In Which Blue Renounces Her Title

Here's a story.

When I used to work as a waitress, my... um... colleagues used to call me a princess. This despite the fact that I was the one who would tackle the nastiest side work (squeezing hot butter into flower shapes, for example, and various things involving dishwater and chemicals) without complaining. Finally, one of the cooks told them to knock it off.

Anyway. The "princess" label is one that has stuck to me since grade school. But I'm renouncing it.

I spent the night on a Delhi train to Amritsar. It was the only one I didn't upgrade. I left the ticket in Sleeper II class because I thought "oh, it'll smell a bit, but I'll lie down and close my eyes and wake up at the station."

Wrong.

Everything is filthier in Delhi, including the trains.

It was an unimaginable night. I decided, pretty early on, that I would not fall asleep because falling asleep seemed the only alternative worse than staying awake. (I was concerned more with the multitude of insects than with, say, getting robbed; I had my arms around my bag and laptop the entire time.) So I spent several hours sitting at the open door, wrapped in a blanket, along with half-a-dozen people who hadn't bought a ticket (the train was crammed full of people who hadn't bought tickets; there were far more people in that Sleeper II train than there were bunks). At least I had a blanket; many of the people there were wrapped in newspaper.

At any rate. I survived, and no one ever gets to call me a princess again.