Day 40

It was a short flight to Singapore and then a much longer flight to Germany. I had a few hundred baht leftover so I handed the teller at the currency exchange a stack and asked how many euro I could get. She shrugged and said "not much". I asked if it was enough for something at the coffee shop and she said probably and handed me 5 euro and some change. The meals and movie selections were all different on this flight and I was still impressed with Singapore Air. I watched some of The Office, Scrubs, Arrested Development and also saw X-men 3 (the diplomat turned fighter in The Beast reminded me of Cro Cop), Davinci Code, Godfather II and a little of Nacho Libre. We touched down a little late at 11:00 am at JFK and I was pretty sure I was going to miss my 1:00 pm flight from LaGuardia. Somehow I was able to get my bags, get through customs, get a taxi, get to LGA, get my bags checked in, get through security and to my terminal by a little after 12. I got to Atlanta with about an hour and a half to kill so I walked around a little bit and read some magazines in the bookstores. I realized it had been about 11 hours since I'd eaten so I stopped at Moe's and got a big burrito. They were playing Ray Charles and I was having a pretty decent time when they paged me to the gate my flight was departing from. The terminal was empty when I got there and I was smiling when I walked up to the desk. She said "Are you Nicholas Thomas?" I just kept smiling and winked at her. She said "Honey get on this plane so we can get out of here - we're just waiting on you!" The front half of the plane (where my seat was) was pretty full. However the back half of the plane was basically empty so I took a row to myself near the back. As we took off Willy Nelson's XM radio station was playing Lorretta, Waylon and Hank Jr. and I was almost home.

So thats it, my family picked me up and we ate at Los Lupes and its back to reality.

There were a few stories I forgot to tell:

One night I was walking into Greenwich Village from Tribeca as the sun was setting and I heard organ music and church bells. The music echoed off the walls and throughout the neighborhood and I followed the sound to find a church having an evening service.

I forgot to mention the time I stopped at an internet cafe and they weren't open but they said I could go ahead and come in. The owner was farang and his daughter kept checking on me and eventually she said she was going to sleep but I could pay her dad when I left. I found him in a room that looked like it could be in NORAD. He sat at a desk in a middle of the room facing a wall with three enormous hi-def flat screen computer monitors with scrolling stock information on them. There were dozens of other flatscreens that covered every wall in the room except the one behind him. It was probably 10 or 11 at night and I'm not even sure which markets he was trading in. As Gordon Gekko said, the market never sleeps.

I forgot to mention the time I went to visit Wat Chalong (the temple) at night, and got chased out by a pack of dogs.

One morning I put on my shoes and I had a frog in each one. Both lived. While I was packing up I noticed another frog amidst my clothes, inside my bag. That could have been a problem at customs.