On Wednesday, October 17th at 2:50pm I left from SFO to fly to Beijing then onward to Bangkok. I’m currently sitting in the Bangkok airport waiting for my Thai Airways flight from BKK to Chiang Mai where I’ll meet up with Chelsea and her family.
It hasn’t quite hit me yet, but I’m in Thailand. And I’ll be here for five months. So far the trip has been just peachy. Flying and traveling in general can be a doozy, but this trip has been surprisingly successful so far. Don’t get me wrong, there have already been snafus and there is great potential for it all to go downhill from here.
It’s crazy to think that just this morning (er, yesterday morning? Time zones are confusing) I was watching Price is Right in my living room in San Ramon. Yes, PIR was my last American TV experience, and I’d have it no other way. And coincidentally enough one of the grand prizes in the final showcase showdown was a trip to Thailand. So crazy. Despite that aligning coincidence and being packed & ready to go, it was ridiculously hard to leave. Saying goodbye to my dad and my dog at home was one thing, then the farewell with my mom at airport really made me lose it. So I tucked my pride aside and began this independent journey as a weeping girl in the security check line. Off to a good start, right?
As I sat at my gate, I had this panic attack of what am I doing. Sometimes I don’t understand why I choose to do the things I do. Luckily Donald Miller understands them better than I do in his book “Through Painted Deserts”:
“It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet to see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.”
Well said, Don. Anyway, as I’m mid perplexing thought, I hear a “Hey there!” from behind me. It was none other than Derek Lopez, my longtime college friend and fellow future Thailand teacher. Even though Derek & I are not going to be teaching in the same city, he and I planned to fly to the country together. It often times makes layovers and transfers less stressful to spout out confusion and airport frustrations to a familiar face.
Derek had flown from Portland to SFO with two girls teaching through the same program (CIEE) as him. Suddenly I went from being very lonely to part of a foursome. None of us sat near each other on the plane, but that was probably for the better. Derek said he strolled by my seat a couple times and I was conked out. Initially I thought I wasn’t going to sleep on the flight, but then I popped some Dramamine and next thing I knew I’d slept through an entire movie and perhaps a snack (drat!). Btw, for anyone flying to Asia in the near future, I wouldn’t recommend Air China. There is only one TV per section of the plane and it’s not very good quality. The first movie played was some Chinese movie, fair enough. The next was War Horse, which I had to stop watching because the idea of a boy giving up his horse to a war was more sad to me than the idea of me going to Thailand for five months. Seriously, I said in my head “Sheesh, at least I didn’t have to give up a horse.” Once I unplugged my headphones from the sad movie, I slept pretty much the rest of the time. It wasn’t until later that I found out they had played The Lorax next.
After our 12 hour flight, we got to Beijing and the foursome met up again to attempt to figure out where to go. It was way more difficult than it needed to be and we only had an hour and 40 minutes to get it figured out. After finally finding the International Transfers booth, we had to wait for a worker to come acknowledge our presence--frustrating. That took longer than needed before we could head down to the Chinese security. This was just the worst, most poorly organized security I’ve ever been through. There were two young workers, a boy and a girl, and I’m fairly certain they were mocking us or flirting with each other the whole time. There were no signs indicating what to remove from your bag, so it took each of us about three tries before they cleared our carry-ons. I pulled out my water bottle and asked the male worker if I could keep my water. He said “yes, yes” then proceeded to throw it away. After that snafu, we had to walk what must have been half a mile to our gate, which was now boarding passengers. We had zero time to enjoy the luxuries the Beijing airport had to offer.
I slept through pretty much the entire second flight, which was 5.5 hours long. I woke once for the food service, and then I realized if I ate that food I was going to hurl, so I just mushed it around in the containers before returning it to the flight attendant. After this flight we found another CIEE program member and the now five-some traveled to customs and baggage. Customs was suuuper easy and took a total of 2 minutes tops. Then we all got our bags really fast (last time Wendy & I went to Thailand it took about an hour for our bags to pop out, so huge improvement this time). Then came the awkward moment where the CIEE peeps & I had differing plans. They left the airport to split a cab and find their program hotel, whereas I had to figure out how to stay in the airport in order to catch my separate flight to Chiang Mai.
I thought this would be really nerve-racking and scary to navigate on my own, but so far I’m loving it. Seriously. Thai people are so friendly and helpful. I found a rolling cart for my giant travel backpack and I’ve been pushing it around like a content shopper ever since. They don’t have free wifi here, but they do have these web phone/internet access machines. I used one of them to contact my family and was lucky enough to catch my sister on gchat. After that I bought some Thai water and a coconut/taro biscuit. Lol to Thai food. Now I’m writing this blog and realizing I still have to navigate a flight transaction on my own as well as find Chelsea in Chiang Mai. Here goes nothing!
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