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December 2, 2005
Mo's take on things...
Wow. That's all I keep saying to myself over and over and over and over...well, you get the picture. I'll start from the beginning. We stayed at my cousin Geoff's place in Vancouver the night before the big flight. It was great to hang out with him and stuff ourselves with good old Canadian pizza and Vancouver sushi...mmmm...a pretty good send off meal I'd say.
I have to admit, the 14 hour flight to Hong Kong had me a bit nervous as I have never flown over 5 hours before... but it actually went surprisingly fast as they had a continual stream of movies/tv shows, meals, we played some cards and mad periodic trips to the back of the plane to catch glimpses out the window of Alaska, Siberia and China (so cool!!) We had a couple hour lay over in Hong Kong (just enough to stretch some kinks out) before we took the last two hour flight to Bangkok. At this point we are going on 24 hours without sleep and could care less what movies are playing.
Things couldn't have gone smoother once we arrived. We all breezed through customs (although I'm still not sure they understood where we were going and what we are doing here..shrug) and all our luggage arrived in fine shape:o) We took a cab to our hotel...which by the way is not the easiest place to find and was quite intimidating at 1:00am (bangkok time)...but we made it just fine and crashed into bed.
Our first day here... well, all I can say that the difference between Northern BC and Bangkok is absolutely astounding!
There are all sorts of smells depending on where you are, but you can be sure that at any given time, you will be smelling something. The people, there are lots of them and they are beautiful!! 12 million people in this city...yikes!!! The traffic is crazy and there are little motorbikes and scooters making their way between vehicles everywhere (oh, and they drive on the right side of the vehicle). I have yet to have a bad experience with Thai food...it is very lively and so cheap! I have to admit, there's always been at least one thing in my food that I have no idea what it is but...what the heck, "when in Rome"...right? The hotel that we've been staying at is great...very clean and we feel quite safe here which is such a blessing...with everything else being so different, it's nice to have a good place to stay.
Since we've been here we have been to a huge mall (7 stories with very fast escalators), the Dusit zoo, the pariliament/royal palace (where they were very busy making preparations for the King's birthday on Monday, on a water taxi on the river, China-town (I've never experienced anything like that...so thankful for David or I would still be lost in there), and have purchased our train tickets out of here to Chiang Mai on Sunday night. It's been great to be here and experience Bangkok a bit...it seems like you could keep yourself entertained here endlessly, but I think we'll do it in little doses. We're feeling the need for a little fresh air, but we'll definitely be back on our way through to other places to take advantage of the great shopping!!
Just a quick story...yesterday afternoon we were all feeling pretty sleepy as we are not yet over the whole jet-lag thing, so we decided to take a nap before dinner. So we went to sleep at about 4pm and the next thing I knew...it was midnight and we were wide awake...oops. I did set an alarm but it obviously didn't do much good. So here we are at midnight not really knowing what to do...so we read a bit and watched some really great Thai music videos but I actually had to take a gravol at 3am in order to get back to sleep for a few more hours. The same thing happened with Paul and Jisca, so we've decided that we are not allowed to have anymore afternoon naps until we've adjusted to the time over here. But regardless of the weird night/afternoon of sleep, we were able to get through the day without feeling too tired (not counting our legs and feet from all the walking...but we'll get used to that too:o)
Posted by Maureen at December 2, 2005 8:31 PM