out form, which is maybe-foreigners-registration-in-India, we are not sure. We signed it. At this point we had already been in India about 24 hours (probably as illegal immigrants!)

12. Take luggage out of airport and continue journey!

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