Guangzhou to Dhaka

I spent the ENTIRE day in an airport. It’s 9:07 Guangzhou time, which I think means 8:07pm Korea time. 8 hours was an awful long time to spend in the airport, but once I found the international lounge with the comfortable chairs and the plugin for the laptop it was much better. I forget when I travel that on international transfers (stopovers) it’s pretty much impossible to get out money at the airport… this left me cashless at the airport, but I did have my visa so it was fine. The only thing was that I hadn’t taken time to figure out how many Chinese RMY were equivalent to a thousand KRW, so I have no idea how much things cost me - GAH!

At the airport I watched Burlesque for the 13th time, and tried tried tried to get online but Skype for a few minutes was all I could manage - and it cost me many bux with some strange Skype Boingo option. Too bad China won’t let me connect to any social networking sites (I didn’t realize I did so much of that “networking” crap!! I couldn’t actually even get into a currency exchange website, so goodness knows what the actual restrictions were.

Other than watching the movie I walked the airport from one end to the other repeatedly (good exercise I guess), had a bite to eat (satay beef and a coke) at one of the restaurants, watched planes come and go out some of the many windows, and people watched in different spots until I tired of it and went back to the comfy chairs of the lounge. Most of the time the place was empty, and then about 2 hours before it was time to go a guy came in a played his guitar quietly while I read, it was very nice!

When it was finally time to get on the plane (I flew China Southern) I noticed that there were just about NO women on my flight - it was overwhelmingly filled with men… no families that I saw, very few women at all (I was nearly last onto the plane and I only counted 3 on the way to my seat), it was pretty much all groups of men. The second thing I noticed was that there was only me and one other white dude of the few hundred collected passengers.
Through the flight people were randomly staring at me with some kind of strange fascination, but a little differently from the way the Koreans in Daejeon used to look at me… this is more out of curiosity than horror, lol, I hate to say that it used to feel like people in Korea were scared of me (kids in particular), but when the little ones cry and adults avert their eyes to the ground after you simply smile at them or say hello (and the Bangladeshi people smile), what else are you gonna think, right?

I remember reading online about people’s comments to ignore the staring, that people are just curious, but I guess I didn’t think I’d be quite so outnumbered in the men:women part - it‘s a little unnerving!! Does nobody else find that ratio to be a little crazy?

I’ve made plans to spend the first 2 nights in Dhaka with a woman from www.couchsurfing.org and I’m feeling a little glad of that now - finding a hotel room when I don’t even land until 11 at night would be an unnerving experience in itself!! The plane will land soon so I have to shut down... more soon!