Peace out Portland; Sawatdee Ka Bangkok!! WE MADE IT! And this is definitely the coolest thing I've ever done!!
So, our 29ish hour journey to BKK started on a three hour train to Seattle (Josh figured out that it's $300. cheaper to fly out of SeaTac rather than PDX and the train tickets were only $29./each). The train ride ended up being really fun especially when we got off and three cop cars surrounded us cuz they thought Brandon was a crime suspect or something! HA!!!!
So then, Josh's great friend Matt took us to the airport where we had to wait around for 3 or 4 hours. Right at this point it felt like we were already in another county. Since we were taking EVA Airlines (which I think it Taiwanese) all the announcements and signs were in Chinese and besides a couple 50 year old creepers (with their 25 year old asian wives), we were the only whities. I think it's so funny how much Josh's blonde hair stands out!!! Oh - and the plane itself was SO COOL!! It was a Boeing 777 so it was enormous!! I think there were about 20 flight attendants.
The flight went surprisingly well. I ended up being really happy that I didn't make special brownies because I slept for 7 out of the 13 hours without taking anything!! And I'm glad I didn't sleep more cuz I would have missed the food!!! ...I'm such an ADPi!! The trays of food were hilarious. They were neon green plastic and absolutely TINY!! They looked exactly like something a five year old would want for serving her easy-bake oven stuff. The water cup was literally about 1/8 cup which you can imagine made Brandon pretty distressed! HAHA!!! But, my tiny food was SO GOOD! Shockingly, they had a vegetarian option but I can't say what it was because I didn't recognize anything except the rice and tofu. I had never seen any of the vegetables before which was SO COOL!
After 13 hours on the plane we landed in Taipei which seemed like a really, really nice airport. Our layover was only three hours long so we unfortunately didn't have enough time to leave the airport. But at least we found a free internet room so we could e-mail home and UPDATE OUR FACEBOOK STATUSES!! ;)
So meanwhile, I was sitting at our gate and watching four (then later six) mormons corner (ok, not really corner) a tiny Thai lady. After listening to them, I'm pretty sure missionary work is exactly like sales. There was a raport building stage, a pitch, a close, a hard close... it would have been really funny except the last thing that this world needs is less Buddhists and more mormons. Well, at least they weren't evangelicals! i might have had to tell the TSA guys that I heard them use the word Ji Had or something.
Ooooo and speaking of mormons, I almost finished reading the second Twilight book which is AWESOME!! :) .....I know, embaressing... but they're so good! Although, I really started wondering how Edward can stop himself from killing Bella when she's on her period especially when Jasper almost killed her when she got a tiny paper cut on her birthday. Hmm
Anyway, we finally landed in BKK and holy cow it's f'ing HOTTTTT! Getting a taxi was really frustrating because we could clearly tell that we were being taken advantage of because we're farangs (foreigners). But the taxi assigner lady wouldn't negotiate with us AT ALL because there were tons of other customers that seemed to be paying exactly what she said. We did find one taxi for 700 baht (the first place said 1,200) but it turned out later that we should have only paid 350 baht. As Brandon and Josh kept saying; we were GROSSED!!
So, 29 hours after we started our trip we got to our hotel: All Seasons Siam which was recommended by Laty - thanks man!! It's better than anywhere I've stayed back home (not that that's saying a lot) and really inexpensive. I immediately took a shower (I called dibs on first shower about 20 hours ago) which was amazing - best water pressure everrrrr! It's seriously better than the sorority's down stairs shower! It felt like I was standing under a pounding waterfall. I'm pretty sure I'm going to single handily cause a BKK water shortage!!!
Speaking of water, we arrived during the Thai new year which means WATER FESTIVAL!!! I expected that this was going to be really fun but as it turned out - not so much. EVERYWHERE you go, people spray you with hoses, dump buckets of water on your head and spray you with supersoakers. And this isn't nice, refreshing water. This is NASTYYY, hot, STINKY water. We're pretty sure we all have AIDS now. The warnings tuned out to be totally true; farangs are targeted BIG TIME at the water festival. We were getting chased! :)
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