Blogging from the skies

As I'm typing this, my personal in-flight computer screen informs me that we are cruising comfortably somewhere over the North Pole in a high-altitude cloudscape of brilliant pastels. Cathay Pacific is really the most wonderful airline I’ve ever flown on. I thought this on my flight from Taiwan to Hong Kong last summer, but since that flight took barely two hours, I thought my judgment might be a little unfair. Nothing so far has disconfirmed this opinion: the food is excellent, the stewards and stewardesses all speak English, there is ample leg room (not that I need much, ha), the seats themselves are comfortable, and we were greeted not only with our own pillows and blankets, but a little pouch containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, earplugs, socks, breath mints, and a washcloth! (Naturally, I brought my own, but still!) Moreover, they have three (!!) kinds of hot tea on offer, including good old English tea, which would make my mom very happy. :)

The most fun I’ve had so far with the luxuries of Cathay Pacific’s economy class is definitely the personal computer embedded in the back headrest of the seat in front of me. It plays music, TV, news, and a HUGE selection of movies, as well as containing information about the flight (including a satellite tracking map and live camera view from a lens mounted on the outside of the plane), information about our destination, a list of in-flight services (including in-flight phone calls and ramen whenever you want it), and a mini-DVD of “Inflight Exercises” you can do while seated to stretch and prevent leg clots. This is a far cry from the insanely cramped quarters of a certain airline that shall remain nameless, on which we were denied food, liquids, and permission to open the windows for a stretch of enforced darkness lasting nearly eight hours, plus subjected to not one but two showings of The Chronicles of Narnia dubbed into Chinese. Those were not good times. This, comparatively, is paradise, or as close to paradise as you can get on a 20-hour flight to the other side of the world.

We still have about ten hours until touchdown in Hong Kong, where I intend to use some of my leftover HKD to buy a snack, exchange some RMB for Thai bhat at my favorite exchange booth in the airport, and let the jangling sound of Cantonese wash over me as I listen to conversations I can't understand. Until then, I’m blogging, reading a bit of Charles Taylor’s latest book, recommended to me at the last conference I attended, and using the “Infotainment” section of my little computer to read up on my destination.

According to Cathay Pacific, Bangkok is home to more than ten million people, comprising fifty districts spanning over six provinces. It was created as the Thai capital in 1782 by the first monarch of the present Chakri dynasty. They present an impressive list of cultural attractions, as well as places to eat, sleep, and shop, plus tips on transportation and emergency numbers. (One thing I always find more interesting than I probably should: how “911” varies from country to country. In Thailand, it is apparently “191.”)

In a way I can't help but feel like I'm parachuting in blind here -- I can barely speak a word of the language, and have done almost no research on the city of Bangkok. I have only a vague sense of the historical and geographical contours of the country I am visiting, and still find the squiggly writing system and its diacritical-laden transliteration baffling. When I visited China (my first trip abroad ever), I had studied the language for nearly a year, and researched the city and culture for weeks beforehand with bibliophilic zeal. By the time I made my way to Taiwan, I had not only studied an entire semester of the island's fraught political history, but was en route with my very own Taiwanese guide, so to speak. :)

Faithful blog readers (hi Mom, Dad, Amy!) might view this lack of preparation as a good thing, since it's been brought to my attention that certain overly dense blog posts, with too much history and not enough pictures, can be off-putting for friends back home. This time around, I'll be viewing the country with the eyes of a blissfully (?) uninformed tourist, stumbling through a handful of memorized phrases, and snapping photos of pretty things even if I have no idea what I'm looking at. According to my internet research, which thankfully turned up a database of audio for Thai phrases, these might come in handy:

sah-what-dee-ka = hello [if you're a girl],
cop-coon-ka = thank you [if you're a girl],
ka-taut-ka = excuse me [if you're a girl],
choy-doy = help! [for both genders, I guess].

NB: I made all these transliterations up based on what they sounded like to me, they're not in any way related to the actual transliterations, which, as I mentioned above, are pretty confusing.

Beyond this, I'm rather shockingly ill-prepared to be a tourist in Thailand. Still, I'm only going to be in Bangkok for two weeks, and nearly all of my waking hours will presumably be taken up with conference meetings, trips, and lectures. Since my main responsibility in Thailand will be BIOCEP, with any touristing taking place on the side, perhaps this is actually best.

I’ll try to post this during my layover in Hong Kong, since apparently they now have wireless internet in all their terminals.