Are we there yet?

By: Sarah Pierson and Leah Jeglum

Sarah’s post

When I first walked outside the airport my first reaction was its hot and humid but I can handle it.  It was a big jump walking out of the nice air conditioned airport and walking to the vans.  There was mass confusion to what van to get in and trying to find space for the vans to park.  Once we finally got going, I was half asleep trying to take in as much as I could.    I first noticed that driving on the roads was opposite and that Thai drivers are pretty aggressive, they go where they want.  We noticed that most of the cars are honda, nissan or toyota.  I was surprised to see all the garbage on the side of the road and further in the trip noticed that it is hard to find garbage cans.  There were also little shacks on the side of nicer buildings and everything wasn’t as organized as other cities are.  I was also surprised how big Bangkok is.  New York City has its clump of really tall buildings surrounded by smaller ones and suburbs.  Comparatively, Bangkok doesn’t have very tall buidings and looks like one giant suburb.  I was expecting it to be cleaner and the buildings to be more impressive than they were.  I didn’t feel as much as a culture shock as we made our way to the hotel.  There were more asians but other than that the people seemed very nice and eager to meet us.  Thus far i am loving Thailand!

Leah’s post

When our plane touched down in Bangkok, I immediately felt the change in weather, which included the dramatic increase in humidity.  While my hometown isn’t the most moist place in the world, I thought living in Salt Lake would help me with the transition.  I could not have been any more wrong!  To this day, the humidity and heat are an issue for me, but I am slowly getting more and more acclimated to the weather.

When driving into Bangkok, all I could think was that this city is HUGE!  I still am having a hard time grasping the fact that it is a metropolis of 14 million people, especially when I am used to cities of no more than 500,000 people, but I have a feeling that when I return in the next week, it will not be such a shock to my system, or at least I hope so.