Welcome to Thailand

Most of our group has arrived safely in Thailand and we're adapting to the new time zone. My journey to this point including my stay in the San Francisco Bay Area has been wonderful. It was so nice to visit with friends and family and to play a little at the same time. Thanks to my mother-in-law, I had a few extra days with my wife before heading off to Thailand as well. All of us got to go to one of my wife's favorite places, Santa Cruz. My mom spoiled me a little and sent some gifts for the children our group will be interacting with. Her husband (and my friend) took a week off and highlights included participating in a weekly sailing race in Alameda, a trip to Great America (which I planned independently of my wife's request to go to Santa Cruz), and a trip to see my sister, niece, cousins, and aunt and uncle in Manteca and Modesto. I got to walk around Lake Elizabeth a couple of times with a friend who I went to middle school, high school and church with growing up. We also had a small partial reunion of our church youth group in Auburn. On my last day in California, I rode to work with my mom to Mountain View (all city references so far are in California), then rode the light rail train to Great America and spent the day walking around and riding rides. Since I had a season pass and everybody was working that day, I wanted to spend the day being active instead of sitting around an empty house in front of a computer. After about five hours in the park I took the light rail back to my mom's work. From there we drove home, I freshened up for my trip, and then we headed to the airport to catch my 11pm flight to Manila.

At the San Francisco airport, I decided to have a drink of orange soda and check in on Facebook. I was flying with a long layover through Manila, Philippines and noticed that a friend from high school and her husband had just posted about being in line to check in on the same airline for a flight from Los Angeles. On this airline they would have to be flying to or through Manila as well and our flight time was modified so we'd be one of the first planes landing when the airport opened. I sent her a message letting her know I'd try to find them in Manila. The flight was long and fairly uneventful. The gentleman I sat next two works for the same healthcare chain as my mother and we visited on and off during the flight. My only real challenge on the flight was the light padding on the seat leading me to reallocate the pillow assigned for my head to a more comfortable location. I think I will budget for a full-sized pillow purchase on my last day in Bangkok for that very purpose.

I landed in Manila around 3:40 am and as an airport employee began to escort me back to the international flight waiting area I asked about waiting for my friend and her husband. It was a good thing I asked. He escorted me back to the arrival area and they allowed me to wait there until my friends arrived. She hadn't got the message and was quite surprised when I called her name. We hugged and I got to meet her husband for the first time and it was clear that the visit would be a short one as they were headed for a domestic flight from there, but it was nice to see each other after fifteen years. So her husband took a couple of pictures of us together and we parted ways. Without the world of status updates, we would have been a few hundred feet apart in different areas of the same airport thousands of miles from home and would have never known it.

Later that day, I arrived in Bangkok with a quite long delay before I'd meet up with the rest of the group. The customs official didn't even say one word to me, in stark contrast to my last experience leaving and returning to the United States by land, in which the Canadian and American officials each tried to play "Stump the Dummy" with me in their respective posts as I went to the funeral of a friend I had spent all last summer with in a chaplaincy internship. I was glad that passing through customs went smoothly and my luggage was already waiting for me. Since I was still in a controlled area of the airport, I sat down and planned the rest of my day. I paid for wi-fi access for a month, since it was $2 more than paying for a day and I'll be back at the airport again to go home soon enough to need it. With wi-fi access, I was able to call my wife and my mother from my laptop with no added charge thanks to Google voice (another benefit of recent technology). I didn't really feel safe lingering around the airport for 7 hours so I found an airport hotel that included a free shuttle to and from the airport for under $20 and waited there until the appointed time to meet the group. Although we had two people from the group delayed with visa issues, we knew they would be two days behind so we packed into our vans and arrived safely at Asia-Pacific International University around 3am.

Since I was able to rest on the airplanes and in my hotel, I was up bright and early at 7am so I figured I'd start getting my body used to the daily routine while most of the group was exhausted and needed to sleep in. I had breakfast then walked around the beautiful campus to take pictures and have some reflection time. I find myself continually both delighted and at peace in Thailand. Although the weather is hot and humid, it is not unlike being in Hawaii and so far it has been more comfortable than most of the summer in Michigan and the morning was quite mild for walking around and enjoying the plant life. Since I seem to love being around water, I found the koi fish and the water lilies in the lakes and ponds to be quite pleasing. I'll try to post a picture or two before breakfast and church today (which is coming up quickly).

