Still have a couple more days of holiday left

It wasn't the end of the weekend yet so I hung out at Lung Dej's house for the rest of the time. On Sunday Pa'Di, Lung Dej, P'Bang, P'Sea, Pa'Tad, and I all went out for lunch. They took me to the best seafood market place ever. Ever. It was comprised of a bunch of stalls in the middle of an open space that all had various sorts of edible, marine wildlife. We went around to choose our food and got lots of stuff like crab, mussels, fish, prawns, and the like. Then we took our spoils and walked it over to this area where they cooked it for you. I ate all those foods mentioned plus fried rice and a coconut smoothie which I won't attempt to describe and you couldn't even imagine unless you experienced it yourself. We were there for about two hours in all which was ample time to stuff myself to bursting. After hearing that I would be meeting people for dinner too I had to use the rest of the time in between to furiously digest whatever was still in my stomach. For dinner, I went with P'Tae and P'Sea to meet some of her aunts and cousins which included Nisha, her brother Nikhil, their cousin Tee, and Nisha's parents. We ate dinner and then everybody headed back to Nisha's house in Bangkok to socialize. It was a lot of fun with lots of laughing and good conversation. It was time to go home then and I unfortunately had to say goodbye to everybody because it was likely that I wouldn't see them again before I left.

Junk

There was a holiday here in Thailand that started on Wednesday and lasted until the end of the week which gave most people time off work. It was the queen's birthday on Thursday and because of that it was also Mother's Day here. P'Sea and P'Tae were going to P'Sea's hometown, Pitsukomlow, or something like that. Not too sure. Anyway it's near Sukothai and used to be the capitol. That's all I describe about it so you're gonna have to figure out which town it is from there. Anyway, they asked me to come along and I immediately agreed. We were going to visit her parents with P'Sand her brother. We met up with him and then started the drive over which took about five hours. By the time we got there it was almost midnight and we were all pretty tired. We only had time to meet her parents and get a little karaoke on before it was time for bed. The next day we got up around seven AM to go to this market for breakfast. There were stalls everywhere selling things you wouldn't even believe. There were live and dead things everywhere and people butchering the live things to make them dead things. It was fairly hectic but we managed to find breakfast somewhere in all of that. It was a very good soup with noodles, meat, and other unknown substances. One of said unknown substances I didn't care for and didn't finish all of them. Only after I was done did they tell me that it was congealed blood. Yum. I was pretty proud of my tastebuds for helping me dodge that bullet. They bought some fish and frogs from the market to go release into the nearby river. People believe that if you save an animal who is about to be killed it is good luck or karma or that sort of thing. After, we went over to her grandmother's shop and met all the people there. I tell you, everybody that I met there was absolutely wonderful. They were all incredibly nice and welcoming. Most of the day was then spent visiting buddhist temples. One of them held an image of the Buddha that was reputed to be the most beautiful statue in Thailand. There was some history with kings trying to move it to the new capitol but things kept going wrong so they took it as a sign to leave it there. Another very cool one was situated right on the side of a mountain and had an awesome view off of a balcony. We released birds at this temple. That just left dinner. Because it was mother's day we went to a restaurant and met up with all of P'Sea's family in the area. It was a very nice dinner with lots of great food. I think the only other event worth mentioning was throwing up. After getting home and settling down we watched a movie together. My stomach started hurting a lot during the movie. Literally as Sean Connery said his last line and the credits started I felt that warm water start in my mouth and i only had time to think, "Now that's timing" before I was in the bathroom and started the whole process. I felt better immediately afterward and there were no other symptoms of anything so maybe I just ate something bad. The next day was all goodbyes and long car rides.

