Pseudoreality Prevails

It's 8 AM in the grotto nearby the Bangkok airport, my $20 airport hotel on a narrow alley that is in all ways your cinematic idea of southeast Asia - food stalls with all sorts of frightening looking tentacled things on sticks or in ziploc plastic bags, dozens of motorcycles with families hanging off, wild dogs, weird swampy green canals crisscrossing the street, actual sighting of 2 barefood saffron-robed monks on their way to...temple? work? Paul Simon's "Sound of Silence" currently on speaker for no apparent reason, and importantly, the hotel's internet station right out in the street, directly next to an enromous plastic Donald Duck paddle boat. In another hour I return to the Bangkok airport to fly on to Chiang Mai, which all the teen Thai boys assure me is "vehhy vehhy cold." Considering the heat and humidity here I assume the breezy 70 degrees forecast for Chiang Mai would indeed count as so.

My Air China voyage began auspiciously, as I got an entire four-wide seat row all to myself and stretched out for a delightful 9 hour sleeping pill induced coma, and woke feeling refreshed and already adjusted to the time change. My obsessive over-hydration also paid off as I felt fresh and well hydrated; the only downside was the need for very frequent bathroom trips and Air China users BEWARE! There was a reason for the Olympics the government had to spend a million in propaganda explaining to these people the concept of a "line." The message apparently didn't have legs, because I have never seen such an aggressive free for all at the bathroom cluster. After politely letting some half dozen of them cut in front of me I finally had to give a middle aged man an elbow to get into the stall. It did help that I was a foot taller than him.

But from here it was downhill: the flight to Bangkok was tiny and cramped with spazzy Chinese teen girls who climbed over me every five minutes of the five hour trip, and so I was already on edge when I landed at BKK around midnight to learn that Air China didn't manage to get my bag onto my BKK flight, but not worry, they would get it to BKK by 6 PM Friday night. Only problem is I LEAVE BANGKOK AT 11 AM THIS MORNING YOU $#)*#$)#@$%*)(. They promise to send it on to Chiang Mai late tonight and briefly suggested that I would have to return to the Chiang Mai airport to pick it up myself, since Air China has no representative in Chiang Mai to deliver it to me, to which I said with my crazy-I-have-been-on-a-plane-for-twenty-hours-eyes that they CAN and WILL find a way to get it to my hotel, at their expense, and that it WILL arrive by Friday night, and that is the end of the story.

So, we'll see. I'm equipped with a bunch of Air China, Air Asia and Air Thai phone #s I can't use myself, lots of receipts and carbon copies in curlicue thai and chinese that I can't read, and trusting that both in Bangkok and Chiang Mai someone will find my bag and send it on to the proper destinations. I'm really fine on everything except underwear - unfortunately none of these little stalls appear to sell any. Then again the giant plastic Donald Duck looks happy enough going bare bottomed. Perhaps I'll join him.