I'd already gotten little sleep (mostly purposefully) on Thursday night due to a great send off from friends. Then I got up around 6 to spend time with Mom before she went to school. And while I went back to bed afterwards, I still got back up around 9 to run more last minute errands. I know, I know... I should have had everything done by Friday. Clearly I have mastered the art of procrastination.
So that was about 5 hours of sleep.
I flew out Friday, around 6ish. Atlanta has a new snazzy international terminal which made the whole business so very much faster, Dani, Joe, and Josh all rode up to the airport to see me off, and when they all started looking sad as I went through security I almost lost it. There were 6 others from my group at the gate and we pretty much immediately started looking after each other.
No sleep on the flight Friday, which was 9 hours.
Watched 4 movies: Django Unchained (good), The Guilt Trip (decent), Parental Guidance (meh), and The Great and Powerful Oz (crap; couldn't finish it (and I thought I could watch anything with James Franco); don't waste your time)
We landed in Frankfort, Germany, around 9am. Since we had an 8 hour layover, we decided to explore the city a bit. That made for an interesting trip, being that out of 7 of us maybe 3 have any travel sense. Several members of the group decided that stopping and looking around crazily and wondering aloud several times where we should go was far superior to picking a direction and walking to see what lay ahead. Needless to say, we heard several people call us stupid Americans. Eventually, we found the metro, and more eventually, we figured out how to work the ATM and then the ticket booth and found our way to Hauptwache. The architecture was what I expected, but not much else. Although in retrospect I'm really not sure what I was expecting. We found ourselves in the middle of a couple of festivals, one with shitty music by a girl that could not really hit Adele's high notes (soooo flat), and another was a Korean Buddhist celebration of some kind. In German. There were several different types of traditional Korean dress, and it was really interesting. We got coffee and a waffle for breakfast, which I couldn't finish because it had sugar clumps baked into it and was almost sickeningly sweet. I stopped to sketch a statue, and tourists not only came up to see what I was doing, but several sat on the bench, put an arm around me and snapped a picture.
We had a short hop to Vienna from there, and a mad dash to the next gate, as we landed with 45 minutes until our next flight left. Even though we could have walked from one plane to the next, we had to wind around the halls and up three flights of stairs to our next gate. No sleep on that plane either.
From Vienna was our flight to Bankok, 10 hours. I got maybe 3 hours of sleep.
Watched 3 more movies, Water For Elephants (not bad), and due to lack of sleep I forgot the others.
5 hour layover in Bankok. We sat at the gate and tried to sleep, while also trying very hard to make sure the bottoms of our shoes were not pointed at anyone, which proved difficult. Mostly we took turns wandering around our section of the terminal. The flight to Chiang Mai was pretty short, and I luckily slept for most of it.
Total: 10 hours of sleep in 72. Never again.
I will say: those noise canceling headphones made for much better plane rides. They didn't take the noise away entirely, but it took away the oppressive bass from the engines and made the movies easier to hear.
We were met in the airport at Chiang Mai by the director of our program, Dr. Nirund. He ushered us onto a van to Lampang, which was about an hour and a half that most of us slept through. Since it was around 9 pm, it was already dark outside and there wasn't a whole lot to see anyway.
We're now being put up in the Weingtong Hotel, in which I have been given my own room. Score! It may change tomorrow with the arrival of new people, especially considering that everyone else is paired, but thankfully tonight will make the second in which I am still in here alone.
I'll update my adventures from today later. It's 1am here and I have to be up at 7 for orientation.
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