Day 1 - September 26-27, 2010

  

Sophia headed to Customs: Bangkok, HDR



21 hours of travel later… 1 day 11 hours with time change, at 00:10 I walked into my hotel room in Bangkok.  My sinuses are run completely dry, despite otherwise pleasant and comfortable plane rides.  The Bangkok airport, Suvarnabhumi is a beautiful post-modern architectural feat, the grey stone and chrome lit against the night by halogen and blue running lights.  We found our shuttle easily after Sophia, who I pushed in front of me, asked where our shuttle was.  There was a slight language hiccup, but their English was better than our Thai.  The extent of mine is a number of memorized compounds such as pad thai, pad see eew, and the more simple panang.  Is it sad that English is so universal that I have made little attempt to learn any of the sovereign languages of the places I will go?  I shouldn’t admit that.



37 hours ago I sat at gate 10 in the north satellite at SeaTac, watching the Falcons try to beat the Saints from the giant tube television hanging from the ceiling.  As much as I love football (and baseball), I hoped it would be the last breath of American culture I would have for a while, apart from the two pounds of Swedish Fish I had stuffed into one of my two backpacks, oh! and the $40 of magazines I just bought, but none of those are decidedly “American” per se.  I also would have to grapple with the reality that everywhere I would go for the next three months, as hard as I might try (save daily trips to the tanning salon with The Situation and Pauly D to become dark), I would be American.  I just prayed that I wouldn’t see any goddamn Bud ads.

Much of this really didn’t strike me at the time—I was more impatient to get into the air than anything else, not too sentimental about leaving my parents and my brother still in high school who I’d been living at home with, or my friends.  College spliced out my missing gene; I guess you could say I’m not particularly prone to any semblance of separation anxiety.  Which is not to be confused with a lack of fondness for homo sapiens.  I spent my last night with my good friend Scott and met some of his friends.  Together, we used to joke that we met in the Swedish nursery—chances were high—and we did ask people “don’t please not come” to our 10 year birthday party slash whirligigfest.  All this is to say, to illustrate really, the importance of the people in my life—the people I am leaving for the time being to see a part of the world that has always struck my interest.

The few transient immersions I’ve had to Latin American countries were always goal-oriented, and any worries I had somewhat assuaged by a decent but recently declining Spanish language proficiency.  Everyday someone asks me why I am going to Laos.  I’ve said to travel and volunteer and a friend of mine told someone I was going to do photography-that’s certainly true, but I don’t have a canned answer. To be honest, I’ll tell you when I get back.  This trip is about to call on the parts of me I have maybe come in contact with once or twice, I want to learn—about people and how I interact with them.  This trip is not goal-oriented in the American sense of the word, that’s what I’m trying to say, and that, I guess is hard to relate to people, but also hard for me to relate with.  That is exactly the point, sorry, the goal.



After a few friendly words with
a new friend, scarfed down



Capt. Dan Mueller flew me over the Pacific to where I crept up on Sophia, waiting at gate 36 in Narita.  We roamed the international terminals before returning to our gate, next to which seemed to have the most appropriate culinary offerings.  I ordered a medium Sapporro and a bowl of mushroom udon, grabbed my (draft!) Sapporro and headed to the corner of the restaurant, where Sophia had hidden herself at a counter overlooking the tarmac through giant plane-glass windows bolted into steel.  Two seats away Yusef, on his way to Taiwan looked like he was up for some friendly conversation.  He was.  He had turned his back on medicine after considering its political environment in the United States.  From our conversation, which lasted until his flight boarded, I grew very fond of him, seeming well-rounded and well-educated, and a hard worker.  I scarfed the rest of my Udon, shared a few random inappropriate remarks with Sophia for a giggle and we boarded our plane to Bangkok.

Despite having been fed two meals on the plane to Tokyo, a snack, and a healthy serving of trashy American action-thrillers, list including but not limited to The Losers (with Zoe Saldana!) and The A-Team (with Jessica Biel!!!),  I was insatiable.  My stomach growled incessantly and I could feel the hydrochloric acid building up slowly.  We got another meal on between Tokyo and Bongkok. Tangent: When I took the wrapper off, something about its texture and the way it crackled as I crunched it into a ball reminded me of when I was little and they served McDonald’s hamburgers on the plane.  Regardless, the vegetarian pasta they served was mediocre at best.  And thousand island dressing, I have one punctuation for that. ?.

Walking through the Bangkok airport, its novelty was apparent; it was crisp, clean, and shiny new.  English subscript everywhere guided us easily through immigration to our bags and through customs to where I began this rant.  I left out one thing at the beginning though: I took my lens cap off as we walked outside to document for myself the grandeur of the international-travel-hub-turned-shopping-mall.  I looked through viewfinder and saw nothing.  Not the black nothingness of raising a covered SLR to your eye; fog.  The heat and humidity struck me the moment I’d walked outside, but it wasn’t until this dilemma that I thought, This really could be an issue.