Ooh, Those Japanese

I felt a little sick today but I'm fairly sure that it's not an actual illness. More a combination not having breakfast, gorging on lunch, and then playing tennis. I will be really pissed if I get sick again this trip. What I'm really worried about is being sick for the flight home though. Specifically Narita airport in Tokyo. Them Japaneresers can be pretty scary. They get really serious about certain things like honor, family, and apparently sickness. They have signs all over the airport about going to see their medical center if you are sick and everybody there wears masks and seems to be closely inspecting you for even the slightest sign of a sniffle. I always watch myself for any cough or sneeze because I fully expect them to quarantine me their until they are sure that I'm not disease ridden. I first saw it a couple years ago about the time that the swine flu scare was at its height and I just chalked it up to that but it's been consistent every other year so I guess not. I saw one family reading their posters and debating whether to go and get some medicine for their son on the flight. I wanted to scream at them,"No! It's a trap! You'll never get out of there again!" A spread of disease across JAL would be worse than across any other airline. I believe that there would be many more deaths. In the words of Jeremy Clarkson," If the Japanese failed that badly they'd all fall on their pencils even before the order came for it." Ooh, those Japanese.

Interesting day

Today was fairly extraordinary compared to the usual routine. The gobs of extraordinariness were all packed in after 5 pm so i suppose i'll start the narrative their. It all started when the skies opened up right when tennis class started. I figured we were done but they brought us all into the gym to train. They have a whole gym with lots of equipment and it's all very professional. They even have trainers whose only job is to work with people in the gym. There weren't many people to begin with and a few left so when they brought out the trainers for us the ratio of students to trainers was almost exactly 1:1. I got basically my own personal trainer for two hours. It was pretty nice though I was hurting at the end of it. So many muscles were sore and they even got me to run two miles. I fell asleep on the ride home and when we arrived I had no idea where i was. By this time it was as dark as it would get and still raining too. I actually wasn't as worried as I figured I would be. I had several options and wasn't very concerned that I wouldn't be able to get home. I had ended up next to an enormous building with a big neon sign that said "bangkok Terminal(chakchuchak or something like that)" This told me I was still in bangkok, and probably meant that there was somebody english speaking in there who could help me. I could have done that, called somebody, or hired one of the taxis driving by to take me home. So really it wasn't that much of a problem. The taxi was an expensive solution so I called Lung Yee and he told me that there was a BTS skytrain station a couple kilometers away. I was already soaked so I hired a motorcycle person to take me there which was quite a bit cheaper. From there I could find my way home no problem.

Muffins

I am so using page breaks you complainers! It's just that the tab doesn't work so I tried to move over using spaces but they didn't show up. I noticed that baked goods here are generally priced at about equal or a little bit lower than in america. That is... except for muffins. The muffins here are way overpriced and always just a little bit stale. These two clues have lead me to deduce a possible explanation. All the muffins in thailand are imported from other countries. This is why they are expensive and they get stale from the travel time. But why would they import them when they could just bake them here for a fraction of the cost. The only possible explanation, no matter how absurd, is that they can't. The secret art of muffin baking was prevented from spreading into thailand. It seems that this seemingly innocent country has commited a travesty so severe that every single other country in the world has withheld this recipe and only sells them at exorbitant prices. Who would have known that they were caught in such a web of secrecy and deception.

