... Your class trip involves dealing with foreign royalty, bureaucracy and at least 5 different languages all in 1 afternoon and for only one student's visa issue.
One of our students on the Indian class trip needed to be registered because he was over 16 years old and traveled under a Afgani passport. Of course, we didn't know that he needed to be registered until after we arrived in Delhi. To make matters easier, the only place we thought it could be done is a special office in Delhi which we couldn't go to because we needed to hit the road ASAP to make it to our halfway point hotel before nightfall. Luckily, the person in charge of our outdoor adventure expedition also happens to be an Indian Prince (fancy white outfit, awesome jewel wearing, goes everywhere on top of an elephant... ok not really- actually he looked totally normal. But seriously, he was a prince), and he said he could hook us up with the special registration stamp that would guarantee our student to be able to leave the country without being put under arrest or put onto a blacklist or whatever happens when you don't register in India. Unfortunately, Prince couldn't make it happen without the student with him (also, more information we didn't know). So, we decided to enjoy our outdoor excursion and wait until the end of the week before we could take further steps (seeing as we were now many many miles from Delhi and not wanting our student to miss out on class trip experiences with his peers. On the second to last day, we started making some phone calls. Many of our students tried calling their uncles, cousins, father's co-worker's cousin-sister to try and see what kind of connections we could use to get this registration to happen. The problem: our last chance to do so also happens to be a public holiday in India! ... oops! After a bit of panic time we came up with a few plans.
Plan A: Going to the airport and hoping they wouldn't care (obviously a last resort).
Plan B: Leaving around midnight to head back to Delhi through the night and try to get someone to come into the office on the public holiday to give us our stamp, and if that didn't work continuing on to Plan A.
Plan C: Heading to Shimla (nearby town in N. India) to get a chief of police to come in on his day off to register the student (after some time we found out it can be any chief of police, not just the office in Delhi). If that fails continuing on to Plan A.
Plan D: If Plan A fails, I volunteered to stay in Delhi for 2 additional days (with the Prince and student) until the offices opened up after the weekend to register our student and then fly back to Dhaka.
We went with Plan C. The next step: how to get the Chief of Police to come into work on his holiday? Don't worry, Prince came to the rescue! He pulled some strings. Everyone else (24 students and 2 chaperons) headed on the bus back to Delhi on our last morning at camp. Prince, the student and I stayed back to confirm that we would be able to do the registration in Shimla. The drive to Shimla is about 1 hour and 30 mins (opposite of Delhi). We made the drive, parked the car (this was a 20 minute hold up because the only parking spot was being blocked by a car that had 2 flat tires and about 7 people trying to fix them), and bought tickets for an elevator that took us up to "Mall Road". Mall Road is a shopping street that is supposed to be nice (hence costing money to take an elevator up) but it still had the feel of a crowded, dirty Indian street (sprinkled with some nice higher end shops). We wandered down the street aimlessly following the Prince on his cell phone as he tried to figure out who we were meeting and where. After stopping a few times to ask for directions to the office, we arrived at a large abandoned warehouse. I soon realized this abandoned building (looking suspiciously like the setting to many an Indian horror film) was the one we needed, and to top it off: the rickety metal bridge walkway to get to the "door" (open entry in brick wall) to the building was covered in monkeys. I looked from the poor student to the Prince and then to the monkeys, took a deep breath and walked onto the walkway and into the "office building". Once inside, I saw outlines of filing cabinets through the dimly light corridors (the power was out) and had to dodge holes in the ground large enough to allow me to reach the floor below more quickly than the stairs or an elevator would allow. We stood, confused, in the darkness as our eyes adjusted and called our "registrar". A distant ringing, the click of a deadbolt, and a man appeared from the shadows at the end of the hallway to our right. He invited us in his office (3 large desks, 1 window, 3 desktop computers (circa 1999), and a space heater) and we took seats around the room. The conversation began and we quickly got to the point. As all three men could speak Urdu and Hindi, I was left out of most of the information exchanged, but from references to passports, AIS/D and our camping company and some words spoken in English, I figured out that the man was very confused as to why we had waited to register our student, and how the student could speak Urdu and Hindi if he was Afgani and why an Afgani would be living in Bangladesh and traveling with an American school teacher. Many repetitions of our story later, the register agreed on stamping the registration form. He pulled a clean, new stamp out of an organized desk drawer and opened a fresh ink pad. HAH! Just kidding. Actually, he opened his desk drawer and found himself in a predicament: there were too many of the proper stamp, but none of them seemed to be new enough to make a proper impression. Also, the ink-pad looked like it had dried out in 2008. As he practice-stamped a piece of paper close to 2 dozen times, I worried that my pant legs were going to catch on fire from sitting too close to the space heater. I leaned back, and got distracted by an invitational letter on the desktop next to me addressed to the King of Nepal and his family. (?!?) Trying to remain on task, I refocused my efforts to willing the registrar to lick the stamp-pad to give it some more moisture. Instead, stamp number 38 worked. We got our stamp and started to make our escape. We got excited too fast! We needed to have a few more side conversations on the cell phone (calling everyone to make sure this was the correct procedure) and some further discussion on the confusing inter-nationality of the situation. Then we were out the door, battling the monkeys on our way to Mall Road, to try to get back to our car (in the organized parking lot) to get on the road and try to catch up with the bus of students on its way to Delhi. Stamped registration in hand, we were all able to get on the plane the following morning without any trouble. The good news: the Prince gave me his business card in case I ever run into any trouble the next time I'm traveling in his country.
