Mishaps and Anecdotes: Cast Away from Home ( In Thailand for the first time!)

Our plane took off from the Philippine soils at around 9:30 pm.

 And even though I've been living away from home for the most part of almost 7 years, it will be my first time to leave home without going back every weekends and it will be for a very long, long time.


I and my companion arrived at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok at around 12:30 am, 1:30 am Philippine time. Upon touching the grounds of Thailand, a warm rush of homesickness instantly hit me with the full realization that I'm outside my comfort zone, I'm away from home.

We had to walk like for almost a kilometer from the arrival point to the immigration area. The escalator -like ramps were a big help, or else we'd be walking ourselves to complete exhaustion at 12:30 in the morning.

After buying for each one of us a 123-call sim card and contacting the persons we had to contact, our first in a series of mishaps started. We had to inform the non-English speaking Thai taxi driver to bring us to Morchit Bus station which will bring us to the northern part of Thailand where our school is located.

Taxis are lining up just outside the arrival area of the airport. Our first attempt in communicating with the non-English speaking taxi drivers also paid off in the end.

A thirty minute taxi ride gave us the opportunity to take a glimpse of Bangkok with all its majesty and glory at night. With the incomprehensible Thai love songs being played in the radio, and the occasional attempts of the driver to communicate to us in English, I and my companion dared not to speak or talk except the occasional mutterings of observations, since we were still in the process of grasping the idea that we were indeed in Thailand.

Bangkok at night.

If I record the accounts of our arrival in Thailand in words, it will be a compilation of funny anecdotes and ghastly mishaps. So here's the pictures that would do the talking instead.

At 1:00 in the morning, deprived of sleep and food, we were aghast that the bus going to Chiang Mai is still available at 7:00 in the morning. The ticket seller got a bit irritated when I had to ask her several times of the details---it was just an equal effort though from both of us to communicate to each other.

Our double-decker bus finally arrived at 3:30 pm. This bus features onboard Thai movies and songs and also serves free snacks and drinks. It has a comfort room at the lower deck of the bus.

We got stranded in this waiting shed for more than an hour with both our cellphones' battery empty of charge-----we couldn't contact anyone plus we were in the middle of a highway with by-passers who couldn't understand us whenever we ask directions, not to mention that we lacked sleep and food!

We were still lucky because beside the waiting shed is a police station. So we got help from a very kind Thai police who let us use his phone to call our contacts.

Despite the seeming mishaps, we still found it a wonderful photo opportunity moment and a great source of future travel anecdotes.