Ken Curtis' blog «

So I finally land in Bangkok and take the shuttle to catch my flight to Krabi. Krabi is nearest airport to the location I booked in Thailand. Turns out that I had a 12K limit in weight… shit. See you get one carry on and checked baggage can’t exceed 12k. With my carry on I probably was at about 30k, now I had to be creative. I decided to go outside and figure how to eliminate another 15k. While I was outside I met a Brit who gave me some tips, first get rid of my daypack and pack my full backpack with all the heavy things. This way the checked baggage would be lighter, but I’d be carrying more weight in the carry on. AirAsia had limit of 7k for carryon, and I figure that I was going to try to pass with about 20… it worked! Nobody weighed my carry on so I made it through without any problems. Thanks Brit guy.

Finally turning the page.

So I’m in Koh Lanta, Thailand right now and it is beautiful. The place I’m staying is comprised of about thirty bungalows, and it’s right on the beach.

This is kind of confused entry, but bear with me because there is somewhat of a point. So I rented a place in Goa India for three months, got my visa and everything was going great. About a month before I had to leave I booked a bungalow in Thailand and noticed that I had to be out of India earlier than I planned because three months is not the same as ninety days. July 6 to October 6 is something like 94 days, so thankful that I caught my mistake went about booking the new place and flights from October third to November third.

On October 3 as I was doing my final preparations for leaving I decided to look through my passport…I still don’t know why I did it, but I looked at the visa and noticed that it expired three months from the time that I initially got it, which was July 24. Oh Crap! The remainder of the day I went over in my mind all the possible outcomes from overstaying my visa. Would it be minor and would they let me leave anyway? Would I get in trouble and be blacklisted from ever returning to India? I didn’t have a clue of the possible ramifications that I would have to deal with and according to the internet, I should expect to be treated like a criminal and be prepared for the worst possible outcome.

Knowing that there would be problems I went to the airport anyway and try my luck. Now if you know me you know that I’m kind of adverse to confrontation and this made it difficult to come to grips with what I had to do. When I arrived at the airport I immediately went to passport control to talk to someone about my expired visa. I was the only one there and in a matter of a minute (maybe two) I had about 6 passport officials surrounding me telling me what I did was wrong. One official told me that if I had tried to go through he would have thrown me in jail; pointing to some where in the distance, another told me that it would be easy to fix. Funnier than anything else, most of the officials were questioning how I had made it to passport control at all. (They seemed somewhat satisfied when I told them that I just followed the signs and nobody stopped me.) During one of my conversations with a passport official they told me to go to Panjim to get an extension to my visa and I’d be able to leave tomorrow. No big deal, only a hiccup. So I grabbed a taxi to Panjim at about 9pm with the naïve belief that everything would be okay. All I needed to do was rent a room, go to the police station in the morning and I could put this whole mess behind me. The taxi driver promised that he could find a hotel for me…”No problem.”

So we take off for Panjim, India and just by coincidence there is a national holiday going on and we couldn’t find any hotels that had a room. We drove around for about thirty minutes and finally I decided to call the landlord of the place I was staying at in Colva Beach to ask if I could come back and finish my time there. They agreed and the taxi driver and myself headed back to my apartment in Colva Beach.

The next day I headed to Panjim to fix my visa. Turns out that the office was closed but there was some people working so I got a chance to talk to the head of the office there. I explained my situation and she was very kind and told me what the procedure was. She also explained that since it was a holiday the office wouldn’t be open until Tuesday, about four days away. So much for a quick fix.

My landlord in Colva Beach let me stay the extra time that it would take, but she openly spoke of the problem that I put her in. She said that the police would question her and according to her, make her life miserable. I felt so guilty that not only did I screw things up for me, but now she would suffer from my mistake.

The next few days I kind of hid in the apartment. I’m not really sure why, but I didn’t go anywhere or do anything… almost like I didn’t belong and everyone knew.

Tuesday comes and I head out to Panjim with all the paperwork that I was told to bring. At this point I should mention that each trip to Panjim cost a lot, about $20 and I had to make about four or five trips. I get to the office and wait to be seen, finally after about an hour I get to talk to someone. From that point on things seemed to go pretty smoothly. All the paperwork was done and except for a report from the police station in Colva Beach everything was taken care of. Because the police report was needed I had to return five days later to get my extension.

