Getting Settled In.

      I will be studying abroad from January 1st to Mid-May 2010 at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand. I hope this blog helps me communicate and stay in touch with everyone back home, and saves me from having to tell each person the exact same story of what I did while I am abroad. So, I have been in Bangkok for two full days now and it feels like I have already been here for weeks (in a good way).  There a lot of things that you cannot explain in Bangkok unless you experience it for yourself. So I will explain what I can.

Getting to Bangkok:

I had a 1am flight out of Chicago to South Korea on December 31^st, a New Years Eve flight that I thought would be empty was actually full. The plane was delayed for a couple of hours after I boarded it because the airline was waiting for some documents and once they got them the plane and runway were iced over so they had to bring out de-icing trucks to hose down the plane.  The plane had great service except for the fact that I could not understand a word that anyone on the plane was saying (they made all the announcements in Korean and then really quickly TRIED to translate in English. The flight to Korea was supposed to be 14 hours but actually took longer because of headwinds. I should have listened to Shetal when she told me not to watch Food Inc. the day before I left… I could not swallow the plane food that they gave us for dinner (at 3:30 am) even though it looked really good. Asiana Airlines uses Korean time on their flight so I time traveled 15 hours from the second I got on the plane, in a way it was good because jet lag by the time I reached Bangkok was not too bad because of the gradual change. I arrived at the Seoul airport around 7:20 am (some 16 hours after I left Chicago). I had an 11 hour layover and was planning on walking around outside until I realized it was 2 degrees there, so most of my day consisted of falling asleep on random benches and walking around aimlessly to kill time.

I had my first non-western meal for lunch; I have no idea what they gave me because I ordered something completely different than what I got. All I know is that it was a Korean dish and it had a bowl of soup with thick noodles and a bunch of other stuff with a plate of sushi on the side (and no I did not eat the sushi) I did finish most of the other stuff they served me but it took me a while because they only had chopsticks for me to use.

 My plane for Bangkok left at 6:20pm (South Korea time) and was 6 hours long. I arrived at Suvarnabhumi (So-wanna-poom) airport around 10:20pm (BKK time). I had no idea which baggage claim to go to until the sign switched from Thai to English. I went through immigration and then to the currency exchange counter. After I got my bags going through customs was a pain, so far from everyone I talked to I was the only one to encounter any problems. They opened all of my bags and had me empty everything out of each one on a counter after they kept saying “duty, duty, duty in bag.” They didn’t find anything to charge me duty on after I explained to them that I am a student and will be here for an extended time. The first time I got nervous about this trip came right after I cleared customs and saw a bunch of taxi drivers and hotel staff holding up signs with names on them and I did not see anything with my name on it. After peeing my pants trying to figure out what I was going to do I figured I should keep walking towards the exit and then I finally saw another section of people holding signs and one of them had my name on it. The man holding the sign was Justin; he works at the apartment/hotel building that I am now staying at it is called The Amarin Mansion. Also next to him was another exchange student from Canada named Chrystal, we found out that both of us had been on the same flight from ORD all the way to BKK. We had to wait for one more exchange student from Wisconsin named Jackie, her flight didn’t come in for a while after ours…

Finally we got to the mansion at 1:30am Saturday morning and checked into temporary rooms for the night in the hotel part of the building and called it a night.

First day in Bangkok:

                It was a long day especially in a foreign land. Chrystal, Jackie and I not knowing anyone else here yet all got together in the morning after sleeping a few hours and tried to find food, it was a very eye-opening experience. We walked around for 2 hours not knowing where we were going. We went through slums with cats and dogs sitting right next to food that was being cooked, and walked into a restaurant where they did not have an English menu. Finally the three of us gave up and started the next endeavor of trying to get a taxi back to our building which is very hidden, luckily we had a map of the building to show drivers and we ended up getting in our first tuk-tuk which is kind of like a rick-shaw in India.

We finally ended up getting our first Thai meal in the restaurant that’s part of the building for a total of 35 baht ($1.05 USD).  I didn’t like the first meal I got very much probably because I just pointed at a random number on the menu. But later that night I went back to the same place and ordered a dish that another student I met that morning recommended and it was delicious, food will be no problem in Thailand.

     After eating in the morning we went to look at other apartments and to a big mall kind of like Woodfield but the prices there were actually 2 to 3 times more expensive at this mall then they are back home (They had an Aldo shoe store and the exact sandals that I was wearing were 3,900 baht which is around $120 USD , I bought them at Woodfield back home for $30 USD). Clearly there was no point buying anything here, but I did find a good deal on a local phone and minutes to use here so I got a Thai number (08-5909-3520). I went ahead and booked Amarin Mansion for the remainder of my time in Thailand. Later we met two more exchange students and went back shopping to get sheets and stuff for the permanent room, I wanted to take a nap but ended up falling asleep.

Chatuchak Weekend Market/Bangkok at Night:

I decided to go to the Chatuchak weekend market with a few people in the morning. The market was huge it covers more than 30 acres of land and has more than 15,000 stalls. It’s the one place I have been so far where it is not too hard to bargain without knowing the Thai language. It was 93 degrees the whole day and very humid. I surprisingly ended up not buying anything at all. Then we went over to another apartment building about a 10 minutes taxi ride away that has an Olympic sized pool. Everyone then visited to McDonalds for the first time, the fries were really salty but finding out the McDonalds delivers 24 hours a day ended the trip there on a good note.

 Later that night about a group of 20 of us and 2 actual Thai students went out and ended up on Khaosan Rd which is a very touristy street that kind of reminded me of a little version of Cancun.We got fish massages which is basically a pool of fish that you put your feet and the fish eat all of the dead skin off of your feet, surprisingly it actually does work. We ended up at Soi Cowboy and Patpong which are districts that are more geared towards tourist, the two districts also happen to be red-light districts. There’s not much that can be written about the 2 areas except that it was intense for my second day in Bangkok, that there are some hard-core lady-boys and that there are some things that you cannot write about because people just have to see certain things for themselves to truly understand and appreciate what you would want them to know about an area.