It’s just a jump to the left.

Actually, if you think about it, it is almost. Look at any map of the world and you can start in Boston, then make one leftward jump to LA, then another to Taipei, then another to Kuala Lumpur. OF course, then you do have to take a small step to the right again (and travel about 2 hours by plane north) before you get to Bangkok. Directions aside, the whole journey boils down to a major time warp. And, as such, I have no idea what time is actually is right now, but suffice to say that it’s late enough according to my system that I’ll be writing the rest of this tomorrow.

10 hours later, here we are again, having just returned from a sojourn to the nearby 7-11 for water, starchy snacks, and yogurt. I’ll backtrack to the flights of yesterday before I move on to today. A series of flights totaling about 26 hours is about as exciting as you’d think it’d be, so I won’t delve into gory details. However, I did enjoy certain aspects of the trip, such as the woman in the Malaysia Airlines safety video wearing too much makeup and beckoning my fellow passengers and I to, “Please join me on our journey into safety.” Afterwards, she proceeded to explain what we should do in the event of a “water landing”. Something about this phrase struck me, most importantly that, at least, the 747 that I was sitting on, was not equipped with the proper pontoons for any sort of “water landing”. I guess the phrase, “crash and burn in the middle of the Pacific” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Before landing in Taipei, the friendly Malaysia Airlines staff also reminded us that our seat backs and tray tables must be the upright and locked position, our seatbelts should be fastened tightly and, “trafficking of narcotics is illegal, and carries punishments including the death penalty. Thank you.” The way they phrased this seemed to imply that drug mules were punished beyond just the death penalty, at which point all I could think about was a crew of dead drug traffickers picking up trash on the side of the road. I think I’ve been flying too long.

After a brief stop in Taipei, it was on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. After wandering for a bit, we crashed for a few hours in Malaysian Burger King until our next flight. On the way there, I spotted this:



Viva la Globalizaçion!

Flying into Bangkok, the first word that comes to mind is “soggy”. The city is filled with patches of flooded fields, reminiscent of high tide Ipswich marshes. These areas are so prevalent that it looked for a brief moment like we’d be having one of those “water landings” the nice lady in the video had told us about. Fortunately, the runway materialized out of nowhere, and we were on the ground.

The next word that comes to mind when arriving in Bangkok is “moist”. I swear if you tried hard enough you’d be able to swim through the air. God bless air conditioning, which has been blasting in our room since we got here and has finally managed to lower the humidity level from “Turkish Bath House” to “Mercury Brewing Company”. Not much of an improvement, but it’s something. I’ve been here for less than 24 hours, and I could probably keep writing for pages. However, I’ll cut myself off here so I can get dressed for orientation and our meeting with whoever’s in charge. More to come soon.