Journey to the Other Side of the World

I have officially arrived in Bangkok! After around 29 hours of travelling... I think? It’s hard to keep track. But here is my account of my travel day:

 Ottawa International Airport, 6:50am

The night before I left, I was up until about 12:30am packing my bags. Needless to say it was no fun at all getting up the next morning at 5:30am. After eating breakfast and grabbing a few last minute things (i.e  neck pillow. Which I must say was fantastic.), my parents and I left for the Ottawa Airport. I should add that this was my first time flying by myself on an actual long flight, and I was pretty nervous. I also had to go through US customs, which did not help at all. But everything went smoothly, and I was soon waiting in the US departures terminal... which is much less fun than the Canadian/international departure area. As I was boarding, I made sure to take one last deep breath of Canadian air... and cold. My flight to Chicago left at 9:10 am and lasted about 2 hours. I actually managed to sleep pretty much the whole way!

In Chicago, I met up with a few other people – two girls from the Maritimes and two Americans. It was nice to have other people in the same boat (or plane.... haha) as me while waiting for the flight. It takes about 12 hours to fly from Chicago to Tokyo. It was my first time on a Boeing-747 (the one with 2 levels...crazy) and compared to the tiny plane I took from Chicago, it was massive. Once we boarded, we had to wait in the gate for another hour... first they said there was lightning, and then there was mix-up with fueling or something. Not impressed. But we were eventually on our way.  I was lucky because in our row section of 3, nobody was in the middle seat. It was glorious. I cannot emphasize this enough. The flight itself was pretty standard: I watched 2 of the movies, “Moonrise Kingdom” and the new “Spiderman”. I quite enjoyed “Moonrise Kingdom” – it’s made by the same people who made “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and the humour/script in general was quite similar. I was very pleased that I managed to sleep for about 4 hours. It was strange to miss a night – the sun didn’t set until we arrived in Tokyo, and by then it was already the next day. It was cloudy for most of the flight but it cleared up when we were over northern/arctic Russia.

SO we arrived in Tokyo around... I can’t really remember but I think it was around 4:30pm local time.  By the time we arrived, we were all exhausted and stiff from hours of sitting still. We were on the same plane to Bangkok, so we didn’t have to worry about missing our connection due to the delay – unlike some of the other passengers. The flight to Bangkok took about 6 hours. Again, not very eventful save that the person on the end of my 3 seat section looked either like a pimp or a gangster. He was covered with tattoos, including ones on his ears, hands, and tattooed-on eyebrows. He was wearing a white suit, with a faux-fur white long jacket, and had a Louis-vuitton knock-off briefcase. My description really doesn’t do him justice... I guess you had to be there.

So after all that, I finally arrived in Bangkok. Getting through customs was pretty easy  (they didn’t ask me any questions), and our bags arrived really quickly. I met up with the other girl teaching at my school, Anna, and we shared a cab to the hotel. It was my first time in a car that drives on the left side. It was mildly frightening zooming down the highway with no seatbelts in the back seat, but we survived. It appears that that is the norm so far. The driver asked us if we spoke any Thai, and then laughed at my admittedly laughable attempt to say “My name is Caitlin”. All in all, we arrived at the Louis Tavern Hotel around 1:30am local time, and it was soon to bed after that.

And so ended my loooong journey to the other side of the world. More to come soon!