Asia! I am now able to add another continent to my list of places I've set foot on. In reality, I have set foot on Asian soil before (I was in Tokyo for 3 weeks in 1999), but Japan doesn't really feel like it counts because it's an island. Sorry to all the Japanese people reading this blog, I'm sure that there are many of you.

Yesterday I travelled for 18 hours on 4 different planes to finally arrive here - on Phuket, Thailand. In terms of time zones, it is exactly halfway around the world from Montreal, my starting point. So I'm halfway there! Fortunately, most of the rest of my trip will be at a much more leisurely pace, so I don't have to suffer through 18 hours in the air again to get back.

Yes, you read that right. 18 hours! But that's not really the worst of it. I also spent another 17 hours waiting for planes while transferring. The first, and longest, wait was in Honolulu, where I had to wait 12 hours between flying from Kauai to get on my plane to Taipei (transfer point #2). I thought I could do some neato stuff in Honolulu, but my plans were seriously hindered by the fact that I had to lug my bag around everywhere. Since 9/11, no American airport has lockers or luggage drop off. Very inconvenient, if you ask me, especially since they could just x-ray your luggage before they lock it up if they're that concerned about security. That's what they do in some European airports.

So I went to the largest mall in Honolulu, thinking they might have lockers or a bag storage of some kind there. And they did! Yay, I thought, only to notice that both banks of lockers were out of order because someone had tried to break into them recently. Poo! For a moment I though I could "lose" my bags, and then pick them up later at lost and found, but that plan felt a bit unrealistic. Instead I left my bags at the cashier of every store I went to.

Unfortunately, due to my continued bad luck with the weather, the one Honolulu activity that would have been a no brainer - going to the beach - was not possible. Once again it was cloudy and occasionally drizzling. So after killing 3 hours shopping (and if you know me, you know I don't like shopping (except for vinyl and cds) so 3 hours is alot) I decided to see a movie. V for Vendetta! Pretty good action flick, actually. It's pretty audacious these days to make a film where the hero is a terrorist who tries to bring the government down by blowing up buildings, but I guess you can get away with it if you hide it between gunfire, blatant 1984 references, Natalie Portman and lots of british people. The American thought police probably couldn't understand a thing anyway with all the accents, so maybe this film won't be all that controversial despite its subject matter.

Movies became the theme of the day for this long trip. As I flew to Phuket, I eventually saw 5 more movies - "Walk the Line" (Liked it), "Elisabethtown" (Liked it), "the Unfinished Life" (Liked it), "the Family Stone" (Okay) and "Good Night and Good Luck" (Okay). Don't take my movie reviews seriously, though. First of all, I was on a plane, so the sound was crappy, the screen was tiny and I was profoundly uncomfortable in my pretzle like position. Second, I was getting very tired, so my judgement could be off... Not like "Liked it" or "Okay" give you much of a review anyway. I think that's a record for me - 6 movies in a 24 hour period. Wow!

Well, enough about that. All this rambling is beside the point because now I'm in Phuket Thailand, and who really cares what movies I saw on the plane, right? What you might care to know about is that I'm _still_ having bad luck with the weather (today: cloudy with occasional rain), but I don't care because it's still very warm and I can go swim and eat real Thai food and try to decipher what people are telling me with their thick Thai accents. The fun never ceases! My stay here will be very short, however. Tomorrow I leave on my boat to sail off into the sunset. Literally. For those of you who don't know, I've included a picture of the boat and of the route I'll be taking on the top of this post (you may have already noticed...). I'm not sure I'll be able to post on this blog from the boat, so there might be one last entry tomorrow before there'll be a long silence. Or maybe this'll be the last entry. But this post is so long that it'll probably hold you over until I have internet again.

Okay, time to include my warmth sans sunshine! Hope everyone is doing well...