Why you going to the airport?
Flying somewhere?
After saying my last few goodbyes, the most excruciating ones to date, I stepped onto the plane that will begin my trip to the other side of the planet. For the past 36 hours I have been traveling by plane to arrive in Bangkok, Thailand. The travel was not difficult, much of it spent sitting and waiting and more sitting. The food wasn’t that bad though.
It feels weird to be a minority, especially at the mercy of the airport gods. I had to wait my turn to listen to English announcements. Departure/Arrival boards flipped back and forth between Japanese and English, only hovering slowly on the English translations. Flight attendants speak broken English, if any at all. Nearly all of the passengers are from the East. It almost feels good to not be understood for more obvious reasons.
I waited in the immigration line for about thirty minutes before being let into Thailand. Shortly after waiting for my baggage to come out, I found my father. We hugged and smiled and got into a cab to take us to our hotel. The humidity hit me in the face like a rolling pin when the automatic doors opened up to outside. I’m surprised that the fish haven’t learned to walk the streets the air is so saturated. It is quite hot, even for midnight. I can’t wait to see what daytime will be like. Where we are staying is in the middle of backpacker heaven, or hell depending on how you look at it. The streets are narrow with people crowding around the car as we idle down the streets to our hotel.
After taking a quick shower (the shower is a removable shower head on the wall in the middle of a small bathroom, you stand in front of the sink and next to the toilet while you wash yourself) we headed down to walk around for a short while and to get dinner and a beer. At 2 AM there are still many people of all types walking around, drinking, laughing, and eating. Bangkok is a hub of international travel, so it is only fitting that I don’t understand a single word that is spoken by anyone. There are street vendors selling all types of food and drinks, panhandlers beg for change and men try to coax you into going to private discos. Stray dogs walk the streets and in and out of restaurants freely. There was a baby elephant as tall as I was lumbering through the street tethered to a short man. It feels like it would at Mardi Gras. People are loud and crowding the streets. The area we are staying in is where most of the traveler’s flock to, all sorts of languages and accents going off all around my ears as we walked the streets.
We each ate a plate of fried noodles and seafood and had a bowl of coconut milk soup filled with spices and seafood. Dad had two beers; I had one my stomach was empty from not eating much on the way here. It was good beer though, stronger stuff than at home. The whole meal cost 590 baht, which is about $15.
We are going to stay here in Bangkok for the night tonight as well, and then head to Phuket by plane on Thursday. The class starts on Monday, so we want to get settled and find our footing in Phuket town before we have the extra stress of the class. I still haven’t learned a drop of Thai language yet. I should probably start soon.
Since I woke up on Monday morning at 5 AM, I have only gotten about 8 hours of sleep. Some of that being plane sleep; which, if you ask anyone that has traveled over seas, doesn’t count. Not that I have good a good sleep schedule as it was in the US, having my internal clock skewed so drastically won’t help, I’m sure. It’s the feeling of waking up and seeing the blue numbers on the clock blinking 10:12 PM when it is really 9:12 AM. I am eleven hours into the future from home! So if you want to know whether it is day or night for me, subtract an hour and switch the AM to a PM from New York.
I hope all is well at home. I miss everyone terribly and it has only been two (three?) days. I’ll be in touch again soon.
(I haven't taken many pictures yet, and some of them were just a few short minutes before I walked into this internet cafe, I' will put some up sometime soon though. I promise.)
Love
- Brandon
After saying my last few goodbyes, the most excruciating ones to date, I stepped onto the plane that will begin my trip to the other side of the planet. For the past 36 hours I have been traveling by plane to arrive in Bangkok, Thailand. The travel was not difficult, much of it spent sitting and waiting and more sitting. The food wasn’t that bad though.
It feels weird to be a minority, especially at the mercy of the airport gods. I had to wait my turn to listen to English announcements. Departure/Arrival boards flipped back and forth between Japanese and English, only hovering slowly on the English translations. Flight attendants speak broken English, if any at all. Nearly all of the passengers are from the East. It almost feels good to not be understood for more obvious reasons.
I waited in the immigration line for about thirty minutes before being let into Thailand. Shortly after waiting for my baggage to come out, I found my father. We hugged and smiled and got into a cab to take us to our hotel. The humidity hit me in the face like a rolling pin when the automatic doors opened up to outside. I’m surprised that the fish haven’t learned to walk the streets the air is so saturated. It is quite hot, even for midnight. I can’t wait to see what daytime will be like. Where we are staying is in the middle of backpacker heaven, or hell depending on how you look at it. The streets are narrow with people crowding around the car as we idle down the streets to our hotel.
After taking a quick shower (the shower is a removable shower head on the wall in the middle of a small bathroom, you stand in front of the sink and next to the toilet while you wash yourself) we headed down to walk around for a short while and to get dinner and a beer. At 2 AM there are still many people of all types walking around, drinking, laughing, and eating. Bangkok is a hub of international travel, so it is only fitting that I don’t understand a single word that is spoken by anyone. There are street vendors selling all types of food and drinks, panhandlers beg for change and men try to coax you into going to private discos. Stray dogs walk the streets and in and out of restaurants freely. There was a baby elephant as tall as I was lumbering through the street tethered to a short man. It feels like it would at Mardi Gras. People are loud and crowding the streets. The area we are staying in is where most of the traveler’s flock to, all sorts of languages and accents going off all around my ears as we walked the streets.
We each ate a plate of fried noodles and seafood and had a bowl of coconut milk soup filled with spices and seafood. Dad had two beers; I had one my stomach was empty from not eating much on the way here. It was good beer though, stronger stuff than at home. The whole meal cost 590 baht, which is about $15.
We are going to stay here in Bangkok for the night tonight as well, and then head to Phuket by plane on Thursday. The class starts on Monday, so we want to get settled and find our footing in Phuket town before we have the extra stress of the class. I still haven’t learned a drop of Thai language yet. I should probably start soon.
Since I woke up on Monday morning at 5 AM, I have only gotten about 8 hours of sleep. Some of that being plane sleep; which, if you ask anyone that has traveled over seas, doesn’t count. Not that I have good a good sleep schedule as it was in the US, having my internal clock skewed so drastically won’t help, I’m sure. It’s the feeling of waking up and seeing the blue numbers on the clock blinking 10:12 PM when it is really 9:12 AM. I am eleven hours into the future from home! So if you want to know whether it is day or night for me, subtract an hour and switch the AM to a PM from New York.
I hope all is well at home. I miss everyone terribly and it has only been two (three?) days. I’ll be in touch again soon.
(I haven't taken many pictures yet, and some of them were just a few short minutes before I walked into this internet cafe, I' will put some up sometime soon though. I promise.)
Love
- Brandon