I wake up and immediately decide my watch is lying to me. There is no way that it’s already 9AM. After getting to sleep at 4AM due to internships yesterday I feel exhausted. Lucky for me classes are relatively easy, with the only notable thing being a video on Halo Effect in my ever favorite Judgment and Decision Making. What they basically did was to hire two actors – one that looks good and one that, well… doesn’t. They give them basically identical resumes and have them both apply and interview for the same job. They also did a test with a pretty woman stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and another, average woman. Now, it doesn’t take an astronautical engineer (aka rocket scientist) to guess what happened. While the average looking woman stood there for 45 minutes before someone offered to help her, and he only gave her a couple suggestions before continuing on his way. Next, the pretty woman stood there and cars were screeching to a halt, people from both sides of the street walked over, all trying to help her fix her car problems. Some of them even offered to walk all the way to the gas station to buy her a gallon of gas. You can probably guess what then happened with the job interview as well. The pretty girl got job offers from all five jobs she applied to, the average girl didn’t even get any calls back.
So, I get back after class and madly pack for Thailand. We then head off to the MTR get to the airport without any issues, Thailand here we come! A quick note about our flight is in order here. There are only six of us on this flight and one guy on a different flight. You might ask why, but once I explain that we’re flying Air Kenya you might understand. To put it mildly, my friend’s mother is paranoid about air travel and wouldn’t let him buy a ticket on this flight. In the end, the flight was a lot of fun and very nice. The fact that Kenya was recently almost in a civil war due to their presidential elections and allegations of vote rigging made me slightly nervous to be honest, but Kenya Air is the best airline in Africa and has an excellent safety record. Not to mention that it was about 200 USD cheaper than the other flight. The most interesting part was that they spoke Swahili and the flight attendants were dressed in traditional African attire. It was a most relaxing atmosphere and I highly recommend them.
We arrived in Thailand without problems… yet. You see, my friend Brian, the guy who was on a different flight than the rest of us, and we never really discussed where we’d meet after our flights landed. So we ended up searching the airport for around 40 minutes trying to find him. As for the airport itself, I was most impressed. It was not only modern, but one of the nicest airports I’ve ever seen. After getting through customs we manage to get outside and find two taxis to take us to our hotel. If you want to know how that went, read the first paragraph. Basically, the city was very nice with modern roads and freeways and such things, but the traffic laws are blatantly ignored. Our driver sped at who knows what speeds and swerved all over, sometimes driving on the other side of the road! I honestly thought I was going to die a few times, especially considering the fact that there weren’t seatbelts! Let’s just say that the ride was both enlightening as well as thrilling.
We arrived at our hotel at 2:30AM local time (Thailand is one hour behind HK) and it took about half an hour to check in. The hotel itself was very nice and was a 4-star hotel, yet still only $40 USD a night per room. We actually got upgraded rooms and the rooms themselves were not only beautiful, but quite comfy. The coolest thing was the fact that I got my very own king sized bed, although I felt like I somehow needed to use all that space. I think the pictures of the hotel will explain better than I can.
This was the pool. Pretty nice.
My giant king size bed.
The bedrooms are separate from the living area, I like nice hotels!
A view of the city at night from the 12th floor lobby.
We ended up looking around the hotel some more and deciding what we wanted to see the next day before finally getting to bed around 4AM. Like I said before, our adventure was about to begin. On a more practical note, I would like to apologize to anyone reading this. I went on this trip a month and a half ago and am just now getting around to writing my blog entry on the first day. I’m trying my best to get caught up and thank you for taking your time to read all the way through. The rest of Thailand proved to be most interesting and I recommend you continue on.
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