This Really is Boring

Getting to Thailand took me 24 hours, almost to the minute. Here's a breakdown of all my trip legs:

Friday 11:50pm: Take taxi to bus station. Flip out a little in my head because the driver takes a slightly different route than I'm used to, and I think we've passed it. Not true, though.

Saturday 12:30am: Take bus to Incheon International Airport outside Seoul. Both Heather and her mom assured me that the 6 on my ticket below the departure time is my arrival time, but it's not written in time format, so I realize once I'm on the bus that that's my seat number. The sign on the bus seemed to indicate that our arrival time was 7:40, but that ended up being thankfully wrong, and confusing.

Saturday 5:35am: Arrive at the airport. Get off at the Korean Airways terminal, because it seems like that's the only stop the bus makes. Get my suitcase, wander around for a bit, and find the Thai Airways check-in counter, which is closed. Wander around. Wait for Kent to get there. Get worried because he didn't have a solid plan for getting there.

Saturday 7:30ish am: Kent arrives and we get in line to check in. The line turns at a 90 degree angle where we step in and a middle aged Korean man takes the opportunity to cut in line. I am so tired I let it go. What a bastard.

Saturday 8:00am: We get our boarding passes and I get a Burger King burger for the first time in about seven months. It was good. I didn't get to eat the fries, though. Too full.

Saturday 830ish am: We start to look for the monorail that will take us to the right terminal, and have quite a bit of trouble finding it. We find signs that say Airport Railroad and follow them for a while, only to find that they led to the subway system. Kent figured the monorail must be after security, so we find the security gateway and go through. Then we get to the monorail and find the “mono” part is all a big lie. It's just a regular train.

Saturday 10:20 am: Our plane departs for Bangkok. The seating arrangement on the plane is 2-4-2, so I get a window seat and Kent gets an aisle and we don't have to share our row. They feed us a snack of gross packaged almonds with our drink, and a full meal with salad, a hot bun, choice of beef curry (beef? curry?) or chicken with rice, kimchi (gross), and chocolate cake. I usually like airplane food, but this was just okay.

Saturday 1:00ish local time: We arrive in Hong Kong, where for the first time I will be one of the ones returning to the same plane after it is cleaned. It is an odd process. They tell us to come back to the gate after 30 minutes to reboard, so we were just going to wander around for a while. Right as we deplane, though, we are lined up with the other returning passengers, given a sticker and a plastic card, and sent out into the hallway, where we are herded and lined up again. I thought they were going to just make us wait in line to reboard right then, and they wouldn't even let me leave the line to find a bathroom. Apparently the liquid regulations are different in Hong Kong, though, so we have to go through security again. Then we get to wander. It's nothing special.

Saturday 2:10pm Hong Kong time: We depart on the same plane to Bangkok, and get fed again. I get noodles with prawns and some other stuff I don't remember. Not the greatest.

Saturday 3:50pm local time: We arrive in Bangkok and have a couple hours to burn. We look at some shops and take some Thai baht out of the ATM. We look for a travel book for Thailand, but ironically, there are none. Just every other Asian country. Bizarro.

Saturday 6:20pm: We depart for the quick flight to Phuket. I'm so exhausted that I start to lose body heat and have to wrap up completely in blankets. Then I crash for like an hour after they feed us a muffin.

Saturday 7:40pm: We arrive at Phuket airport, go through customs and such, and find our driver outside. He had a sign with my name on it. That's the second time this year for me, woo. He drives us back to the hotel, about a 90 minute trip. They drive on the left in Thailand. It was dark.

Saturday 9:50pm: We arrive at the hotel and check in. We get free fruity drinks, yea.

Thailand

Well, I JUST got back from Thailand, and had been so excited when I left about all the things I was going to blog about and all the pictures I was going to post. But you know, it was such a boring vacation that I'm not going to bother you with all the details. Suffice to say I swam, ate, slept, and got bitten by mosquitoes.

I'll write about some other stuff soon.

Vacation

I am officially on summer vacation for the next week. I leave for Phang Nga (near Phuket), Thailand tomorrow morning. But first I have to get to Incheon Airport, outside Seoul. So that means I have to take a bus at 12:30 tonight, and I won't get to the hotel until probably 9:30 tomorrow night, which is 11:30 here. All this extended traveling I've been doing the last few years makes anything under 15 hours seem like a breeze. This, of course, not being one of those instances. Still, though, Thailand.

Have fun at your day jobs, suckers.

Funny Classroom Situation

Yesterday the air conditioner at school broke for the second time this month. It was awful. Only one of the four classrooms has a window that can open, and mine isn't it. The kids were miserable, the teachers were miserable. Very little learning goes on when you're that sticky. There was a lot of moaning. Even the ice cream that inevitably gets brought in by... someone, the school or parents, I don't know, doesn't really help.

My fourth class of the day is usually pretty hard to control. There's one girl in there who has ADHD, I'm sure of it, and trying to control her is an eternal struggle. Another kid, though the smartest in the class, just sleeps the whole time most days. Other kids vary between ultra shy, overbearing, and inattentive. The age range is a little awkward, too. Most of my classes are arranged by grade, with kids not varying by more than a year, for the most part, but this class, I think, ranges from grades 3-6. There's a big difference between 3rd and 6th graders.

The heat made everything worse, but there was this odd long moment of total, awesome bizarreness that I thought I'd share. This occurred, I think, when I was asking a question to the class, and everyone was pretty much ignoring me. Here's what the class looked like (wish I'd had my video camera):

The overbearing girl, Bunny, was up by the door, swinging it open and closed repeatedly to create a breeze. Sleepy head boy, Pam (he chose the name not knowing it's a girl's name. I haven't the heart to tell him), was asleep with his forehead on the edge of the desk. Next to him, another boy, John, had changed seats to be by the swinging door, and had collapsed his head into his arms on the desk. One of the shy girls, Lauren, was just staring off into space. That was the back row. In the front row, two of the oldest kids, Ruby and Hollis, were doodling and I think making googley eyes at each other, and to top it all off, Any (pronounced "Annie"), the ADHD girl, had turned her chair sideways and was sitting backwards in it, facing the wall, and rocking deeply back and forth, saying "This is very relaxing" over and over and over and over. The only way she can control herself from screaming and running around is by putting herself into a trance. That trance lasted about ten minutes, complete with mantra.

As I paused, superficially to let them think about my question, but really because I had just given up on trying to teach them, I surveyed the classroom and that sight. Then I just started laughing at the sheer lunacy that they had settled into. Ruby asked what I was laughing at, and I told her to look at the class. She got the joke. I think she said, "Oh, crazy people," laughed, and went back to her doodling. Oh, the joys of teaching.