After a few hours of wandering around on our acclimatization day, our group started waking up and I went back to the dorm to make sure the other guy staying in my dorm building knew where to go for our lunch and orientation. After lunch and orientation, we headed to Tesco-Lotus to shop for essentials. Why bring soap and shampoo when you can buy it here for a fraction of the American prices? My bottle of shampoo was about 60 cents, although I could have splurged and spent up to $4 for western brands. I did splurge a little on my body wash at about $1.50. A plastic comb set me back about a quarter and I picked up snack packages of wasabi peanuts and seaweed strips for about 30 cents each. Our group had pizza together followed by a giant bowl of Swensen's Ice Cream; we skipped all we had learned in our lives about germs as this group of almost strangers delved into ten different flavors of ice cream and toppings together in our community bowl. As we joked about it we shrugged it off as an ice cream breaker and just had fun with it. After that we returned back to campus and went to vespers, a worship service to welcome the beginning of our Sabbath rest day in which we set aside our worldly needs to spend a day with God.

Following vespers, my exhaustion from travel was finally kicking in and even though it was only around 8pm, I headed to bed sure that I'd be out for a good ten or twelve hours. But nope, I woke up for the third time around 4am and decided I'd just accept that I was awake from there. Today we'll go to church, vacation Bible school, and do some hiking. Our work weeks will mostly be Monday to Friday with cultural time on the weekends.

Stopover in Walla Walla

A friend from Walla Walla and his family have graciously allowed me to stay with them while I await a flight to San Francisco on Friday. The cheapest airfare we could find to Thailand was from San Francisco, and the need to come to Walla Walla presented itself later. It meant I'd have to leave Michigan earlier than planned but I'll get to spend more time with my mom before I head out, and my mother-in-law is flying my wife home so we can all be together.

This morning we went to visit some of our former professors, including the one who will be leading the mission trip. We also saw a friend who has been serving as a missionary in Eastern Europe and her six-month old baby. She and her husband will be joining us for breakfast tomorrow and I can't wait to hear about the experiences of long-term missionaries.

While I believe what we're doing on our short-term trips is valuable, we who go on short-term mission trips often gain more than the people we go to serve on the trip. Much of the value is in experience of other cultures and the ability to share what we learn about those cultures. In this trip, we also have the value of working in conjunction with an existing infrastructure. When we leave, the mission continues, and hopefully we've done more to reflect the character of Jesus Christ in our interactions than we have the character of the typical western tourist.

A Slow Start

We had quite a slow start yesterday but we got a giant U-haul truck and two trailers packed to the gills. We were looking to leave between ten or eleven but it was about two when we left. We had to stop at Benton Harbor to return my wife's phone which ended up in my possession. The traffic from Benton Harbor to Chicago was the worst I've ever seen in Michigan. It looked like a lot of people from Illinois came to visit Michigan, which I hope is good for Michigan's struggling economy but I wish we had traveled through Berrien Springs and South Bend instead. We finally got to Iowa City about 1am and found out that the hotel we booked was in downtown and didn't have parking for our truck. It was kind of amusing but it was late and we had to scramble for another place to stay in town, as another hour plus of driving was out of the question at that point. We ended up finding a Best Western 2 miles away. They charged $20 each for the two dogs, but I think I would have made the same call. It was time to sleep and even with that charge the cost of lodging is small in comparison to our gas costs. I'm just driving and I was grateful for the comfortable bed. The motel was so cool with a medieval theme all around including the poster beds and the courtyard style swimming pool. This was quite unexpected to find such an ambiance in a motel and I'll be writing a good review for trip advisor. We're still two or three hours behind so we'll be driving 11+ hours to try to make some of that up.I have so much to look forward to this trip. We should get to my dad's house late tomorrow, Walla Walla and many friends the next day, home to California and more family on Friday (and my wife is flying in too!), and then on to Thailand.