Only 24 Hours To Go!

Today we arrived in Pune at around 11 am, we are just less than 24 hours away from meeting our beautiful daugther, the suspense is killing me. Apparently there is some big militiary guy coming to Pune beause the place is loaded with military and escorts at that airport. Pune is a much different city than the other cities I've been to in India (Surat, Mumbai, etc), its clean and non-congested - I guess the two go hand-in-hand. There isn't a lot of touristy stuff to see here, but its the education center of India with many large well know India campuses.

We were greated by our driver and taken to the the Westin Koregon Park, to a very friendly and helpful staff and we were escorted all the way through to our hotel room. I think we probably met at least 15 staff members personally before entering our room. Very nice service indeed. One thing however is that there are metal detectors to get into major buildings, its probably due to what happened last year in Mumbai. It did seem strange to have my bags go through x-ray to get into my hotel, but we felt safe even without that. The lobby and rooms are all top notch and I can't wait to sink my head into the kingsize "Heavenly Bed" that Westin offers, however knowing me I'll be up all night thinking about tomorrow so I probably won't get much sleep.

After our check-in, we went for a little city tour on a rickshaw and we had a meal at a local establishment called, McDonald's. I had the McVeggie and it is pretty dang good, I wish we had it in the US. Then we went over the the mall to get some items for Bela. Inside the mall was a movie theater, food court, etc. We bought tictkets to see "Three Idiots" at 3:30, and the cool thing is the seats are pre-assigned like at a concert or sporting event. But the movie did not have any subtitles, but as long as the whole movie consisted of the words Hello, Good-Bye, I am hungry and thirsty, cat, dog and, Henglish (1/2 English/Hindi), and counting to 10 then I would be just fine.

Before the movie started, we had our driver take us to some local street shopping where we got some items for Bela and our nieces and we ate charred masala corn - yummy!