Phattaya

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On Saturday Sunny's family, P'Fern's family, Esther, and I were going to take a day trip to Phattaya a beach that was about an hour and a half away. They decided that I should stay overnight on Friday because we were going to leave very early in the morning. And that's how I ended up on that toilet. That wasn't such a great connection, I'll explain more. After they(Sunny, Beam, their mom) picked me up they went to a place to pick out tiles for their house. Which meant that their mom picked out tiles and Sunny, Beam, and I screwed around in a huge department store full of sample rooms with lots of stuff to play with. Afterward, we drove way out of the city to go pick up their new dog Sky. He is a syberian husky and they have him in a dog school right now. He is about six months old and still has that puppy playfulness going on. For dinner, they were meeting some family friends at ANOTHER buffet place. I figured I'd take this one easy because I stuffed myself so much the previous days. That ended as soon as Sunny challenged me to an eating competition. I was like, "It's on, no holding back." My American eating trained body was up to the fight. I was born into large portions and unhealthy foods so I was in my element. He put up a good fight but I ended winning by two plates. It was an unnnecessary margin because he had given up when I was one plate ahead but I decided to rub it in a little bit. The final tally was Sunny: five dinner plates, three desert plates, one glass of wine. Me: six dinner plates, four desert plates, one glass of wine. The wine was one of his desperate last-ditch efforts to win because I was only fifteen. He said that a glass of wine counted as a plate but I just downed it and kept going. Tasted bad though. I met another of Sunny's friends there. Her name is Mint and she had spent the last summer working at Disney World as part of a college program. We talked some and got to know each other a little bit because the dinner lasted like two and a half hours.
Godawful early does not even begin to describe waking up at 6 on a saturday. We left while I was still half asleep and picked up Esther at her hotel. When we arrived at Phattaya the first thing we did was go to the zoo there. It was a driving zoo so you could drive around in your car and stop at whichever animals you wanted and feed some of them. By then it was about eleven so we went to lunch at the same place that we went to last year. It has excellent seafood and is outdoors right by the seaside. Luckily the competition that we had there was not an eating one. They had some gigantic prawns there and we raced to see who could take the shell off and make it ready to eat using only a fork and spoon. Unfortunately, I lost that one and it went to Sunny. It was beach time after lunch. We found a spot and set up camp. The next couple hours was just various beach activities. Played some soccer, fun in the ocean, judo tournament, and playing with Sky. It was his first time at the beach so he had fun with all the new experiences. I was not happy with the judo competitions because they set up an elemination system and I was supposed to fight Esther first. Brian, Esther, and Sunny all did judo so I was at a bit of a disadvantage. While I was in the middle of asking exactly what the rules were she charged me and pushed me over which everyone counted as a win. I was subsequently eliminated without even doing anything. We hired a banana boat which is basically an inflatable pontoon pulled by a boat and the driver tries to throw you off of it. One of the times we were thrown Sunny came up with blood coming from what looked like his eye. They took him to the hospital and I was pretty worried until they called back. It turns out he just got a cut right below his eye. He got five stitches and they sent him on his way. It was late by that time so we drove home and Esther and I stayed the night at their place.
I didn't mention before but Beam didn't come with us because he went to Hong Kong for the four day weekend with some friends. There is some religious holiday going on now so people have Monday and Tuesday off. Sunday we slept in until lunch time when we went to meet yet more people. I always meet so many nice people here it's sometimes hard to keep track. This was a group of friends that Sunny's parents have been meeting with for 25 years. I haven't even known anybody that long. It was just Esther, Brian, and I who went though. Sunny stayed at home to sleep some more and rest. That top picture was the dim sum restaurant we went to. Everybody there went back to the house and they continued everything there. I could talk with Esther and Mint though. Maybe I forgot to mention but Mint was there too, obviously. I am home now after being dropped off this afternoon.
Brian is the one holding Sky next to the glass. Sunny is sitting next to me in the chairs by the window. Esther is holding the animal thing and on the right in the restaurant picture.

Almost Normal

I have been slowly recovering judging by how out of breath and wheezy I get from walking up three flights of stairs. Sunny, a friend Luke and I met in Thailand, arrived back for summer break after finishing high school in the UK. He contacted me and we arranged to do something on Monday. He went to school in Singapore before going to the UK and a friend from his Judo classes was here in Bangkok. She is here to train with an international group of the best judo people from each asian country. We went out to a buffet for dinner with Esther(that friend), Brian(Sunny's older brother), and P'Fern(Brian's girlfriend). I had already met Brian and P'Fern from last year and we were already good friends. It turns out that Esther is 15, stuck in thailand, and can't speak thai. I thought that was a funny coincidence. They were all very good company and we stuffed ourselves and had a good time.
Wednesday, they asked me to dinner again but I went a couple hours early to hang out a little bit. Sunny, his mom, Beam(younger brother), and I drove to P'Fern's house where we played various sports and watched a movie. When dinner time came we met Brian and the rest of P'Fern's family at a very nice outdoor restaurant. The food there was excellent. They ordered a little bit too much and then turned to me. Luke and I became known as big eaters around here so when we had extra they knew where to look. They just unloaded everything to me and I ate as much as I could, which was most of it. When they announced plans for desert I just loosened the ole' belt and took it like a trooper. It was a special ice cream place where they hand you a heaping bowl and let you put whatever toppings you want on it. Naturally, I was very polite and didn't hold back. Around here people always offer food to you to be polite and it makes them very happy when you eat it and like it. I do quite well in that department.

