Nightmare in Bangkok ...

Whoa, there's someone holding up a sign for my connecting flight -- am I gonna get expedited processing thru' to my other plane, yippee :) Hmm, ok, we gotta wait for the 8 other ppl who're also making the same connection as myself. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I learn that our connecting flight has been delayed. So, this is somewhat good... it means that Bangkok Airport + China Airlines aren't likely to misplace my luggage. Oh hey, this airport looks nice ... there's a gold temple upstairs... sweet!!



We're all here .. or, more like, all the pax are outta da plane, and there's no one else coming on our connecting flight. Ok, off we go... large group of Nepaliz trundling through the airport.

Ok, to cut a long painful story short, our plane hasn't left Nepal yet!?!?! I know... unbelievable! It'll get here later on tonight... apparently around 1am... hey, it's 1pm right now. I'm supposed to stay here in BKK for 12 hrs ?!?!? Continuing with the shortened story: they had promised a paid hotel stay earlier, but ended up not offering it ... sux! And, this is a new airport terminal building ... they opened it *yesterday* ... just my luck. Worst of all, I can't get online ... nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo *gasp* oooooooooooooooooooooooooo *gasp* *gasp* oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Ok ok, it's no big deal, I can handle this. I'll take it like a man. I can handle no Internet! I was born handling no Internet!!! End of shortened story: some other ppl who've been here since last night know of this lounge area about 1/2 mile away... we trundle across, and I sleep for a while. Thank goodness for my pillow!



I wake up, and type this blog ... offline, in VIM, yeah VIM :)

Ok, here're some interesting things I saw in BKK

A buddhist monk making full use of a muslim prayer room ... all is fair in sleep and war :p



Another view of the Gold temple!! Instead of spending so much on aesthetics, the Thai airport authorities shoulda focused on setting up telephones & Internet access, no ??




A statue ... btw, there's loads and loads more in the airport! Very beautiful ... and I can't help but notice the Buddhist religious figures' similarities with Hindu ones :-/ Their names are also similar ... get this: the new airport is called Suvarnabhumi ... "auspicious ground" in Nepali!!



Guess what? My stay in BKK just reduced my KTM stay by a whole 12.5% :'(

Peace out, I'm hoping that nothing eventful will happen on the RNAC flight back to KTM. It's 7pm now, and flight's presumably @ midnight. Gettin to KTM ~3am.. sux, don't I know it!

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Oh wait, did I say 3am. I musta been drunk, or high, or both!!! A lotta sh*t happened, and eventually the THAI airport staff told us that they've finally received confirmation that our plane had left Kathmandu, bound for Bangkok. They heard this ~10pm, so, I'm assuming the plane will arrive ~2am, and be ready to leave around ~3am, getting us to KTM ~5am. We coped with the passing time with extreme agitation. The plane arrived.



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It takes forever, and we're still not allowed to board. Apparently, the airport tower in Kathmandu is shut down for the night, yup, I said it, friggin shut down for the night. What sorta idiot shuts down the airport after sending a plane out that they know is going to return straight away! So, it's almost 4am, and there's still talks about waiting for the 6am KTM re-opening time for the airport. It wasn't clear whether we were shooting to arrive in KTM for the opening, or whether we're gonna stay put in BKK until then, and only then actually head for KTM. This is friggin' unbelievable... but then again, I guess many things were.

I have no idea what's going on at home ... I guess they've figured that the plane was grounded for a few hours, and it's departure for BKK was delayed by 12hrs. I hope they've also found out that the plane won't return till Saturday morning. So, did I say that my cellphone didn't work in BKK ? It's all an unlikely sequence of extremely unfortunate events, hehe ... I had scheduled my VZW cellphone service to be suspended for the 3m I'm in BLR. Guess what? The suspension started approximately the same time I first found out that we were going to be stuck in BKK for a while... friggin Thailand has 007 as their access code for making international calls. WTF!!! Why can't they be consistent with the rest of the world and use + or 00 ... or atleast 011 like the US. Btw, I didn't find out it was 007 until later, much later. So, I couldn't call KTM .. and at some point, it became midnight, and hence Friday in California, and my phone stopped working!! Yep, ded phone .. D-E-D ded! Only thing it's useful for right now is to take pix and bluetooth them over to my laptop. Oh sh*t, just realised how much photo uploading is gonna suck over dialup in KTM ... yikes!!

So yeah, I couldn't call anywhere the entire day. Surprisingly there's an Internet/Phone booth at the departure gate, and the thing simply doesn't wanna accept my mastercard... yup, they should make a mastercard commercial from this ... "flying to BKK, 20hrs, delayed @ BKK, 17hrs, staring @ worthless Internet booth that doesn't accept MasterC@rd, 2hrs ... oh wait, that was meant to be priceless!!!" However, some folks had managed to scrounge up a few bahts here and there, and were able to make very short calls to home .. I inherited like 3-4 baht which was good enough for a coupla mins of Internet access... thank goodness for the GMail shortcut this booth had, thank goodness for mailing lists ... I had no money to call home, but I sho' 'nuff did have enough time to send email to a relevant group of people asking them to call home on my behalf, and pass on my msgs, hehe...