Stranded at the airport on Christmas day! (Bangkok, Thailand)

How typical is this? Of course its never happened to me before, but now I can say that it has!

From our guesthouse, you're able to book a mini van to the airport for a cheap fee, well Jeremy and I forgot to book one yesterday so we weren't able to catch one. Instead, we hurried and caught a taxi ride instead for a lot more money. We arrived at the airport at 9:30am, only to find out that our 12:00pm departure flight to Manila has been delayed by several hours. We're flying with Kuwait Airlines and the plane hadn't even left Kuwait yet for some reason. Our suspected departure now is 4:30pm, I've got a couple more hours here at the airport. We probably won't arrive in Manila til about 9 or 10pm, there goes Christmas dinner with the relatives I guess. At least the airport's playing Christmas music, that's a nice bonus!


Thai Style

Bangkok, being the modern mecca it is, there's a definite feel of Christmas in the air, however I think their definition of Christmas is only based on Santa Claus. Jesus, who's Jesus? Oh well, its nice to see a bunch of Thais wearing those red Santa hats everywhere.

The other night Jeremy and I went to a movie theatre that was showing "The Polar Express". We were lucky that it was in English with Thai subtitles. However, in the movie there's parts where it has things that are in written in Thai! I don't wanna spoil the movie, but at the end of the film where you're supposed to read what written on the train tickets, we have no idea what it says and its an important part when a big thing is revealed.

Last night (Christmas Eve) the two of us went up the Baiyoke II sky tower and had a huge international buffet overlooking all of Bangkok. Stuffed myself with everything of course, including some turkey and cranberry sauce. Yummy.

Afterwards, at around 10:45pm we tried to venture off to find a Catholic Church to celebrate midnight mass. This was a little problematic, every Thai person we asked had no idea what a church is.

"Church... you know... Cathedral?"
"What? City tour?"

"We go to church... Christmas, you know, Christmas?"
"No, no, no... Christmas no today... Christmas tomorrow.... closed, you go hotel... sleep"

Well we finally made it to this beautiful cathedral built by Portugese in the 18th century. We got there around 11:15 and discovered that they had a mass at 10pm, not midnight. Oh well, we still got to partake in the festivities. After the mass there was juice and baked goods being served, of course we were too full bastards who couldn't have another bite though. Inside the priest was at the altar calling out numbers (in Thai) and the people sat in the pews with what appeared to be raffle tickets stuck to the back of chewing gum packs. The congregation was giving away some fancy, all-out Christmas presents; including blankets, rice-cookers, bicycles, electic fans, huge teddy bears and the grand prize, a refridgerator! Wow, I wish my church did that.

Okay, I'm gonna see if can finally check in my luggage. Once again... Merry Christmas!