Saturday, May 12, 2012

Finally here!!

In Thailand! Here's how the flights went down..


Our flight to Taiwan was really long and actually very wonderful. We were so sleep deprived and crazy after dealing with the international terminal in LAX that we hardly had time to eat our in flight meal before falling asleep. Aside from being a little cramped, we both slept really well, woke up for the in-flight breakfast, and didn't even have a chance to finish Sherlock Holmes 2 before landing. We really loved Taiwan (so many Asians!!! And plenty of Chinese people just for Andrea ;) ). We brushed our teeth, put on deodorant, and felt a little better about ourselves.

Welcome to Asia! There was even a Hello Kitty airplane and terminal.



It wasn't a very long layover, and after we met up with a few other volunteers at the terminal, we got on the plane for Bangkok! Same airline, same Asian in-flight meals, and same movies available. We finished Sherlocke Holmes while eating curry chicken, and had just enough time to finish We Bought a Zoo before landing in Bangkok. Bangkok is a HUGE airport full of people from all over Asia and the middle east. It's probably a major international connector between the middle east and the rest of Asia. There were even a few Persians! After we got through immigration, the luggage carousel was pretty empty. We noticed a few of the airline personnel were looking at a few bags, including one of ours. After we got it from them, we realized our other bag wasn't there!! We told a BKK worker, who took us to our airline counter, and after ten minutes of trying to figure out what happened, they didn't know where our bag was! We gave them Nat's number, and borrowed one of their phones to call and let him know they'd be calling. We had a 7 hour layover in Bangkok, so we exchanged some money, got some SUPER spicy curry, and walked around a bit. It was suffocatingly humid, but really pretty!

Our flight to Chiang Rai took off after the sun set, but there was a thunderstorm so we could occasionally see flashes of the ground below. lots of farms, jungles, and scattered villages. In Chiang Rai we met up with the rest of our group, piled our luggage under a tarp in the back of a rusty pickup truck, and then all 15 of us crammed into a van. We luckily shared the front seat with our driver who didn't speak a word of English. Our drive lasted an hour- think road to Hana in the dark- It was a VERY windy road through the mountain, and I think we ran over at least 18 frogs along the way. We also passed a lot of people riding scooters and holding umbrellas. Ooh, and they drive on the left side of the road! That was fun:) We dumped our stuff into our unairconditioned room and passed out under our fan until 9:30 this morning:) Oh!! We woke up at 3 for a bathroom break, and had to go outside to get to the bathroom across the patio (our house is halfway between a cheap motel and camping), and it was so loud with frogs, geckos, crickets, bugs, and possibly monkeys. Today we went to a Buddhist temple on the hill, drove 25 minutes to a nearby town so we could buy groceries and clothes (oh yeah, the airline still doesn't know where our bags are...), ate an awesome lunch for less than a dollar, cleaned out our room, killed a huge spider, and finally showered in wonderfully cold water. Every day is a new experience but we are loving it!!

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