The plane took off at 10:30 PM. I arrived at the airport at 6:30 and got through security in 15 minutes because there was no one there, which gave me about 3.5 hours. While sitting and eating some gourmet pizza from the Wolfgang Puc express oven in the waiting area, an older Italian gentleman, maybe in his fifties, sat down next to me. He didn't speak any English, while I, having studied Italian for four years in high school, remembered how to say, "I studied in high school for four years," and almost nothing else. I managed to tell him I was headed to Thailand (Thailandia, he corrected me), and that it was my first time out of the country. Then his similarly aged friends came and sat down, and they all started talking way too fast for me to pretend anything Italian. It was my first experience, I thought excitedly, of not understanding what people around me were saying. One of them had bought a doggy bone-shaped, vibrating neck pillow from an overpriced shop near the waiting area, and the others made dirty gestures with it, indicating the funniest places to stick it and how fast to jerk it, all the while nodding at me for agreement. I nodded back, of course, but wasn't I wanted any of them to shake my hand.
I flew Cathay Pacific, an Asian airline based in Hong Kong. The thing about Asian airlines, unlike American ones, is that they serve food continuously throughout the flight, and also about every six hours, starting half an hour after take off. The first stop was Vancouver, about 2:00 AM local time. Upon descent, I couldn't hear anything because I'd gotten a fever and my head, like a microwave stuffed with marshmallows, was so pressurized that thoughts, let alone sounds, could barely fit. The next leg, to Hong Kong airport, was eighteen hours. I watched a few movies but tried to stretch often. I was delirious with fever, and the girl sitting next to me, who, I'd learned from polite conversation, was also going to Thailand, became more and more suspicious. Was she really sleeping, or just trying to force me off guard? I'd seen it too many times. I was also blowing my nose constantly, which made me self-conscious because I was surrounded by hundreds of strangers in an enclosed, airtight cylinder. Maybe they'd think I had a disease, that I was a health risk and would need to be eliminated. Or if there was some kind of weight issue or something, I, being only half healthy anyway, would be the first one thrown overboard. If that's what they call it for airplanes.
I flew Cathay Pacific, an Asian airline based in Hong Kong. The thing about Asian airlines, unlike American ones, is that they serve food continuously throughout the flight, and also about every six hours, starting half an hour after take off. The first stop was Vancouver, about 2:00 AM local time. Upon descent, I couldn't hear anything because I'd gotten a fever and my head, like a microwave stuffed with marshmallows, was so pressurized that thoughts, let alone sounds, could barely fit. The next leg, to Hong Kong airport, was eighteen hours. I watched a few movies but tried to stretch often. I was delirious with fever, and the girl sitting next to me, who, I'd learned from polite conversation, was also going to Thailand, became more and more suspicious. Was she really sleeping, or just trying to force me off guard? I'd seen it too many times. I was also blowing my nose constantly, which made me self-conscious because I was surrounded by hundreds of strangers in an enclosed, airtight cylinder. Maybe they'd think I had a disease, that I was a health risk and would need to be eliminated. Or if there was some kind of weight issue or something, I, being only half healthy anyway, would be the first one thrown overboard. If that's what they call it for airplanes.
A friend of mine gave me some Ambien and diarrhea medication before I left. I put them in a very tiny plastic Ziploc bag, the kind for cocaine, which I put in my wallet. I hadn't taken the pills because I don't like to be adventurous with drugs when I'm already fighting a war inside my body, and when I got to Hong Kong, I had to go through another security check with illegal-as-hell looking baggie on my person. Having not slept for more than four hours, having no idea what a Hong Kong security check entailed, knowing that I was in fact carrying them illegally (are diarrhea pills legal in Hong Kong?), and reminding myself that getting caught smuggling drugs into Asia would be pretty embarrassing, I panicked and dumped the baggie into a garbage can while waiting in line to go through the metal detector. I was shaking, trying to discreetly cover the pills with a candy bar wrapper, failing to do so, and then just dropping them next to the candy wrapper. The white guy behind me looked into the can suspiciously and then at me in horror. I tried the, "Just looking around at you because this line is taking so long, right?!" look, but he wasn't convinced. Then, I thought, there's no way to prove that it was mine. So fuck you, buddy. Then I thought, oh shit, this is Asia, I don't know how the legal system works here. And the cameras. Why didn't I think of that? But he wouldn't want to go through the trouble of pointing me out, because then they'd arrest him too, probably, or at least it would delay his departure time, and that's, like, the worst thing that could happen to anyone. I didn't look back again.
I got through without incident and swore to God never to take pills on a plane with me again, or something. The next two flights were to Bangkok and then to Khon Kaen. My ears felt like I'd had dictionaries simultaneously thrown at both sides of my head, but I finally got to a pharmacy in Bangkok and bought some ibuprofen, which did very little.
By the time I arrived at the Glacier hotel in downtown KK, it was somehow 1:30 PM. I still couldn't hear, my muscles felt like they had yogurt in them, and I couldn't stop thinking about how I'd overpaid for the cab ride from the airport. But I was there. I was BK to KK, and my year had begun.
