Super suave

After spending the weekend reading reports of delayed and cancelled flights in and out of SFO due to the Asiana crash, Leah and I were relieved to take off from San Francisco on Air China Flight 986 at 3 PM on Tuesday afternoon (though it was sobering and not a bit unsettling to glance out the airplane window as we taxiied from the gate and see the charred wreckage of the Asiana Boeing still blocking an adjacent runway). We were especially pleased with ourselves for having each brought only a sngle suitcase and small backpack with us, a fact that we continually congratulated ourselves on as we glided suavely around the other passengers in the airport. "Look at all the giant bags that Asian family's trying to check!" I cackled. "Those Indian parents are never going to be able to fit those Costco bags of pistachios and cartons of Tang into their carry-ons!" I don't think you can fully appreciate the joy of traveling light until you've spent a decade hauling a 45-pound fencing bag with you on 90% of your trips.

    Super suave

Our journey continued to be relatively pleasant and uneventful for the first several hours of our flight. Leah watched a movie on her iPad and I finished a book. Our first moment of excitement arrived with dinner. Now, since I'm used to the pace of meal service on American airlines (a pace at which the people in row 24 can easily finish eating by the time the people in row 28 are deciding between chicken and pasta; at which you can read three chapters of "Into Thin Air" in between getting your food and the complimentary beverage that comes with it; and at which anyone with a special meal becomes so ravenous while waiting for their food that they end up eating a thousand calories' worth of yogurt trail mix by the time they get their 200 calories' worth of steamed carrots and rice, Leah and ithought it was safe to wait a little bit after receving our food to start eating.

    All 200.

Not so. We were halfway through our entrees when we realized that the flight attendants were already plowing up the aisles with their garbage carts. "If I down this yogurt really fast, I think I can make it!" I hissed to Leah. "Oh God oh God," she muttered in response, ripping the plastic wrap off her container of cubed melon. The garbage carts advanced towards us with frightening speed. We stabbed sporks into salad. We barely managed to dump our trash with the Chinese blitzkriegers before they zoomed past us, and counted ourselves lucky that we were able to avoid an additional thirty minutes sharing our economy tray table space with a few leftover grains of rice and the one piece of honeydew that we all leave behind.

As it turned out, though, we hadn't seen the last of the meal service commandos. After dinner and another movie, at around 8:30, Leah and I began to try to trick our circadian rhythms into thinking that it was bedtime--a delicate, hour-long process that involves much flossing and tooth-brushing and Ambien-taking and staunchly avoiding looking at that irritating passenger with his window shade cracked to reveal the bright sunlight outside. By 9:30, we were ready for sleep. By 10 we were asleep. And at 10:30, we were jolted out of sleep by the cries of "ESSUSE ME!? ESSCUSE ME?! YOU OLDEL SPESSAL VEGGIE MEAL?" Coming from two Chinese flight attendants bent disconcertingly close to our faces with trays of second dinner--something that i had believed was unique to college campuses, but apparently exists om Air China as well. Before we could think twice, we had accepted the meals that our brushed-and-flossed selves had no intention of eating. And so it was that, despite our earlier efforts, we ended up spending quality time with cantaloupe.

I'll condense the rest of this blog post by saying that we made it to the Beijing airport, the Bangkok airport, and our airport hotel in Bangkok without further significant incident. We're now in Kanchanaburi, a town a couple of hours outside of Bangkok, where we'll be based for the next few nights. We'll update you more on our activities here shortly, but here's a teaser: