A Late Start

I've been in Thailand for four weeks, and I've got some forty weeks to go before I move back home to Seattle. It was always my intention to blog about my time here. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications and an uncooperative bureaucratic third party (which shall remain nameless for now), I'm just getting started. So, let me start at the beginning:

The Reality Check at 30,000 Feet

I left America on October 17th, 2012. I had a very convoluted flight path--from Seattle to Chicago, and from there to Tokyo, and on to Bangkok. Why cover so much ground twice, you might ask? Well, it wasn't my first choice, but the price was right. Even if it did add eight more hours to the trip.

The flight from Seattle to Chicago was pretty standard stuff--nothing so different from all the flights I took to and from Utah, where I went to college. At some point over the Pacific Ocean, though, the delayed reaction hit. The idea of leaving hadn't felt real for several weeks, even while I was packing and double-checking and re-packing. It felt real at 30,000 feet over the Pacific. Maybe it was just that all the announcements on the airplane were in Japanese as well as English. I'd been abroad before--even on a long-term basis--but I'd never been anywhere in Asia, and I'd never lived in a country that doesn't speak English as a first language. For a moment on the plane, I wondered if I was crazy to leave everything behind and go on this year-long adventure. It felt surreal. It felt like somebody else had made the choice to go, and I was just getting a very close look into someone else's life.

The moment passed, of course. Moments tend to do that. The moment on the plane, thankfully, wasn't a  freak-out, and I didn't exactly have second thoughts. It was a reality check . . . yes, I was really doing this, yes, I was really going half-way around the world, yes, I was really going all on my own. People I meet here sometimes ask me why I chose to come to Thailand. I don't have a good answer for them. Mostly it boils down to "because I wanted to experience something different" and "because I could." Which means it's going to be a great year. In the words of Doctor Who: Allons-y!