Departing

Thursday, February 22, 2007

I hadn't slept much the two nights previous...I was too excited. Then I was scared I was going to oversleep Thursday morning so I set all three of my cell phone alarms, my two alarm clocks, and my watch each ten minutes apart starting at about 5am (I figured nobody could turn off six alarms scattered throughout the room in their sleep). I got up fine though and took the bus into the city--New York, that is--to catch A-Train at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

I had been fretting for a few days about how best to get to JFK and settled on the subway as being the most reliable. I was going to take luck out of the picture as much as I possibly could. You see, you can grab a cab to the airport, and it'll leave as soon as you get in, but it's expensive (I think the airport cabs might be up to $40 plus tip now) and traffic is a significant issue, not to mention the brain hemoraging as one watches the driver taking the most traffic-clogged, round-about ways to get to the simplest places. Then there are the airport buses. I'm a fan of these for getting to Laguardia, and they're only like $13 one-way, but then they leave whenever they show up (this, of course, is despite the fact that they actually have a schedule), have broken down (not mine, but at least one JFK bus has while I was riding the Laguardia bus at the same time), and also have to deal with the traffic. The third option was the subway. It's the cheapest--$2 for the subway ride, plus $5 to ride the AirTrain around the JFK terminals, but then I've never heard of anybody getting to JFK that way. The best part IMO, is that you don't have to deal with New York traffic and since the subways run almost like clockwork (almost) you can count on getting there eventually. I imagine the biggest objections are the cleanliness of the subway--but seriously people, the subways are fine, er, for the most part, and I'm sure you don't even want to know what's happened in the past 24 hours in the back seat of the cab you're riding instead--and the safety, which may be a legitimate concern, but during the workday I didn't see anything to cause a worry.

I actually ended up getting to the airport way too early, but whatever. I ate some breakfast, talked to Tanya on the phone to inquire about the $-to-Thai Baht conversion rate, and to let her and Chris know that I was well and truly coming.

To be continued...

My First Trip Abroad!!!


Um, yeah, so this is my first attempt at a blog so I'm not sure how it's going to come out. For the time being this is going to be a sort of post-dated diary of my ten-day trip to Thailand. My friends Tanya and Chris are currently living in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and this was an opportunity to visit them, and more significantly, it was my first real trip abroad...yay!!! I say "real" because driving through southern Ontario shouldn't really count as a trip abroad for Americans--heck, during my few trips there in the past I hadn't even officially needed a passport. No, I wanted a stamp in my passport so I could actually prove I've been out of the States.

Okay, yeah, visiting a foreign country is hardly a revolutionary concept, but you have to understand that for people that grow up in communities surrounded by corn and soybeans, even something as simple as going to "The Big City" is a life-changing event. Oh, I've been around a bit--much of north-suburban Chicago, metro Philly, and the New York City area--but I was born and lived for almost half my life in one of those wholesome Midwest towns where everybody knows everybody else, three generations of your family live within two miles of each other, and your elementary school field trips were to farms to watch cows being milked (seriously). So a trip to Thailand might not sound all that special on an absolute scale, but it was very special to me, so now you can read about it. :-D