Sawadee Kha (Thailand!) January 7, 2024

What I didn’t realize is that Peace Corps staff doesn’t accompany you on the travel to country, so you can imagine how trying to get 47 Peace Corps volunteers through checkin and security TSA was… a little chaotic. Nonetheless everyone made it on to the plane departing for Taipei, Taiwan. This plane ride was the longest I have ever been on, I can remember always complaining on the 4 hour plane ride to Honduras growing up, but 15 hours was a new challenge for me.

This is so far!

I decided pretty early on that I would rather be asleep the whole time so I took quite a bit of melatonin and anytime I woke up I took more to knock me back out. Which ended up working in my favor I got almost 8 hours of sleep. The nice thing about this red eye flight was that it left around midnight and with time changes + 15 hours later it ended up being early 10am by the time we got to Thailand. (I’m still not quite sure how this all works). They did give us meals on the plane which I have never gotten before and these were in my opinion GREAT.

This was the dinner meal it included fruit, duck, bread roll, stir fry pork, and a piece of cake. They also give us a breakfast meal, that I didn’t take a picture of but I chose the omelette (I was too nervous to try the fish floss porridge). I woke up with about 4 hours left. The layover in Taiwan was short, but I did get to find some quick fast food, and for those of you curious I did have chicken nuggets, sorry. AND GUESS WHAT, THEY HAD RANCH. Possibly my last time having ranch!? for only a while hopefully.

The flight from Taiwan to Thailand was nice, I got the window seat and just spent time appreciating the land and the Pacific ocean, which I have never seen before.

Right after landing in Thailand we all got off the plane together and were accompanied by the Peace Corps Thailand staff. They had a little sign for us and we did a final head count. They informed us we would be getting fast tracked through immigration, and we would have to grab our bags they said we could expect to be in there for a while. I was really surprised when immigration took no time at all and grabbing bags was also pretty quick. At staging they gave us yarn to tie to our bags, and told us to just grab anything that had yarn and at the end find your stuff. This process was really fast and efficient. Right after that we went out and got met by another sign.

We exchanged some money and took some more photos, which I am including here don’t you worry!

Finally we loaded onto the buses and headed to the training center 2 hours away, checked in and now I’m here. Writing this for you all to see. Also I can say I have tried the inf

amous Southeast Asian “bum gun” it’s going to take trial and error and more tries but from my understanding it’s more hygenic than the western way.

Anyways, It’s currently 4:13 pm here in Thailand January 7th, due to time changes and starting right at 11:30pm on the 5th we never got to experience January 6th which is crazy we just skip a day. It is 1:13am in San Francisco and 3:13 am in Wisconsin which makes this officially over 24 hours of travel (about 28 hours total) . We are all tired, exhausted, probably dehydrated, but also so excited to be in Thailand to start this journey. All the encouraging words mean the world.

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SAWADEE KHA THAILAND!

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January 7, 2024