Airports, Airplanes, and I always forget how awful Jetlag is...

So! I am in Bangkok! And I am exhausted! It was so frustrating, jaunting around the globe without internet access! I got off the plane in BKK and it hit me, more fully, that I had no phone, no car, and no internet. It was a little upsetting. But I found my dear friend, got a bit of sleep and am thinking about getting a cheap pre-paid phone for my time here. (You can do that here without breaking the bank, apparently. I hope that means grad student banks, too.)

Here are the meandering thoughts I composed along the way here:

JFK, New York: I’m feeling chatty and there’s no one here to talk to, sadly. So I will write down what I’m thinking and post this sometime when I can find a free wi-fi connection.

It’s been an interesting day already. I stayed up all night packing and cleaning (and finding things that should have gone in storage when it was far too late to do anything about it), so I was pretty tired when the shuttle came for me at 5:30. I felt a little anxious when I got in because the van smelled like beer. And then the first thing the driver said to me was, “I haven’t slept since Wednesday.”

“Great,” I thought. “He hasn’t slept and he’s possibly drunk. This could be a tragic beginning to this adventure!”

It turned out that he’d taken a charter group to a concert the night before and let them tailgate out the back.

Philly looks different at 5:30 in the morning. It’s much quieter and serene. It felt weird to be leaving. Driver drove a bit maniacally and so I ended up at JFK well before I needed to. I dragged myself into the terminal feeling slightly grumpy at the thought of how long I was going to have to sit and wait.

When I got inside the airport, I felt a bit overwhelmed. In the three and a half years since I last flew internationally, everything has gotten technologized. I wasn’t sure how to use the self-check in kiosks and I felt a bit of a fool. This made me want to think deep thoughts about how technology is slowly changing our culture and how people interact with each other, but I feel like I’m on jetlag already so I gave up.

There is nothing quite like an airport terminal though. Everything is extremely expensive and streamlined. You must proceed in designated, straight lines from point A to point B. You enter a separate realm of existence: once you pass through security you are in the world of the terminus, a pathway to the next place separated from its physical location by passports, boarding passes and metal detectors. The plane is an extension of these lines: a metal capsule in the sky, connecting one no-man’s-land to another.

Your flight carries you to another terminal, which feels strangely familiar. Even though you may be in a completely different country, unless you go back through the security process, you are not really present. Your hours in the airport don’t count; you just pass through. You are invisible, unless you deviate from the approved procedures and then you are unpleasantly hyper-visible, a possible menace to the world. The terminus is a world of ordered and regulated discomfort: from the uncomfortable chairs to the glaring lights you are never allowed to forget that you are on your way somewhere else. Real life happens outside the boundaries of the airport. Inside you can only wait, disconnected from everything.

Narita, Tokyo: This lack of internet access feels like I’m flying blind, as it were, and increases my feeling of forced disconnect. Obviously, the terminal isn’t ‘real’ since I can’t get in touch with anyone without spending a lot of money!

One flight down. I was very worried when a mother and young child came to sit in my row. But the little guy was very well behaved and I envied his ability to sleep. I did manage to sleep quite a bit, but no thanks to the people in the row behind me, who decided that their light needed to be on the whole flight and insisted on flirting with each other at the top of their lungs.

I was thinking about the associations with “free spiritedness” and traveling. It struck me that air travel, in particular, is not really compatible with just going wherever your whim takes you. Because of the regimentation, once you are in the airport you are locked into your path of travel. There aren’t any detours for airplanes, (or, if there are, they are usually unexpected and unwelcome). Once you sit down you must stay there for however many hours until you touch ground. Time is kind of weird in flight too. You pass through time zones so fast, so it’s like, what time is it actually for me? Is it the zone I left? The zone I’m going to? The one I’m racing through?

Bangkok: That was possibly the smoothest trip I’ve had to date. I think the guy I was sitting next to was sneaking the complimentary single bottles of wine into his bag, because he took like eight of them and he was walking in a straight line when we disembarked. It was certainly one of the quickest trips through customs I’ve had! BKK airport is pretty amazing. When I'm there on Friday I'l try to get some pictures.

I’m afraid I slept too much on the plane though. Right now, it’s about 7 am, my current time, and I guess I slept around 1 am or so. (It’s interesting how discussions of time internationally go; it’s “my morning” or “my tomorrow” and “your night.”) I was going to try to stay up the last flight but it was easier to sleep. None of the movies seemed appealing. So now I'm wide awake but exhausted. (Jetlag isn't just feeling sleepy; it's feeling like you're moving through molasses and it just seems easier to lie down. A physical effect of being yanked through time, I guess.)

It is so humid! I don’t think I can describe it; it’s so familiar and right now I love it but by the end of the day I will probably feel very differently! It’s like a blanket.

I still wish I had a phone! Seriously, one of the reasons I decided to try blogging this trip was so I felt like I was still connected to everyone.

I need some coffee. But I’m so excited for the day!