Bangkok - City of Life

Yes, there it is, as seen from the Skytrain:  Bangkok - City of Life.  Life in all its beauty and squalor.

But back to the very beginning.  

We took a United flight from Seattle to Tokyo, then on to Bangkok, at 1:30 Friday afternoon. The first leg of our flight, the longer of the two (11 hours) was, to our surprise, a piece of cake.  It probably helped that we got upgraded to seats with six inches more legroom because my previous seat's video screen was on the fritz.  As it happened, I seem to have unintentionally jinxed the new seat's video screen as well, but it didn't matter since at least in our upgrade we could cross our legs and move our elbows.

However, the subsequent (mere) six-and-a-half-hour flight from Tokyo to Bangkok (3,000 miles away, to our surprise), arriving at midnight the next day (there's a 15-hour time difference), was more like a piece of... I don't know... last year's fruitcake. Nonetheless, thanks to Deborah's advice we took the usefully named homeopathic remedy "No Jet Lag," and thus we felt fairly okay once we arrived in the architecturally quite remarkable Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Ahh, Thailand.  Land of exotic beauty. I have several evocative Thai figures and puppets at home and at my office.  I was thrilled to actually be here (once I had gotten over my insistence that I wouldn't fly anywhere that a plane might crash).  And as soon as we arrived at the airport, I was instantly in awe of the way Thai beauty was incorporated into so many details, this etched glass doorway and a mural (as seen from the motorized walkway) my certain promise of the beauty to come.

The plan was to pick up a rental car and drive to meet Amira at her home-stay family's in rural Thailand.  Instead, she and Mark conspired to give me a heart attack, and as Mark and I trudged along with luggage that weighed more than the plane we flew on I suddenly saw a familiar face - hers. Of course, I immediately burst into tears. I think the last time I was that happy was the moment after I delivered her.

We all promptly proceeded to pick up the rental car and then on to the sheer insanity (I am not exaggerating) of Bangkok traffic.