The Run-Down on that Whole Sickness Thing

Monday: develop mild fever. minor discomfort but no major alterations in events
Tuesday: massive fever, coughing up crap out of deep recesses of lungs, loss of balance. can not get out of bed until night when dinner is the only option of food
Wednesday: much the same as previous day. in bed all day except for dinner
Thursday: fever lightening, coughing becoming less frequent, unsteadiness continues. Tried to go out but did not make it far without tiring and shortness of breath.
Friday: fever is gone completely, coughing rarely, still unsteady. Was at least out of bed for the day but did not leave.
That's kind of how my week went with only a short walk outside that was no more than two blocks away. I always seem to get sick in Thailand. The fever isn't really the problem with this sort of thing though. It's the mucus in the lungs that really bothers me because I know the effect it has on me. Anything really that has to do with the lungs is harder on me because it is compounded on top of my asthma. I've had this sort of thing before and it always stays with me much longer than it should. I get tired and out of breath easily and my stamina is way lower for weeks afterward. The first nights were very annoying though, I couldn't sleep because I was shivering and hot and coughing all the time. The most annoying thing were the balance problems. If I shifted position my head swam and I definently couldn't walk straight. Getting down the stairs was a problem for dinner and getting back up left me tired and gasping for air. That short walk I took must have been interesting to watch. I would kind of stagger along a three foot wide path and whenever I turned my head to look for a car I'd always drift off to the opposite side and run into a building or plant. You can be sure that I had to be very attentive when I peed. My calf muscles are so sore now. I can only assume it's from fighting to keep me up every time I was on my feet. I've never really had them ever get sore before. My calf muscles have never been a problem. But this isn't all as bad as it sounds. I got some quality reading and television time in and slept when I could. I'm mostly alright now so there's no reason to worry.

Another weekend

I was picked up late Friday night to spend the weekend at Lung Dej's house. Before we went there everybody showed up at the Jim Thompson house for a party. This was to celebrate the graduation of a class that Lung Dej was in. I was told that it was a class comprised of the top businessman in Thailand and some military strategists. Not sure what they were doing but it sounded pretty cool and prestigious. There was a live band and buffet and games. Pretty cool party. The next day P'Sea and P'Tae took me with them as they went around to a couple different sites. First, we saw a wax museum that I previously went to with Mom and Luke like five years ago. I think Luke would remember me scaring Mom pretty well when she leaned in to look at one of the people. After, we drove to see a giant statue of Buddha. We walked around the extensive grounds a little bit and saw some candle making. Every Saturday they have dinner with Pa'Tad's parents but that wasn't for a while so P'Tae and I went to a public park and played a pickup game of basketball for a while. We went to dinner and finished off the day.

Birdy

Somehow this little bird managed to get in my room eventhough all the windows were closed. I don't know how but it took me awhile to herd him out a window. Stubborn little bugger.