Five days later I show up and in about 30 minutes I was good to go.

At the Airport:

So on the 15^th I head to the airport to finally get out of India. I show up at the airport and first have to wait for about an hour before checking in. I finally go to check in and they tell me that I have a 20 kilo limit for baggage. What? I had a 32 kilo limit coming to Goa. My baggage weight was 33, so the fee was $195. I was pissed but they wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t see any solution except to lighten my load. I found a garbage can and started throwing things away. I tossed everything that I thought I could do without. The whole time I was tossing things in the garbage I felt like I had been played, 32 coming and 20 going… I threw away shoes, shorts, a kettle, jeans, shirts, and lots of other things. When I went back I was still 5K over but paid the fee then.

This was my last experience in India… not quite accurate but it gives me the opportunity to mention my feelings about Indian culture in a micro view. It’s all about control and being in control. If something is a rule, it is followed and no questions are asked. If you are told to stand there and wait, you better stand there and wait. If you question a rule you are at best ignored, but at times may be told politely, to shut up.

When I started this blog about eight years ago I told myself that it was going to be more of a journal, in fact that’s what I called it then. It’s kind of funny that when I first moved to Dubai a friend told me that ‘journal’ sounded feminine so I changed it to ‘blog.’ The reason I bring this up is because my idea when creating the blog was to write about my experiences, not for other people, but for myself and more importantly, for posterity. I knew then, and still believe now that I have been very lucky to be traveling the world and am not so naïve to believe that I’ll be doing this the rest of my life. Some day I want to sit back and read what I’ve done and more importantly be reminded of the emotions and the connections that I’ve had over the course of my travels.

Since I left Dubai in July I have kind of refrained from adding entries to the blog simply because nothing really special happened to me. This is/was a mistake because the basic act of living in India was memorable even if nothing ‘special’ happened. I really didn’t take any photos while I was there and I regret that I have nothing to help me remember my life for the past three months.

Hmmm, what do I say about my first day and night in Goa? For some people I feel like I need to give the most optimistic view of the last twenty-four hours. If nothing more than alleve their concerns about me. Having said that though, I haven’t heard from anyone who is asking what it’s like here, so I guess I can tell it like it actually is. :)

The Flight:

First, let me say that I’ve taken probably somewhere near 50 flights in the last seven years, so although it will probably sound like I’m complaining, I’m actually not. I’m recounting the experience and although it has a negative, ‘spin’ it is just part of the traveling experience. It was three and a half hour flight from Dubai to Goa and the plane left the airport about 11pm. Not bad, as it would give me some time to sleep before we landed, and except for a day flight, it was the best option. I sat down and almost immediately a small child in the row in front of me starts crying, and I should add that we’re talking the shrieking kind of crying. He cried something like 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off the entire flight. Not to be outdone, some children sitting in the row behind me would occasionally feel the urge to kick the back of my seat, if nothing more to make sure that I didn’t get any sleep. The guy next to me was suffering too, at one point, during the ‘seat kicking’ he leaned forward and put his head in his hands. When we landed in Goa I was burnt out tired. It was about 3:15 and I think I slept for about 30 minutes.

At the Airport:

It couldn’t have been easier going through the airport in Goa. In fact there was a woman that worked there that actually did much of the work for me. I was out of the airport looking for a taxi in less than thirty minutes, and about 15 were minutes waiting for my checked bags to show up in the carousel. I arrived at my apartment at about 5 in the morning. I was scheduled to pick up the keys at 7am. This was going to be a problem since my taxi driver dropped my bags in between two apartment buildings, and I didn’t know which was mine. I sat on my backpack for about ten minutes before I decided to explore a little. It turns out that one of the apartment buildings is abandoned, creepy kind of abandoned too.

