tropical casa niedzwiecki

Huzzah! The family has arrived! As much as I was enjoying my time alone (see below), I'm pleased to report that I'm enjoying having company even more. I am not a complete hermit. Yet. Ji has run raging back into our lives and while we still hate his whiny spells, we are loving his cheery non-stop narration about every moment he is awake. AND not only that, he finally remembered a dream and was able to tell me about it in the morning. He woke up all bleary and jet lagged after a day back in Thailand and said, "Mum, I had a dream that I was still in Canada. But then I woke up and was like, 'why is it so hot here?'" I've been pestering him to remember more, but so far to no avail.

By all accounts, Mum, Emma, and Ji's trip across the Pacific was a stellar one. They kicked it all off in high gear by travelling in business-class appropriate gear rather than sloppy sweats and sneakers. Em had told us that there'd be more chance of getting bumped up to business if everyone looked the part, and I think they all cleaned up pretty durn good. See for yourself.->

Note that Ji is wearing an Italian suit jacket of blended wool, a white button down Ralph Lauren Polo button down, slacks, and grey calfskin Italian loafers with leather soles. His hand-tailored tuxedo (and I ain't kidding, he's got one) was sent ahead with his luggage.

The fam was able to get on an early morning flight to Seoul on standby - muchas gracias, Emma! Not only were the tickets pennies a seat, but there were seats a-plenty. Everyone got an entire ROW of seats to themselves. This is a very good thing because Ji is a notoriously wretched sleeper - he sleeps soundly, is not disturbed by jet engines or monsoon storms, but he writhes and wriggles and digs his elbows into his sleep-fellows every chance he gets. Mum tells me that Ji was entirely well-behaved and patient during the flight and played especially well with the piggy-that-poops toy that Emma had brought. This toy is the BOMB, man. It's a small (3 cm) medium-flexible pink plastic pig on a keychain, and when you squeeze the pig, a brown bit of squishy plastic pops briefly out of its bum hole. Like, it doesn't come out in a pellet, it just peeps out for a second. And best of all the poop plastic has an entirely different texture than the pig plastic. The poop part is sort of sticky, like one of those plastic things that you can sproing at a paper and snap up the paper, like a gecko's tongue. If that makes any sense! I'll have a full photo demonstration of the pooping pig tomorrow.

So, Ji was well entertained. When the fam arrived in Seoul's new Inchon airport, they checked into a hotel for a few hours and Emma ably went into super-airline-professional mode (going so far as to wear her high heels to walk along a one kilometre-long corridor so as to look extra well-put-together when requesting standby tickets). She was able to get shortly-departing onward tickets from Seoul to Bangkok, notify me of their arrival time by email, and even have a shower. Wow!

Handily enough, the tickets from Seoul to Bangkok were in Business Class, and the fam was waited on hand and foot by adorable and polite Korean air hostesses. This was a welcome relief after the painful and depressing service they'd received on Canadian airline X, which had included a flight attendant saying (upon seeing Ji holding a teeny tiny paddle with a minute ball attached to it with elastic) "I hope that's not all you've brought for him to play with on the flight, because he's not going to be able to use it." Uh, yeah, biatch. Whatever. The kid's wearing Italian calfskin loafers. Do you think that his only amusement's going to be a paddle ball? He's got his laptop, his PhD thesis, and his porn collection to keep him occupied too.

Ji slept all the way to Bangkok while Em caught up on movies and Mum rested a bit. When they arrived and we me them at the airport they all looked INSANELY well-rested. It was like they'd just flown Montreal to Ottawa. They were all clean, smelled great, didn't have charcoal circles under their eyes, and were all capable of stringing together grammatically correct sentences. Phet and I, meanwhile, were all exhausted and I was in the middle of an allergy attack, so we looked like the ones who'd been through the ringer.

Even more incredibly, the next day Mum and Emma were conscious and polite throughout daylight hours. Then they were polite and unconscious in the evening. I think Mum slept from 1 am to 3 am. She was a little tired, but cheery, and in just her first two days here she went to the corner store all by herself (braving wicked soi dogs and dastardly Ekkamai traffic), came to pick up Ji at school (braving the insane heat of high noon), went out for dinner (braving the treacherous Bangkok pavement and the public transit system!!), and made herself at home in my house (braving a complete lack of tea towels, an absence of spoons, a lack of laundry soap, a burn-inducing kettle, a malfunctioning coffee maker, a freezer bereft of ice cubes, a cupboard without tumblers, and a complete lack of booze aside from a giant bottle of gin, which she does not drink). So I'd say things are going pretty well! [Bangkok-25-September-2005]