I am sitting in a very sleek, modern hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand trying to find all the pieces to the alarm clock I just threw across the room. You do odd things when you’re a bit sleep deprived and, yes, a bit angry at an alarm you didn’t set.
While I’m not sure this is the right frame of mind to be writing, I wanted to give it a shot.
I’m in Thailand working on some stories for the MSUToday show. I’m here with our director and videographer Alberto Moreno, David Skole and Jay Samek who are the forestry experts from Michigan State University and Jamie DePolo who’s writing news stories about all of this for MSU News.
We’re here for two weeks of production that will take us around Thailand and into Laos. We’ll be checking out the work MSU is doing with biofuels, sustainability, carbon credits and lots of other things I’ll go into after I wake up all the way.
We got to Bangkok just before midnight. It was about 24 hours after leaving Detroit. While I don’t think two hours in Narita Airport qualifies for having “been to Japan,” it was cool to have my feet on the ground in Asia for the first time. Well, actually that’s not true. We were in Dubai on a shoot last fall, which is technically Asia, but doesn’t feel very Asian.
Anyway…So it was about a 12-hour flight from Detroit to Tokyo, then another six to Bangkok. A very hot, very humid cab ride to the hotel where I am.
After being perplexed by the light switches in the room and spending almost an hour on the phone with the “experts” from my wireless carrier (who shall remain nameless) trying (successfully!) to get my global BlackBerry to actually work globally, I collapsed into bed just after 3:00a.m.
I was looking forward to the fewer than four hours of sleep I had in store so you can imagine my horror at the 5:30a.m. alarm I did not set. And so maybe you can also understand why I felt compelled to make time literally fly a few minutes ago.
And you can probably understand why I am praying for coffee in Thailand.
8:05a.m.
Just back from the breakfast buffet . I am happy to report that not only do they have coffee, but that it is nice and strong. I’m not generally a big fan of the breakfast buffet, but when it includes both bacon AND dim sum…well…that’s pretty tough to beat.
Bangkok breakfast “American.”
Dim sum breakfast in Bangkok.Dave Skole just told me that Thailand is the Land of Smiles.”You can pretty much get anything done if you smile enough.”
The people here do seem friendly, very courteous.
Of course, they haven’t seen what I did to the clock yet.
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