Transnational Valentines Day

We are recovering from the most exciting Valentine's Day in the history of Alp and Ingrid's lives. A few days ago, Esin sent us off from Mysore and we sat on a train for 42 hours, hurtling towards New Delhi, with the final destination in mind being Kathmandu. However, ten minutes into our two day ride we found out that February 13th was the joyous 10th anniversary of the Maoist insurgency and they were most probably planning on celebrating the occasion with some old-fashioned civil war violence. We arrived in Delhi on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and enjoyed the perfect spring weather that the capitol enjoys for about three weeks a year while waiting for our Korean friends, the Shins, to come home. They are the most delightful hosts and we had a thoroughly tasty Korean meal at an excellent restaurant with them later in the evening. We also discovered that night that Kathmandu was under blockade and virtually no traffic was coming in from the south-east, precisely the direction we would be coming from if we took our final leg of the trip to the Nepali-Indian border in Gorakpur. The next morning we decided to scoot over to Mr. Gupta, my mother's travel agent who specializes in executing last-minute travel plans seemlessly and who also deserves to be called "Mr. Magic" for that reason. After one hour in his office, our breathless anticipation was rewarded with two (cheap!!) round-trip tickets to Bangkok Thailand that very night at 7pm!!! We squealed, we giggled, we were jealous of our own good luck! Following our fateful triumph, we made a trip to Khan Market, the expat shopping center in south delhi, and bought ourselves chocolate and cheese for Valentines, paneer tikka roomali rolls for our intestinal worms, and a Lonely Planet Thailand (though, believe us, we tried our best under the time constraints to NOT support that backpacker mafia publication company). After hastily packing and substantially lightening our packs (including tent, hiking boots, and mats our bags are 22lbs each), we made it to the airport and our flight on Myanmar Airlines went first to the sleepy airport of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), where we ate complimentary cake at a hotel and finally continued onto Bangkok, arriving here at 6am, both without any sleep and Ingrid with a headache. Blearily we made our way to a quiet residential area and a guesthouse, and slept for a few hours. We awoke and finally it sunk in~ we are in thailand, yaaaysss!
scoobydo!
ingrid