Thailand VIII

On the 30th we flew back to Bangkok and Monique stayed at the airport because she was flying back to Korea. So I had a couple days alone in Bangkok, and I spent it shopping and checking out the sites. It's really easy to get around Bangkok; I mostly just used the sky train then I'd just wander around all day looking at stuff.

Went to see the biggest golden buddha in the world. It was big alright.


Since I didn't get to see any sharks on the islands, I decided an aquarium was the next best thing.

Here's the entrance to China town. I'd visited Chinatowns before (like in Toronto), but this one was HUGE. Everything was red and gold and being sold at low low prices "What you pay? What you pay?? Discount!".

Here's a typical Buddhist Shrine. You can't really see it in the picture, but there were a bunch of people hanging around, and the air was think with incense.

After all of this I was ready to go back to Korea and sleep in my own bed. My plane ride home was much more eventful than on the way there! There was a short stop off in Hong Kong, and after going through security I was sitting in the waiting room near the entrance gate. I was just doing my regular people watching, when I see a pilot walk up to the gate entrance, presumably waiting to get on the plane. He appeared quite professional, except that he looked about sixteen years old. Then the flight staff approached him, and I couldn't understand everything (because they were speaking in Chinese, Korean and just a little English), but I heard one of the flight staff ask him to take off his jacket. I started laughing at this point, realizing that it was just some crackpot who was REALLY into flying.

Shortly after I was let back onto the plane, and who do you think was to be sitting next to me for the next three hours? The crackpot of course. He starts talking to me, and by this point I'm pretty amused by the situation, so I asked him what was going on. It turns out the crackpot is a young Korean man who wants to be a pilot, and he was in China visiting his father. His English wasn't so good, but he definitely got the point accross that some day it was his wish to become a pilot. He made sure to show me his multiple folders of flight plans, airport terminal maps, China maps, Korea maps etc etc. As the plane was taxi-ing down the airstrip he pretended to be "the ATC" (air traffic control) all in English, so I thought it was for my benefit, but when I tried to respond he acted as though I was interrupting VERY important business. "Take off in one.. two... three". Then we had a semi-literate talk about politics "Bushie... Bushie no good. Bushie stupid", before he tracked our entire flight, pointing important factoids out to me as he read.

I'm not sure if he had some sort of disability; he seemed like a smart guy, and he spoke three languages which is more than I could ever do, but man he was WEIRD, kind of an Asian rainman! But hey, he didn't have a homemade bomb on board, so I was happy. And even though the flight attendants thought he was a psycho he got to take a picture with the pilot in the cockpit (which he reminded me of about five times. "Yeah, you told me! That's great! You're very lucky!".

So I arrived back at Incheon airport in Seoul at about 10pm and was able to take a train to Naju arriving around 2:30am. Back to my Korea home.