My Day:

I found the apartment building and it had a lobby of sorts, nothing special just some benches and a deserted desk, so I stretched out on one of the benches to get some needed sleep. I was woken up at a little after 7 by a guy who wanted to show me the apartment. As I’ve posted before, I rented an apartment in Goa for about $300 per month, utilities paid. I gratefully accepted the key and after a few minutes of fumbling around with the tv remote I fell asleep on the couch. I was woken up by knocking on the door, I have no idea what time it was, but it was the guy who let me in with some toilet paper and a bottle of water. At this point I decided to go for a walk to see the beach. I’ll talk about the beach later… Anyway, I get back to apartment and for whatever reason I fall asleep again on the couch. I’m woken up again by knocking on the door, this time it’s the actual manager asking me questions and generally trying to be nice. I have to admit that I was half asleep and was a little bit annoyed that I was answering questions in my current state. It’s all good though and she leaves. I decide to go out and find a grocery store and have dinner. It’s about 6 now and I’m starting to get hungry. I get back roughly an hour later and within an hour hit the bed for a full nights sleep.

My Night:

I’m in bed and asleep by about 9pm local time, makes it about 7:30 Dubai time. Then the nightmare begins, bugs. I wake up and my legs are itching, which my guess is mosquitoes. Sucks, but livable. I get under the covers to avoid them, then I wake up to something crawling on my leg and I squish it. I still don’t know what it was, but the feeling of the body mass as I pushed it away is still fresh in my mind. I couldn’t get the squished bug out of my mind, was it a spider??? So I got up at about 5am and headed into the other room to play on the computer. I notice that I got two bites on my thumb that have a similarity to bed bug bites… That is one thing that I can’t deal with, fortunately for now I’m not convinced it is bedbugs, but I’m heading to a larger town later on to pick up a supply of bug sprays.

It’s hard to believe it, but I don’t have a home. As I’ve posted recently I decided to leave Dubai and see a little bit of the world, at least a little bit more than I’ve seen so far. Well, tonight I am in the Dubai airport, sitting near a Starbucks and sipping a soy latte just trying to get my mind wrapped around leaving the city that I called home for seven years, permanently.

When I decided to leave in the beginning of the year I knew that this day would eventually come, so I’m not regretting leaving. It was time that I left and I feel good about what I have planned for the next year. What I wasn’t ready for was that I was going to have to say good-bye to so many friends and students. Each time I found a note that told me they are going to miss me, a little piece of my determination slipped away. Each time I shook someone’s hand and told them I was on my way, I couldn’t help feeling a little bad. Then the mere fact of the logistics of leaving kind of made me feel… for lack of proper word, hollow. The school has a process that each faculty must go through each department and facilities to verify that we are cleared to leave. The finality of getting my visa canceled along with the ‘check list’ just seemed harsh.

Looking back at my time at AUD I can actually say it I loved being here. The fact that this was my first teaching job made it probably a little harder on me than it did to others, but I wouldn’t change being here for anything. The students were so sweet and fun to be around, I think I’ll miss them the most. When I got to Dubai it was growing so much. Everywhere I went there were cranes on tops of windowless buildings, sidewalks were dirt, and it seemed that the university was the center point of the area I was in. Now, seven years later, the school is dwarfed by dozens of 100-storey buildings on three of it’s sides. There’s a metro, new malls, and luxury is everywhere. If you know me, you know that I am as far from luxury as anyone can be, so I progressively felt more left out as the years went by. Regardless how I felt, it was remarkable to see a city grow like Dubai did.

Now with the ‘Dubai door closing,’ I’m turning my attention to the future. Not much has changed since I last left a post. I am still going to Goa, India for three months, with an expectation of staying for an additional three months. The thing that will stop me from staying six months will probably be determined by if I can get an extension for my visa. I’ve been told that it isn’t hard at all, so I’m kind of planning on six months for now. My goal is to use my time to focus on web design and learning some programming languages like jQuery. Just recently though, I have thought about doing some day trips around India, so I’ll probably be traveling around as well.

The future looks so good right now. :)

I woke up this morning with a sense of urgency about the amount of time that I have before I leave Dubai. To be frank, I don’t like the feeling as it comes with nervousness and the feeling that I should be doing something right now. I still have a little more than two weeks before I must turn over the keys to my apartment but I can honestly say that yesterday it felt like I had all the time in the world, and this morning it feels like I’m leaving tomorrow. This move would be so much easier if it wasn’t from country to country…

My name is Ken

Finally I’m in Thailand.

Senility has set in.

Why maintain a blog?

My first day/night in Goa

I am Homeless

About two weeks to go…