Friday, May 25, 2007

Thursday - A Lot of Much Needed Sitting Around

Sorry to disappoint, but no pictures with this post. We started the morning by going down the hill at 7:30am, checking our luggage at the in-town check-in before 8am (awesome, you can check into your flight and leave/check your luggage up to 24 hours a head of time and everything arrives like normal in your destination), and then hurried to the Temple to catch the 9am session. It went well and I did the whole thing in Cantonese, of which I understood enough to know what was going on. From there we got lunch at McDonald's, bought me a new power adapter in Mongkok, and caught the train to the airport. Our flight was supposed to be a little over 2 hours but turned into 5 as our plane had some wing/mechanical problem. Honestly, I didn't mind as I just read/sat there. After all the running around the last couple days, sitting was a nice change.
When we got to Bangkok we got through immigration (a while) and negotiated a ride with a taxi driver to our hotel, about a 1/2 hour away. When we were driving down the road it hit me for the first time that we are really in a foreign country now. English is not spoken that much (at least where we have been and who we have interacted with), the local language is totally nonsense to all of us (verbal and written), and we are totally winging it now. No formoer missionaries or British colonial history, now the true adventure begins. When we got to our hotel it took them like 20 minutes to confirm my reservation on their end even though I had the right paperwork on our end (admittedly in English) and the lady was really nice but communication could be a problem. One nice thing is that our hotel seems very good and should be an enjoyable stay. As always, we have a McDonald's a block or less away and 7-11 two doors down. I won't starve (same weight roughly as departure actually).
Check out Fernadno's blog for more detail on today and most days (http://www.blog.mladineo.com/). Mackenzie started one as well so feel free to check that out at www.kenzinasia.blogspot.com. OK, it is 12:30am here (1:30am in HK) and I am caught up on the blog. Totally tired and off to bed.

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