One of our students on the Indian class trip needed to be registered because he was over 16 years old and traveled under a Afgani passport. Of course, we didn't know that he needed to be registered until after we arrived in Delhi. To make matters easier, the only place we thought it could be done is a special office in Delhi which we couldn't go to because we needed to hit the road ASAP to make it to our halfway point hotel before nightfall. Luckily, the person in charge of our outdoor adventure expedition also happens to be an Indian Prince (fancy white outfit, awesome jewel wearing, goes everywhere on top of an elephant... ok not really- actually he looked totally normal. But seriously, he was a prince), and he said he could hook us up with the special registration stamp that would guarantee our student to be able to leave the country without being put under arrest or put onto a blacklist or whatever happens when you don't register in India. Unfortunately, Prince couldn't make it happen without the student with him (also, more information we didn't know). So, we decided to enjoy our outdoor excursion and wait until the end of the week before we could take further steps (seeing as we were now many many miles from Delhi and not wanting our student to miss out on class trip experiences with his peers. On the second to last day, we started making some phone calls. Many of our students tried calling their uncles, cousins, father's co-worker's cousin-sister to try and see what kind of connections we could use to get this registration to happen. The problem: our last chance to do so also happens to be a public holiday in India! ... oops! After a bit of panic time we came up with a few plans.
Plan A: Going to the airport and hoping they wouldn't care (obviously a last resort).
Plan B: Leaving around midnight to head back to Delhi through the night and try to get someone to come into the office on the public holiday to give us our stamp, and if that didn't work continuing on to Plan A.
Plan C: Heading to Shimla (nearby town in N. India) to get a chief of police to come in on his day off to register the student (after some time we found out it can be any chief of police, not just the office in Delhi). If that fails continuing on to Plan A.
Plan D: If Plan A fails, I volunteered to stay in Delhi for 2 additional days (with the Prince and student) until the offices opened up after the weekend to register our student and then fly back to Dhaka.
We went with Plan C. The next step: how to get the Chief of Police to come into work on his holiday? Don't worry, Prince came to the rescue! He pulled some strings. Everyone else (24 students and 2 chaperons) headed on the bus back to Delhi on our last morning at camp. Prince, the student and I stayed back to confirm that we would be able to do the registration in Shimla. The drive to Shimla is about 1 hour and 30 mins (opposite of Delhi). We made the drive, parked the car (this was a 20 minute hold up because the only parking spot was being blocked by a car that had 2 flat tires and about 7 people trying to fix them), and bought tickets for an elevator that took us up to "Mall Road". Mall Road is a shopping street that is supposed to be nice (hence costing money to take an elevator up) but it still had the feel of a crowded, dirty Indian street (sprinkled with some nice higher end shops). We wandered down the street aimlessly following the Prince on his cell phone as he tried to figure out who we were meeting and where. After stopping a few times to ask for directions to the office, we arrived at a large abandoned warehouse. I soon realized this abandoned building (looking suspiciously like the setting to many an Indian horror film) was the one we needed, and to top it off: the rickety metal bridge walkway to get to the "door" (open entry in brick wall) to the building was covered in monkeys. I looked from the poor student to the Prince and then to the monkeys, took a deep breath and walked onto the walkway and into the "office building". Once inside, I saw outlines of filing cabinets through the dimly light corridors (the power was out) and had to dodge holes in the ground large enough to allow me to reach the floor below more quickly than the stairs or an elevator would allow. We stood, confused, in the darkness as our eyes adjusted and called our "registrar". A distant ringing, the click of a deadbolt, and a man appeared from the shadows at the end of the hallway to our right. He invited us in his office (3 large desks, 1 window, 3 desktop computers (circa 1999), and a space heater) and we took seats around the room. The conversation began and we quickly got to the point. As all three men could speak Urdu and Hindi, I was left out of most of the information exchanged, but from references to passports, AIS/D and our camping company and some words spoken in English, I figured out that the man was very confused as to why we had waited to register our student, and how the student could speak Urdu and Hindi if he was Afgani and why an Afgani would be living in Bangladesh and traveling with an American school teacher. Many repetitions of our story later, the register agreed on stamping the registration form. He pulled a clean, new stamp out of an organized desk drawer and opened a fresh ink pad. HAH! Just kidding. Actually, he opened his desk drawer and found himself in a predicament: there were too many of the proper stamp, but none of them seemed to be new enough to make a proper impression. Also, the ink-pad looked like it had dried out in 2008. As he practice-stamped a piece of paper close to 2 dozen times, I worried that my pant legs were going to catch on fire from sitting too close to the space heater. I leaned back, and got distracted by an invitational letter on the desktop next to me addressed to the King of Nepal and his family. (?!?) Trying to remain on task, I refocused my efforts to willing the registrar to lick the stamp-pad to give it some more moisture. Instead, stamp number 38 worked. We got our stamp and started to make our escape. We got excited too fast! We needed to have a few more side conversations on the cell phone (calling everyone to make sure this was the correct procedure) and some further discussion on the confusing inter-nationality of the situation. Then we were out the door, battling the monkeys on our way to Mall Road, to try to get back to our car (in the organized parking lot) to get on the road and try to catch up with the bus of students on its way to Delhi. Stamped registration in hand, we were all able to get on the plane the following morning without any trouble. The good news: the Prince gave me his business card in case I ever run into any trouble the next time I'm traveling in his country.
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