China Layover update

I decided I wanted a place to put some of my journaling from our Thailand trip, so here it is cyberspace.

Thailand!!! We left our house in CA at 5:30am Friday morning and 5 airports later, we arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand Sunday night. This place isn't easy to get to and we've had a few adventures and mishaps getting here (which is to be expected when traveling outside the comfort of the states), but we arrived and LOVE it here!!! We had layovers in LA and Shanghai and Kunming, China before getting here. Shanghai we were able to leave the airport and stay at a hotel.

Thanks to jetlag, we only slept from 1am-5am so we were able to make good use of our 12 hours outside the airport eating pea ice cream and lo mein from a street vendor. We expected to get out and see the rural area around no-where China too during our 7 hour layover, but no ATMs would take our funny American visa or bank account card. Which happened to be a problem not just because we were stuck at a nothing-to-do airport which no chairs to lay down in, but we were really really hungry and had run out of money. We finally managed to find a cup of soup for just over a buck and it was the best $1 spent on our vaca so far.

Thoughts on China from our itty bitty experience: China is still communist (imagine that) and they want you to know they are watching you, everywhere, all the time. The people are hard workers, early to bed, early to rise: they were all in bed by 10:30 and all up at 6am working out and dancing all over the town Sunday morning. Okay, broad generalization, but that's what it looked like--I have tons of pics. Serious people, kitchy cheap stuff to sell, interesting food, resourceful.

And now for some sleep...