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Published: August 11th 2008
Nap Time
Laura sleeping at the airport waiting for our next flight.We have landed in Bangkok around midnight (noon back home) after 19 hours in the air and 24 hours of travel time. Our flight was on Korea Air, very comfortable and we were on one of those huge planes with two levels (although I never did find the stairs)! We met an interesting guy on the plane from Chicago who was traveling to Korea to teach english for a year. They pay for your airfare, apartment, car, insurance and also pay you quite a bit on top of that. He doesn't know how to speak the language at all, but somehow it works out.
The next day we worked our way through Bangkok (close to 9 million people) and found ourselves at the bus station to wait 8 hours for a night bus to take us 10 hours to a smaller northern city called Chiang Mai. While waiting I had my first Leo (beer), learned a lot about Asian pop music videos, and used a squat toilet (pay 3 cents to get in, stand on "wings" on the side of the toilet bowl 1 foot off the ground, squat, and then rinse yourself off with a hose or bucket of water with a plastic bowl in it. There isn't any toilet paper, or soap, or anything remotely clean inside the stalls). Thanks to a couple of Leos I found this experience very funny. I will never take a flush toilet or toilet paper (which has taken the place of my cell phone and travels with me at all times) for granted again! We boarded the deluxe VIP $20 bus excited for a clean place to sit. These buses are comparable to a Grey Hound Bus meets a Party Vegas Style bus. Our seats reclined all the way back and had back massagers in them. We did stop at 2 am for a bathroom break in which they turned on all the lights and played loud Thai music for 15 minutes. We had no idea how good we had it until our next bus ride (more on that later)!
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Diana
non-member comment
The good things
wow - massage seats on a bus! That's pretty fabulous. Sounds like you got to experience the nice kind of squat toilet - you'll come to appreciate those too :)