Sunday

There was nothing planned for that day so we got to sleep in longer, thank god. I was dead from staying up that late and watching the movie. Everybody was up and ready just in time to go out and get lunch. We were supposed to go to this good Som Tam place which I was excited about but it only opened at 4. The next 15 minutes of cruising around looking for a restaurant were not pleasant for me. I don't know if asian cars are manufactured smaller but most of the cars I get in have rooves that are way too low. I end up sitting with my neck bent for most of the car ride. After eating we went over to a different aunt's house and hung out there for a little while. Enough time that I got acquanted with the dogs there well enought that they started following me and that white one got pushy about the attention the other one was getting. Some time mid-afternoon P'Sea had scheduled a visit to a construction site to research the house being built. Lung Dej and Pa'Dat were thinking of building their own house. We regrouped with everybody and had dinner at a japanese place with P'Thae and P'Sand. That other picture is just Thae screwing around.

rest of saturday

After the rose garden we went to some floating market located on and around a river. We only went on one restaurant boat to look at it but we walked around all the stalls by the riverside. They bought some duck from there for us to eat for dinner. They said that the duck was very famous around thailand and it was original to this place. Not sure if they meant the actual duck or how it was prepared. From there it was getting late so we started to head home.(one of her aunt's house that is) Along the way we stopped at an orchid garden and they bought a few to plant or eat or do who knows what. So it was pretty late when we got back but we still had time to eat the duck and watch the germany-argentina game. Afterward, some of the adults went to bed but the kids started to play cards. We played several different games and ended with extreme spoons which involves playing cards and then racing across the room to get a spoon before they were all gone. I ended up winning without shoving anyone or getting very physical, thank you. It was really late by then and almost everyone else went to bed. I stayed up a little bit longer to watch "the boat that rocked" ("pirate radio" in the US) with P'Nisha and then we went to bed at like 1 in the morning. It was a very good movie with great music.

Awesome Weekend

I had a great weekend. P'See (sp?), P'Thae's wife, invited me to come along with her this weekend. She was spending some time with her three aunts and three cousins who were in town. For Saturday they rented a big van and driver and we spent the day driving around to different spots. Her cousins were 10, 14, and 19. Thae, the 10 year old, lives in shanghai and was just visiting. P'Nisha was also visiting. She goes to college at the University of Wisconsin and lived in Paris before that. We went to the Rose Garden first on our trip. It is apparently a super famous tourist spot and has other attractions such as shows about elephants and thai culture. After doing all the shows and visiting the shops we walked through the garden and it was actually very nice which is saying something considering walking through a garden is not my favorite activity. I'll write about the rest of the trip later. It's almost midnight here and i just noticed that it's the fourth of july. Not sure what that has to do with anything.

Ads

I've noticed something about all the ads i'm seeing over here. Whether it be a commercial, billboard, or flyer on the wall they all seem to have one thing in common: the guys. They are all either one of two types. If they aren't the pop star-long-orange-hair asians than they are the whitest looking asian dudes i have ever seen. I'm not going to speculate about this, just simply making an observation.

Pronounciation is Key

It actually rained for the first time here eventhough it's supposed to be the "rainy season". When I say "rained" I mean that it was a downpour that lasted about three hours. Luckily, it was in the morning so i could still go to tennis. When I was about to leave i looked over my racquet to gauge when the string was going to break. I usually only carry one to make it easier. So I looked it over and decided, "yeah, it should be good for one more class and then i'll bring two until it breaks." Nope, it broke during warm-up and i had to borrow another one for the rest of practice. Other than that it went well. Afterwards, somebody came to talk to me to make sure i would be alright getting home. I thought i was good but they wanted to make sure. On the way home i have to tell somebody my destination and they wanted to make sure i had the pronounciation right. I was going to say "uno-sub-marie" apparently that's completely off. They would have absolutely no idea what i was talking about unless i said "anoo-sow-varee". Completely different. Thai is such a finnicky language with all the pitches and tones. You got the rising tone, falling tone, up-down tone, down-up tone, up-down-up tone, and the down-up-down-up-down-up-down-up-down-up tone. It's all very confusing. The good ending to the day was that i got some street meat on the way home. Or should i say questionable street meat of indeterminate origins on a stick.

