Well, we made it to Bangkok, and not without some adventure.Our flight from Atlanta to London was uneventful and short by comparison to the rest of our journey. We arrived in London at about 10:00am and our flight to Bangkok wasn't until 10:00 pm so we decided to hit the city. We purchased day passes for
the underground and made our way from Heathrow to the city center.
We spent the day hitting all the typical sites like: the tower of London, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Parliament, St. Paul's, Big Ben, Talfagar Square, The National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, The London Eye, and some city parks. While walking back to the underground from Tower Bridge we saw a guy beating a teenager on the head with a motorcycle helmet while chasing him into traffic. The kid was screaming and running away from him. People started running to help him as the guy continued pummeling him. It was pretty crazy, and they very easily could have been hit by traffic. Apparently the teenager had stolen the other guy's bike or motorcycle and the man had caught him. It was all very intense and the police were called.
After spending the afternoon in London, we made our way back to Heathrow in time for me to get my ticket snafu worked out (British Airways misprinted my tickets twice in Atlanta) and made our way to gate 40. We were all exhausted by the point and promptly fell asleep at the gate.
Unfortunately, due to the British Airways strike the boarding of our flight was delayed by half an hour. When we were able to finally board we ended up sitting at the gate for about an hour and half waiting for the rest of the cabin crew to show up. We finally made it out of London at about 12:00 am, and this began our 11 hour flight to Bangkok.
We arrived in Bangkok at about 4:30 pm, and made our way through immigration uneventfully. We found Trey and got our bags loaded up into the church truck. The truck took our bags to our apartment and we made our way out to find taxis to take us home. We spent about an hour showering and getting ready for the night ahead of us. We all agreed it would be important to stay awake at least until 9:00 that night in order to avoid jetlag.
We took a sungtow (which means two benches, I'll provide a picture later, but just imagine a truck with two benches in the bed) to a local market area where we got dinner. We spent a couple of hours walking around and taking in the area. When we were ready to head home the sungtow had stopped running for the night so we loaded up into taxis. David, John, Julie and I were in one taxi (Trey gave the driver directions in Thai) while Trey and Emily rode in another taxi.
It would seem our driver didn't quite fully understand Trey's taxiThai and we ended up on an hour long adventure of trying to explain where we lived to a Thai taxi driver when we actually had no idea WHERE we lived other than it was next to a 7/11 (not the best reference considering there is one on every street corner here). It was pretty hilarious. We had no money (other than the 100 baht Trey gave us) no phone, no idea where we were or even where we needed to go really, and no knowledge of the Thai language. We had only been in the country f
or about 3 hours.
We were finally able to explain that we were staying across from King's Park, not King's Park Hotel (which is where he took us) and thanks to "Scoozis" (the only landmark we could remember) we found our apartment.
After Trey returned from frantically looking for us, we all laughed about the whole incident, and went to bed.
Sunday was spent at church, where we experience our first Thai worship service, followed by lunch. We met the American's that are a part of the church, as well as a group of YWAM kids that are here in Thailand. Sunday night was spent at Tim Mill's house where Trey, David, Emily and I did laundry and watched Toy Story.
Here in Thailand thunderstorms have a way of happening without warning. This was one of those times. We are talking about the heaviest rain I've ever seen (and I was there for Katrina). It only lasts a few minutes, but that is all the time needed to flood the streets. The rain let up in time for us to walk to the sungtow route, we waited for about 10 minutes and concluded that the sungtow had stopped running for the night, and began walking home. About a quarter of a mile later a sungtow drove by and we hopped on. Somewhere along the ride the rain started up again, and we had to run the path from the sungtow stop to our apartment in the downpo
ur.
Monday was spent at Ram 2 where the university was having student orientation. We arrived on campus at about 7:15 am and spent the day trying to get students to join our "club" (basically a student organization) at their student club fair. Clubs here seem to be all about providing fun for
students. We farangs (foreigners) handed out invitations to the club's coffee house and played games, sang songs, and talked with students.
It was quite the experience. Thai culture is so incredibly different than American culture. All of these university students gather around and sing these ridiculous little songs and play all these games that I would have played when I was about 8, but it isn't embarrassing to them at all. In fact, the sillier you are, the more they like you. It is kind of refreshing when you come from a culture so fixated on maintaining a cool image.
We stayed at the university until about 5:00 pm that afternoon. It was an incredibly long and trying day for most of us on the team. The heat can be a bit unbearable at times, and I definitely drank my fair share of bottled water that day.
According to Yu, the director of campus ministry, we had a good amount of students sign up for the club, and all of the games and songs went over well. It was kind of hard to know how things were going at the time, but it was good to hear that things went well.
We finally made it back to the apartment by about 6:00 pm. I was in desperate need of some American music (the songs are so ridiculously simply that they have a way of getting stuck in your head; plus we sang them about 100 times) and a run; so I headed over to King's Park for about an hour. It is a beautiful park, and I am definitely planning on going back with my camera today at some point.
I finished off the night with some American food with David, Trey, and Emily (at Scoozi's, our savior) a trip to Carrefour (Thai Wal-Mart) and then fell asleep about .05 seconds after making it back to the apartment.
Today we have our first Thai lesson, as well as some more ministry work. I'll try to keep these a little more simplified in the future. ;)
