Hey! It has been almost 7 months now. I am finally ready to post this story that has turned funny with the months passed and days enjoyed with wonderful people here. Enjoy!
Did you know what it is like traveling in Asia? First you prepare yourself by not sleeping almost all night packing the final things at the last minute. Having almost no sleep, you won’t even have to ask your loving family to say goodbye to you and see you off at the airport at 4AM. This is just the first leg of the journey however and everyone on the plane will wonder why you are dead asleep the whole three hour flight to one of the larger airports in the middle of the morning. You sit there and wait for a few hours, still feeling like sleeping you order your last Starbucks coffee and eventually board the real flight with nobody to see you off... The moment you get on the plane, you feel like you entered the wonderful world of Asia, the sing-song music, red head rests, and the foreign language over the loud-speaker helps you feel very far away, even while you remain on the tarmac in the States. Once you are seated and your baggage properly stowed, you feel confident you are the only non-Asian on the plane... As the safety video is played, you are certain the English version is only for you and you wonder if everyone else is annoyed that they have to listen to...it...twice... (as you doze off). Your thoughts are confirmed when the stewardesses awaken you speaking a foreign language and offer you two choices for a meal, both having the word "rice", not sure exactly you repeat one of the options and a steaming plate of a rice dish is put on your plate. Much better than the food you usually get on a plane, you try to wake up enough to eat.
The flight is still going.... you watch a movie..... still going...... the little airplane on "your flight" monitor, seems to show you in the same place no matter how long you sleep. You journal, you read, you do anything else you have put off for not having time... including more sleep before you finally hear that you will be landing in one hour and they begin to do seat checks and trash removal.
As you disembark, walking quietly along with the large group of people in front of you to a customs area. It says clearly in English on the top, for citizens and a separate line for foreigners. The line is very short and you get in, only to notice everyone seems to have a card in their hands that says "Arrival card" you want to ask if you need one but then it dawns on you that although the people in the line may be white, they are not speaking English... you cautiously ask one of them if they speak English and if you need a card, they reply yes. As you get out of the line and begin to fill out the card, the line is now VERY long and you wonder if it was really that important after all...
Even though there is no reason for alarm, you somehow feel anxious going through a line that would determine if you would be admitted to the country or sent back on the 15 hour flight, going home is not that bad, but that flight again, right after you got off... you just hope you get through.
You walk past people taking selfies in front of the country's name on the wall and feel more like home... soon enough you realize there are no drinking fountains, you have no money, and there is a couple hours before your next flight. Somewhere along there you use your bank card to get some money from an ATM which comes out in denominations of 100. When you finally find a place that is selling bottled water, it only costs two local dollars so they break the 100 for you. It seems to take about an hour just to navigate the subway system in the airport to get to your gate.
By this time your internal clock is saying it is high time to be asleep and waiting for another flight while the rain pours outside the windows in the afternoon is not exactly an adrenaline rush... while you fight to keep up the bricks on your eyelids, you tell yourself that once you are on this next flight in an hour you can sleep. When you are finally on board, you almost immediately fall asleep again and wake up to the loudspeaker only in the local language now, just about thirty minutes from landing. Once you land, you walk out and get your bags, free baggage carts yeah! You are ushered out of the area and told you will have to check your bags again for another domestic flight. It is the middle of the night in your location although not too late for you and you are bombarded by locals showing pictures of nice looking hotel rooms and this is when you are thankful you have already learned how to politely say "No thank you!"
After being told you can't stay in the airport overnight, you finally are able to look up enough words on your phone app to ask where the airport hotel is, you understand enough to get there, on the second floor, and find it is full... So what do you do in country by yourself, you can't stay in the airport and you are told the local hotel is full, and there are exactly 6 hours until you have to be here again? You ask for a miracle!
In this case you are lucky to get one, a person nearby and your phone app work together to get you to an ATM, get enough money for another off-sight airport hotel, and you get into a small personal sized car with four others and your loads of bags, and go to a small alley where there is actually a hotel. The person who helped you, let's just call him your angel, actually went with you in the shuttle car, helps you pay the price you were quoted, and checks your morning flight time on your phone (which you have no ticket for yet) and mimes for you while speaking foreign words you don't understand, that someone will bang on your door in the morning and have you to the airport an hour before your flight. You wonder if you being international, it will only take an hour but you just go into the room and fall asleep. This is again where you remember you are in Asia... the toilet is flush with the floor, or I guess you could say flushed on the floor, that works too, it doubles as a drain for the shower, how about that... Although you feel like going to bed, you are compelled to shower into the toilet because you realize you have now been traveling for about two days give or take. After that you lay in bed and wonder why you could be so tired but not fall asleep... as you smell cigarette smoke over the wall you are just thankful there is a door locked between you and the rest of the world.
At some point you must have fallen asleep, because loud banging produced at your door prompts you to jump out of bed and say "okay, I am awake, just a minute." This doesn't work and you open the door to get them to stop, probably a good idea so you actually get up.
It seems like hours before they actually get a little tiny van for you and several others and all your loads of luggage, which is getting a little embarrassing. As they pack the car, you get in because you luggage is in and you are not letting it out of your sight until you check in. Once you get to the airport, you are dropped in the middle of a busy street and expected to take care of your own bags. With everyone else having one small roller, that would be no problem, but you have decided to have two large rollers and two carry on. It is tough, but you stack them so you can turn around and pull like a draft horse the two large rollers and come barreling toward the airport with determination, having found your check-in counter the night before. At the counter, you are feverishly looking up words to use to help your flight women who doesn't seem to know English... you hand her your passport and she looks up your flights. As she guides you to put your bag on the scale, you would have thought you had a whale! Much less two whales! You figure out that the fit is about your bags being overweight and you will have to pay more. But before you go do that, you have to go open one of those bags for inspection. You go back and the woman just lays your precious passport on the counter and begins helping the next customer (key out of the country if they don't like your bags so much they send you home), she finally realizes you don't know where she told you to go pay more and someone guides you over to the pay counter. After you pay, you search for your iphone and realize the pocket you put it in and zipped a few minutes ago, is opened and the phone is gone... "maybe I put it is another pouch" you might think, no, that can't be possible, it is not in your bag... You try to tell the lady at the counter and as you try to explain, you realize you no longer have your crutch of a digital dictionary on hand. They find someone at the service desk who can speak a little English and she informs you they do not have your phone. At that moment, you don't know if you want to cry or scream, but then you decide either would only make things less favorable for you, so you go through security and board your final flight.
At the tiny airport, you see one or two white faces and they seem to know you! They tell you hello and they are actually boarding your flight, they speak to you in English! Then you wait for your local friend to pick you up and they greet you in broken English and are happy to see you. It feels really good to get into a car with someone who you know is taking you to your new home away from home, finally, even if it is over 6,000 miles from your family... You realize that you’re jet lagged, travel weary body is ready to go to sleep and it is only about 9 am. You take a nice hot shower and contact your family to tell them you have arrived safely. You notice your battery is low so you search your bags for that re-charger, only to discover, sadly, that it is no longer in your baggage.
You go eat lunch with your local friends and even though you have no idea what it is, you don't know when the last time you ate was, so it tastes wonderful. You try to hang around and eventually you go to your friends house, only to feel like a zomby. After staying awake until about 4:30pm, you walk back home and fall into bed, not to wake up until 7am in the morning!
This is one experience one might have traveling alone to Asia. Just in case you wanted to take notes. ;)
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