Retrospect...

Okay, I know. It's been a week since I last posted, I've fallen off the mark. My excuses are as follows: 1. very busy final days, which included a lot of traveling, 2. lack of Internet access (or the necessary 10 bht pieces for Internet), 3. I got sick from food poisoning at the Shanghai airport on our way back, and am still recovering from the various related events coming from that, 4. classes just started. Sue me.

Now that that's been covered, back to the point!

We spent another day or so in Mae Sot, visiting the Friendship Bridge right at the border between Thailand and Burma, meeting with some last organizations, and being stalked by minglaba-man, before heading back to Chiang Mai on Friday morning. There again, we held meetings and an evening monk chat at MCU Buddhist University. That night we said goodbyes to our stellar van drivers Neung and Oo (Oh? Eau?) so that in the morning we took two large tuk-tuks to the Chiang Mai airport to fly to Bangkok once more. The scheduled meeting there fell through, which I don't think too many of us were upset about-- at that point we had hit maximum exhaustion level. So instead we spent our last group dinner at the nearby restaurant Cabbages and Condoms, which actively promotes the use of birth control and safe sex, even giving out free condoms to its patrons and having a gift shop at the entrance. Oh yeah, that was interesting. We didn't get much rest though, as we soon made our way to Bangkok's international airport for a 2AM flight to Shanghai, China (thanks to Fan's awesomeness, I think this went relatively smoothly considering how much trouble the China Eastern airline had given us during the trip about Ben's ticket. Why it should be invalid just because he didn't use the first one is beyond me).

Phase 1 of return journey complete, we set ourselves up for a 12 hour layover-- some of the group decided to go out and see some of Shanghai in all its rainy glory, some of us decided to park it in the terminal and wait it out. I would love to describe all the adventures that the explorers of Shanghai got into, but I myself don't really recall their stories for the reason mentioned above. And the layover turned into a 15.5 hour one anyways, so we all ended up waiting there a long time.

The 13-14 hour flight was relatively uneventful, far less bouncy than our ride out of Bangkok anyways (Amanda and I were pretty sure we were going to crash and burn). Or at least I hope it was for the rest of the group. Suffice it to say that the flight attendants took the best care of me they could.

When we finally landed in JFK at 1AM, I think we were all singing the praises of America. And, like a guardian angel, our bus driver was right there waiting for us when we came out with our luggage, ready to drive us all the way down to American University (arriving at about 5AM) without disaster. At which point our journey together officially ceased.

So. This could potentially be this blog's final update. But it may not be. After all, we're all feeling fairly determined to act on what we've seen and learned.