Tired

This one is going to have to cover two days cause i was too lazy to do it yesterday. Yesterday, I met Pa' Dat and Pa'Dii and they drove me over to the tennis courts. I had my first practice there and it didn't go well. I hadn't played in like a week and i showed up late because of traffic so i missed the warm-up. I played really badly that day. More about tennis in a little bit. After that I stayed overnight at Lung Dej's house and said hello to everybody. P' Tui had surgery on his foot for a torn ligament so he was on crutches and couldn't walk around. I met P' Thae's wife for the first time. She's awesome. She's very nice and was very welcoming. The next day Pa' Dii took me to the tennis courts because you have to take a van over there but there were many of them and i couldn't remember which one it was exactly. In order to get there she talked with about ten different people, took a different van that went to a different place, and then had to give directions to a driver to go the rest of the way. That's really not all that helpful for me because I can't speak thai and I wouldn't be able to recreate that on the way there, let alone do it backwards. Luckily I remembered the way back and it dropped me off at the place that i needed to leave from so i'm good now. At tennis I was put in the lower group this time and I was better than all the other kids. The good thing about this was that their warm-up was just feeding balls to them so i got my stroke back and started playing normally again. Next they did a drill where you rallied with the instructor and when you messed up you moved to the next court and then back again. I did so much better than everyone else that I was just rallying for so long that everybody else was lined up behind me waiting. They kept having to move the kids back over and the instructor's were messing up before me half the time. When we got to real points and I just dominated everyone else they moved me back up to the other group. Even after that I was still doing really well and when we did king of the court i was king for most of the time. I was very happy at the end of it and very tired. I sweated so much during the class. Normally when i see other people with the entire upper half of their shirt soaked i'm a little confused. I always wondered how they got that because you sweat in certain areas more like parts of your back and armpits and you wipe your face on your shirt but it shouldn't be completely soaked. My shirt was literally soaked everywhere except the little half-inch of double layered fabric at the bottom. It was ridiculous. I feel sorry for the people in the van on the way home. The way it works is that they cram as many people as possible into it to make the most amount of money. You have to be in that three-person-car mode the whole time. You should know what i'm talking about. When you need to have three people in the back seat of a small car and you have to hunch your shoulders together awkwardly and try not to touch the other people. It's also very quite in the van because you don't really want to strike up a conversation with the person who is invading your personal space. The vans scare me though. I'm afraid they're gonna fall apart or crash any minute. You have the option of sitting in the front seat which, while more comfortable, also affords you a view of just how screwed up the van actually is. One of the ones from last year had a broken park gear. He just left it in neutral and relied on the parking brake. This one today had a broken dashboard. The speedometer, rev thingy, engine temperature, and gas guage were all broken. The only working thing was the odometer and i kinda wished it wasn't. So I finally made it home in time to miss dinner and now i have to work up the strength to walk up three flights of stairs.

Liverpool

Dear god, this dog is still here. I've seen him every summer for the last 3 years hanging out in the same spots every time. AND he's still fat and never stands up. He is always laying down whenever we see him. While this was the highlight of my day I will also say that i went to two hours of AUA class to show people that i am diligently working at the tasks set upon me by my ever-caring, watchful parents.

Lunch

This is a picture of the lunch that i had today. The drink included it cost a little less than $2. I'd say that's a pretty good deal. A little sidenote: i'm probably not going to have nearly as many pictures as last year because i'm going to be by myself most of the time and it's a lot harder and more awkward to do that.

First Day

I'd say that it was a productive first day overall. I went to the AUA language center and set everything up so i'm all set to start on Monday. After that i went out to lunch with Lung Yee. It was very good, we went to this japanese noodle place that i'm sure luke would have loved. After some more cruising around I went back up to my room. I hadn't actually slept very much since leaving. I only slept on the last leg of the flight and then i arrived at about 1 AM and just stayed up all day. So when i went upstairs i fell asleep almost immediately. It was very funny, I wasn't tired at all even after being up for so long but as soon as I layed down to read i fell asleep with my clothes on and contacts in.

