Hello to adventure 08-09! The days of counting down have finished and I am currently sitting in my hostel in Bangkok...

I can`t say that that trip here exactly went smoothly. The flight to Sydney was amazingly bumpy and the landing was terrifying, one of those ones where the whole plane goes from side to side, and I was definitely not the only one gripping the armrests with white knuckles! I consoled myself with the fact that at least I will get my meal first, being `special` aka gluten free. But no, turns out that didnt show up on the list...

6 hours in Sydney airport was pretty boring. Personally, despite not actually liking the city of Singapore much, I thought the airport was great! Sydney on the other hand was very average... I mean, there is a limit to the time spent entertaining myself watching people walk up to a computer witha broken mouse and try to use it - quite amazing how long people will spend trying to `fix` it...

Neither did me gluten free requests show up on the flight out of Sydney. But British airways were absolutely amazing. Apart from having a captain who sounded exactly like Hugh Grant (made the announcements worth listening to!) they did just give me the meal like Qantas did and hope that I could pick out some food from it. Oh no! The guy assured me that he could `find something for sure` and about half an hour afte everyone else had finished I had the best airplane meal I`ve ever had delivered! I swear i was the envy of all the surrounding passengers! Haha to them for being gluten consumers!! I got steak, roast veges, salad, frest fruit, fancy cheese, chocolate... I`m pretty sure they robbed it from the business class end. And it even came on proper plates and everything! I felt rather posh! :)

The feeling of poshness soon turned to exhaustion and frustration after I arrived in Bangkok at 10.30 pm here (about 4.30am in NZ) and got a taxi from the airport. The fact that the driver didn`t tell me he had no idea where the hostel I had booked was brought back multiple memories of being carted around African cities.... Although I suppose it would have been impossible as he spoke absolutely zero english. This I discovered about 5 minutes in... about one hour in I realised that the classic way of finding your way in Africa (asking whoever you meet where to go by yelling out of the window) isn`t the done thing here... So, we drove around and around and around Bangkok. The driver tried random bursts of Thai at me, but no, suprisingly enough, even repeating the same thing over again doesn`t make me suddenly a fluent speaker of thai! Lets be glad (Pollyanna quote for alice) that I did finally arrive at the hostel - at 1am!