these are not my walls

Well, it appears I finally have something to blog about, so I am back.

That something? I am in Thailand. More specifically, Bangkok :)

We're only here for a week or so, and then we're on the Cambodia - specifically Phnom Penh - which is our actual destination. See, really, Alex and I are just visiting my parents. Who currently happen to live in Phnom Penh. My mom decided to do a retreat-thingy in Thailand for the first week of our trip, though, so we're hanging out in Bangkok with Ian.

Our flight, though lennnnnnnnngthy, was relatively uneventful. We flew out of Victoria around 7 p.m. on the 1st, took a whole 15 minutes in the air to get to Vancouver, then had a 5-hour stopover in Vancouver. Oh joy. The Air Canada people in Victoria hadn't been able to print us out a boarding pass for the Taipei-Bangkok leg of our flight, so she suggested we try the Eva Airways counter in Vancouver. This, of course, required us to leave the secured area, but we figured 5 hours was plenty of time for us to get the info and then back behind...except it turned out that the Eva Airways counter wasn't open. So we shrug, decide to leave it for Taipei, and go back into the secured area.

Problem: Our flight was for 12:30 a.m. Our boarding passes showed a boarding time of 11:55 p.m. This was the evening of November 1st. Can you see where this is going? Our boarding passes, of course, said November 2nd. They wouldn't let us through. They went and spoke to a supervisor. They came back and told us to wait for Eva Airways to open and get new boarding passes printed. We say, new boarding passes are going to say the exact same thing, because OUR FLIGHT IS ON NOVEMBER 2ND!!! Finally, another supervisor comes over and says that we can go in, although the two people at the entryway are shaking their heads and saying he's going to have to explain it to FirstSupervisor.

People, this flight, along with many others between midnight and 3 a.m., leave this airport daily. How in god's name could they still not have figured out that a flight leaving after midnight is a flight on the next day???? Good. Lord.

Then, by the way, because it was a Sunday night and because we had wasted so much time with the stupid security people, we got to the food area just in time to see basically everything except the A&W close. That was the grossest dinner I have had in a looooooooong time. Oh Ryan Beil, how could you steer me wrong???

Anyways, we get on the plane without incident. We were in the Evergreen class, which is like a halfway point between business and economy - bigger seats, more legroom, nothing fancier in the way of service. It doesn't cost much more than economy, and I would totally recommend it - Alex and I both slept for hours at a time, which is extremely unusual for both of us on planes. Of course, it could also have something to do with the extra-strength nighttime cold meds we took. :)

The flight to Taipei was 14 hours long. I don't even know what to say about that. My feet were swollen like sausages when we finally got off the plane, but on the other hand neither of us suffered from deep vein thrombosis. So...uh...good?

We watched a lot of movies - I watched Julie & Julia (which I was glad I didn't pay to see in the theatre, because although Meryl Streep was AWESOME and I actually like Amy Adams, the non-Julia parts of the movie was stupid. Oh whiny generation, how I am not proud to be part of thee...), 500 Days of Summer (again, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt...is it just because I couldn't understand his inexplicable obsession with a girl who made it very clear she wouldn't love him back?), and something that I now totally can't remember. Must not have been very good...

We landed in Taipei, and they made us go through a security check to transfer to another plane (where, exactly, did they think we would get contraband going from one ostensibly secured area to another), so of course they made us get rid of the remaining bottle of water we had bought in the Vancouver airport. BUT!! Then we couldn't find any freakin' water to buy in the Taipei airport! What the hell??? We walked around a LOT, and saw tons of places where we could buy liquor, perfume, and designer clothes and accessories; an indoor garden:



some kind of crazy box room:



and all KINDS of hello kitty goodness:









(doesn't Alex look like the happiest little camper in that last shot???), but for the longest time the only water we could find was in one of these:



And as I'm sure you can imagine, we didn't have the change for that.

Finally, mere moments before we were supposed to be boarding, we found a cafe with super expensive water bottles, and plunked down ye olde visa. I was a little sweaty from our jaunt around the airport, plus the 20 hours of travel thus far, but I guess the cashier thought I was suffering from the dreaded F-L-U, because she pulled out this infrared temperature thing - it looks like one of those handheld things they use to read UPC labels - and pointed it at my forehead without so much as a by-your-leave! Craziness. On the other hand, I walked away secure in the knowledge that I wasn't feverish...

We hopped on our flight to Bangkok, which was only about 3 1/2 hours or so - thank goodness, because we were in two middle seats in the cattle section, and much longer and I think out backs would've seized up permanently! I watched G.I. Joe, which was hilariously bad.

We got to Bangkok, got through passport control with little difficulty - unless you count me whining about how the line next to us was going faster as "difficulty", but I choose not to... - got our luggage, and went out into the airport, to find...nobody we knew.

Ian was supposed to meet us, but he was nowhere to be seen.

So we grabbed a seat, thinking maybe Ian had overestimated the time it would take us to get through passport control and was on his way. And waited. And waited. And, you know, probably only waited for a total of 5-10 minutes, but when you're completely exhausted and filthy and hungry and thirsty...well, anyway, we waited.

I walked about halfway down the airport, looking for him - he's a tall man and generally stands out in a crowd - and didn't see him.

We started thinking about risking the undoubtedly astronomical cell phone roaming fees by calling my brother and asking him for Ian's phone number, but first I decided to try walking the airport again. I noticed there was a sign for a "meeting point", so I figured I'd check it out, because it was a logical place for Ian to wait if he thought he'd missed us.

And lo and behold, there was another international arrivals gate, and there was Ian! There's absolutely nothing to indicate, when you exit from one international arrivals area, that there's another area. And Ian says there's absolutely no way to predict which gate people will come from. How silly!

Anyway, we hopped into an air-conditioned towncar and made our way down to the apartment we're staying at here. Which is lovely, and which I will write about later. It's 6:45 a.m. - I've only been up since 5:20, thanks jet lag! - and I have to go find some food. :)