And So It Begins... Much Less Dramatically Than The Title Would Seem To Suggest

This twenty four hour plane trip was actually one of the best i have had up until now. I think it was my first time by myself but it was rather uneventful and not very stressful. The first leg of the trip to chicago was just trying to busy myself so that i didn't get bored without draining the batteries on my various electric devices or having too much fun. "Why would having too much fun be bad?", you might ask. I try and keep myself busy but not have fun so that i don't set the bar too high for the next leg of the trip. This may seem stupid but it's only an hour and a half there and i would rather deal with slight boredom than think about how much more boring it is on the next 13 hour flight. I know that i would compare it to the previous flight and not be happy with the thirteen hour flight because you just can't sustain that amount of fun for that long in such a confined space. They had some fairly good movies on that trip like how to train your dragon and clash of the titans. I actually liked the dragon one best, it was very good. On that flight however there was one man who got on my nerves a little bit. He was sitting in the exact middle of the row and got up to go who knows where every 30 minutes. I watched him and he didn't even go to the bathroom. He just walked up to the front of the plane and back. Being in the exact middle he of course got out on my side EVERY time. It was quite bothersome to put it politely. At the airports there was a subtle underlying competition going on. I had a three hour layover at each airport and it was the same at both places. As you may know there are outlets periodically on the baseboards around the airports. You had to fight to get to them. You need to be polite and yet viciously nab the oppurtunity when it arises. The trick was determining who you thought would leave first and then casually hanging out near them and trying to blend in. Then when they left you needed to swoop in at walking pace and plug in before anybody else did. It was tricky and took a little bit of practice. I did not however have to recharge my nook. I read it for the last two hours of the longest flight after i ran out of movies. because it was in airplane mode it did not need to connect to the cell network and saved lots of battery power. After those two hours it was still at ninety percent charge so i didn't need to charge it the whole time. Great christmas gift Mom and Dad. The last flight was the best by far. I was not tired at that point and i had absolutely no idea whether it should be night or day. On the last one however i fell asleep immediately for some reason. I slept through takeoff without my seatbelt on and didn't even turn on the tv the whole time. I only remeber maybe ten total minutes of clarity but the memories i had were vivid. One was supreme annoyance at my immediate neighbour. i had a window seat so i only had the one guy next to me. Problem is, he was a big guy. At one point i woke up and sat up straight looking to use the armrests for added comfort but to my surprise he had taken the armrest and a good portion of the space next to it in my seat. It's bad enough when one person takes the whole of the one armrest given to two people but then he oozes over it too. His arm was on the armrest("arm" being the space directly around the bone and muscle) but then the excess oozed over. i was annoyed and slightly disgusted but decided to fall back into blissful sleep. Then next time i woke up i was in that in-between place somwhere not quite awake or asleep. That place where thoughts slow to a crawl and blinking takes several seconds to open your eyes again. During this I could hear at least five people coughing within three rows around me. It was at this point that i recieved a bit of a realization and actually thought about airplanes. This thinking took quite awhile to process but i got there. i thought about all those people sneezing and the various germs floating about through the air. I realized that a plane is basically a closed system of reproccessed air that continually circulates. Those germs where probably circulating around with little breeze to refresh the air. That's when i decided i didn't care and fell back to sleep. I slept so soundly i missed the attendants handing out the customs forms and almost forgot about it until i was leaving the plane. I rushed back in and asked them about it. Feeling proud of myself for remembering. I was not so proud about the form later. To stay in the country you had to wait in a very long slow-moving line to hand someone your passport and that form i just remembered. I fill out the form and saw that there was an arrival half and departure half. I though to myself, "i'm only arriving now so i only need that half." Being me, i ripped it in half and only took the arrival half. It only occured to me halfway through the line that i should have kept the other half just in case, but i decided not to go back and get it because i didn't want to rewait for in line again. So i wait and when i finally get up to him he says i need the other half. I ended up having to wait longer and go back and start over again. Yeah, not my smartest moment.