oh boy it's fun here!

Yah hoo, the Dwyer-Niedzwiecki ladies are now all in Thailand all the time! Right on! Aunt Cathie has arrived and now the coven is complete. World domination will follow shortly.

Actually, Aunt Cathie's arrival day was actually not a great day for us (until she arrived, that is). I took Ji to school, and when I asked his teacher at 10 am how he was doing, she said, "Great!" Good, right? Nope. By 11 am he was in the nurse's room with a 39.5' fever. All that 'good behaviour' was just illness-induced lethargy. Mind you, once the tylenol kicked in and Ji realized he was all alone with his darling Nurse Way - who he's promised to marry - he chippered up. By the time I checked on him at 2 pm he was jumping on the sick bed. So I shipped him off to class for the last half hour of the day.

Our evening was spent attending to Ji. His fever went up and down a few times and we patted him down with cool cloths, plied him with non-dairy beverages, and encouraged him to nap. He slept well, and was still asleep when Em and I headed out to the airport to pick up Cathie at 7:30. Her flight was arriving at 8:15, so we were cutting it a tiny bit close, but I kept reassuring Em that we'd be there in time. We got to the terminal at 8:17 and raced down to arrivals. When we checked the arrivals screens, we found out the flight had been delayed an hour, so we made ourselves at home at the magazine shop. We had a drink, and then went to wait by the gate once the Tokyo flight had landed. We were handily equipped with Ji's golden Viking helmet and his superhero eye-band, and had a sign saying "Kathy Dywer - Viking Superhero Conference" printed on it.

Well, we waited and waited and waited. The JAL stewardesses came out looking ravishing, the pilots trotted along, the passengeres puzzled their way through the arrivals gates. But no Cathie. At 10:30 we became concerned. At quarter to eleven we were still training our eagle eyes on the arrivees, and Em said to me, "Hey, doesn't that look like my friend [name deleted to preserve annonymity]?" "Hey [friend X!]" I shouted. And lo and behold it was [friend X]. Em ran outside to catch up with her friend. She been writing to them for 3 months, telling them when she'd be in Bangkok, and suggesting they might meet up. Em and X came back inside and kept chatting while I went to call Mum to check if Cathie'd gotten home some mysterious round-about way. Then I walked to the far end of the arrivals section, to the group tours exit, to see if Cathie had somehow gotten herself mixed up down there. Nope. Then I walked all the way back to the proper arrivals section.

As a side note, the current Bangkok airport - new one opening next year supposedly - has a wretched arrivals area. If you need to walk from regular arrivals to tour arrivals, you MUST walk outside for 7 minutes along a poorly-lit sidewalk right beside the six thousand cabs coughing out clouds of carbon monoxide. And there's no air con. It sucks.

Uh, but getting back to the story, after X left, I had a melt-down of the sleep-deprived variety. "Oh Thab," I hear you saying. "It was only 11:30 pm for God's sake! Don't be such a loser." Well, I am sorry kind readers, but when I get up at 5:30, start teaching at 7:20, and leave school at 4:00 pm, I go to bed by ten o'clock at the latest. And that's if Phet's in town. If he happens to be in, oh, say, Bangladesh, then I hit the sack anywhere between eight and nine thirty. I was about to cry from tiredness and I made Em go figure out what to do. After all, she is the airline professional. She went and had Cathie paged. No response. We called Mum again to make sure we'd gotten the date right and she said we had. Finally, I caved in and told Em I had to go home or I was going to puke.

So we went home.

We left the airport at midnight and Cathie arrived at 12:30 am. Of course. Her flight had been delayed out of Chicago, and while she was in Tokyo she'd been unable to get through to us using the phone card she'd bought at a heftily high price. Once we'd gotten home we frantically called the JAL folks and got them to find out which flight Cathie was on. They were able to tell us she'd just landed and was headed to the baggage area. They handily intercepted her before she went into arrivals, telling her "Catherine, your family is gone. Your bag is here. You would like to telephone your family?" They very kindly helped her get a cab and made sure she had the correct address.

And thus it came to pass that Cathie arrived in Bangkok with no one to greet her but an airline employee, and arrived at our house when Ji and I and Mum were utterly, completely asleep. Hope the rest of her trip is all uphill from there! [Bangkok-28-September-2005]