From Boulder to Bangkok

Been traveling for a day and a half now, mostly in the air. Boulder—Denver—LA—waiting—another flight—Taipei. Another flight. Lots of turbulence. Around midnight, or noonish by my body clock, we touch down in an enormous shopping mall, which turns out to be Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok.

The next ten hours are a blur of advertising. Win a Bentley a month and a gram of gold per kilo you weigh! Spa and foot massages available, as well as duty-free coffee, whiskey, clothing, purses, jewelry—all to the theme music to Chariots of Fire, tinkling out of the air. Every mile or so, there are four-poster beds and Muslim Prayer Rooms for resting.

Two men sleeping near the International Departures counter. The younger of the two is curled up on the floor, the other sitting with his torso tipped over his knees as if he’d collapsed midsentence. After a while they struggle awake and go get their boarding passes.

"Are you learning Nepali?" the one who was sleeping lying down says in an American accent, seeing my Nepali phrasebook. The other one comes over. He looks around forty, the American’s maybe twenty-five. He speaks to me in Nepali at first—I can't understand yet, but I'm glad to hear that I can tell where words end and begin. I tell them I'm going to Nepal to teach Tibetan nuns English.

"I guided treks for ten years," the Nepali man says. "My uncle has a trekking company. "If you have problems, if you don’t get visa, or you don’t find somewhere, call my uncle," he offers.

I show them my map and directions. "Don’t even pay this much, for a taxi," the American says, pointing to the amount Susan, my contact in Nepal, had suggested. "Say 100, and see what they say. But they see you’re new, and it’s like they can smell it. Just say ‘I know’—learn that much. Say ‘I know what the price should be.’ Act confident." (Later, I will end up paying 400 rupees.)

"Who wrote this?" the Nepali man asks, pointing to the devanagari sentences I’ve been practicing in my notebook—tapai angreji bhasho bolnu hulnu (Do you speak English) and maile bujhina (I don’t understand). "It’s better than my handwriting." I imagine it must look to him like non-native written Roman characters do to me—conscientously formed, childish in their textbook roundness. When I learned the devanagari alphabet so I could study Sanskrit, I never imagined it would have any practical use. I used to use devanagari to write privately in my journals, but now I'm going to a country where I can't use devanagari as a secret code anymore.