Oh how so much has changed...

We aren't in China, nor are we going there. Apparently China requires two full blank passport pages to grant you a visa, which Beth doesn't have. Although we applied for visa's on 4/7, because it took four working days to process, then the travel agency we used was closed for 3 days for the Thai New Year, we didn't find out there was a problem until 4/16. Then, because the government thinks that they need to celebrate the New Year for five days, we were unable to go to the US Embassy until the 18th to have more pages added. Then, we would have had to re-apply for Chinese visas and wait another several days to find out if we could even go to China, hopefully leaving us a few days to see the entire country and get out before May 1st, when the entire country of 1,313,973,713 people goes on vacation. So, after several hours of frustrating phone calls and emails, there has been a change of plans. We leave Bangkok tomorrow evening (4/19) to head for Nairobi. We'll spend three weeks in Kenya/Tanzania before going to Greece via Istanbul, then off to Germany, Amsterdam, more Germany, then home from Ireland. We'll see if it actually pans out this way, but we have tickets as far as Istanbul at this point, so that part's for bound to happen.

Just a thought on Thai restaurants...

In America, when a restaurant is overstaffed, they send servers home. Apparently in Thailand, this is not the case. Apparently when a server is supposed to work from 5-10, he works until 10 whether there are 25 customers or just one. This means that when they are slow, servers have nothing to do but stand around in groups and watch you eat. Maybe it's just me, but having 4 people stand and silently watch me eat ribs is just a bit strange. But then, maybe not.