Best Exotic Girisadan Homestay
Let’s put first things first: there was no wrestling about armrests in the plane! I managed to get an upgrade to Premium Economy in Frankfurt for a reasonable price. Yay!
I had a safe flight and arrived in Mumbai at 1am local time. And while I had initially planned to spend the 5-hour gap until the connecting flight to Jaipur reading, drinking coffee and maybe writing this blog, it actually took me 2 hours to get through immigration, another hour to pick up my bag and check it in again, half an hour to order coffee, half an hour to go to my gate, half an hour to go back and forth because the immigration guy had taken my boarding pass and security wouldn’t let me enter the gate with the electronic one. And when I finally had a new hard copy of the boarding pass and spent 5 minutes at the restroom to freshen up a little, it was 5:10 am and they were boarding the plane to Jaipur.
Luckily, I had met one of my team mates, Renata, in the e-visa queue, and she made a great companion!
Outside Jaipur Airport we met our driver and arrived safe and sound at the lovely Girisadan Homestay. We were greeted by “The Captain”, the owner of the homestay. The Girisadan is a family business with 12 rooms of different size and splendor. To give everyone a fair chance we had to draw little pieces of paper with the room number from a jar. And I was lucky: room 203 has a wonderful balcony which some of my team mates now envy me for.
During the morning, we saw our group growing: every hour or so someone else arrived and there was lots of hugging or shaking hands, asking about flights, the different routes everyone had taken, and so on.
Dinner was at The Palladio, an Italian restaurant.
And while we were having Spaghetti, Piccata, Antipasti, Samosa, Tempura, tea and Tiramisù, the last team members, Ari, Peggy and Tina, arrived at the Girisadan.
The last WhatsApp message of that day was from Kai:
