Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Somewhere Some Time Some Place

So we boarded our flight for Bankok on a huge British Airways 747. I was sitting near the front of the back section, there were lots of empty seats so I ended up moving around so I could get more leg room. There were a couple of movies playing including The Chronicles of Narnia, Casino Royal, and Children of Men. I took in the first two of them before I resigned myself to just closing my eyes and listening to some music. The food was actually pretty good I’ve got to say, they even served us some red wine ( ...but don’t tell anyone I had a sip ok?). We landed In Bangkok at around 3:30 in the afternoon. The humidity hit me immediately after I got off the plane. We grabbed our bags and headed out to catch our bus. We were immediately confronted with the reality of the aggressiveness of Thai Taxi drivers, all out to take us where we did or didn’t want to go. The heat hit me as soon as I stepped outside, and I was sweating profusely moments later (not helped by the fact that I was wearing long pants and a jacket and carrying extra baggage). It was about an hours drive into Bangkok. Its a Freaking Huge City, with over 11 Million people, thats like a third of the entire population of Canada in one city. From the looks of things, there are some insanely poor “slums” here, but just a bit further down, you’ve got the fanciest of the fancy 5 star hotels, so its quite diverse. A few other neat things that I noted were that, here they drive on the opposite side of the road and all of the steering wheels of the cars are on the right hand side and the toilets are really weird. We had our allocation meeting and later met my host family. I’m staying with a Swedish Family this week who’s son plays # 93 for the Detroit Red Wings; small world eh? They have a nice place inside a gated “compound” community. I’m staying with Greg again this week, they guy I stayed with in Leipzig. I have a 7 year old host brother name Hugo. Its going to be interesting.