I'm here!

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I made it to Thailand! And what a trip it was! Total transit time from the time I arrived at JFK Airport until I arrived at my apartment in Bangkok was about 26 hours. Fortunately it wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds, although I didn't get nearly enough sleep on any of the flights and am currently exhausted even though I've only been awake for a little over an hour this morning. But here's how my trip went...

Everything was smooth getting dropped off at JFK and boarding my first flight to Beijing. Fortunately, the flight wasn't that full and the person who was sitting next to me when we took off got up and decided to sit somewhere else. So for a few minutes I had an entire row of four seats to myself. Until an old woman decided to lay down on the other three seats and leave her smelly, disgusting feet right next to me. So i got to enjoy about 11 or 12 hours of smelly old woman feet. But I got used to it so it wasn't too bad. They fed us two meals and a couple of snacks on the flight and they played a couple of movies in English and then what seemed to be a few sitcoms or maybe even a movie in Chinese. I dozed on and off for about two hours during the flight, which lasted about 14 or so hours total. My iPod kept me entertained for most of the flight and I was able to charge it using my laptop so the battery lasted the entire flight.

I arrived at Beijing almost on time and then had about 90 minutes to kill in the airport so I bought a calling card and made some calls home and then just sat around and read until I boarded my flight to Bangkok. This flight was fairly miserable. The seats on the plane were the smallest I have ever been in and the flight was full. I was stuck on the window seat and the seats were so small that my knees nearly hit the seat in front of me. They gave us some expired peanuts as a snack (yes I still ate them) and I don't know what they gave us for dinner because I wasn't hungry so I didn't eat. My watch decided that it was going to die right before boarding the flight so I'm not sure how long I was on the plane for but I think it was about a 5 and a half hour flight, which was an hour longer than it was scheduled to be. We landed in Bangkok around 1:30AM and then I had to go through immigration and customs, which were a piece of cake, and then I got my baggage and went to go look for my ride that was supposed to be taking me to my apartment. After searching for about 15 minutes I couldn't find anyone with a sign that had my name or the name of my apartment complex on it. So I went into a store and bought a calling card to call the apartment and find out what was going on. So I got the calling card and went to use it on a payphone only to find out that the public phones in the airport don't accept the calling card they sold me. At this point a Thai man walked up to me and asked me if I needed help and immediately I knew that I was going to be scammed in some way but at that point I didn't really care. I was tired and wanted to get to my hotel so I explained my situation to him and he took me to another phone to try and help me make the call. He said if the apartment could not send someone to get me, he would take me there. Since my calling card didn't work, him and his friend loaned me change to make the call with and I finally got through to the apartment. I explained to them what was going on and they seemed totally confused, but after a while the receptionist told me that she would come pick me up at the airport herself. So I had to tell the kind Thai man that I didnt need his ride but I thanked him for his help and went to where I was going to meet my ride. The guy seemed pretty pissed off, but oh well. After waiting for another 20 - 30 minutes my ride finally arrived. By this point it was around 3AM. The woman apologized to me a million times and told me that their driver was not around today so they hired a car to take me to the hotel. While in the car she continued to apologize and even gave me a little trinket as a gift for making me wait for so long. I got to my apartment around 3:30 where they checked me in and showed me my room. It's a smaller room than I anticipated but very nice. I'll try and post pictures soon. Unfortunately I was only able to sleep for about 4 hours but at least I'll sleep well tonight and then I should adjust to the time difference here.

I think I'm going to try wandering around the city a little bit and see what's in the area. I haven't even been outside yet but I can tell that it's hot as balls. Since I'm not teaching yet this week I will probably have a lot of updates and photos to post here in the next couple of days.

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