Off we go!

We had an early wake-up call, already at 5.40. I only slept about half an hour, my brain was going somersaults all night about things we might've forgotten to do. My brother and his girlfriend took us to the airport and it was sad saying goodbyes, we had grown even closer to each other since our dad got sick and now we were leaving. But I comforted myself with the thought, that a year goes by really fast. And of course we'll keep in contact with each other, we've got the internet nowadays to ease our lives, remember;)

We passed all the security etc fast, and off we flew to Frankfurt, Germany, at first. There were a lot of police officers everywhere, maybe because of the bombing in Boston, USA. Kari went to buy a deodorant, and when he had paid for it we noticed it was gone from the desk. Some Turkish men had just been there eyeing things weirdly and walked away fast, so the cashier ran after them. She found one of them and the deodorant was there. The man got away with it, the cashier only nodding "oh well", which was weird. You do a crime and that's it? Lucky for Kari they didn't put the blame on him, that would've been a great start for the trip. As we were in Germany, we had to go to Burger King. It is our favourite burger places and Germans have the best BK. We're lacto-ovovegetarians, so we can only eat the veggie burger, but it is sooo delicious. Always worth the visit.

We waited four hours before our next eleven hours flight to Hongkong. It was a stupid but cheap route, as later we flew past Helsinki, 10 hours after we had left Finland. But 500.- euros from flights to Bali is a good price, one way though, and we had time. At the end of the flight we experienced a big thunderstorm with huge lightnings and had some turbulence. It can be scary sometimes, but I enjoyed the lightnings and the clouds were really sinister and huge. I like thunderstorms. Two of the greatest I've experienced were in Florida, USA, where the lightning struck a mast closeby and the whole sky was illuminated, and the other one was at the top of Nohoch Mul, Coba, Mexico. We climbed 120 steps up for a great view over the jungle and as we got there we couldn't come down in an hour, as the lightnings were all over the place. We caught one of them on tape hitting a treetop far away in the jungle, and the smoke coming after it. It was exciting.
In Hongkong we had another four hours of waiting to catch our final flight to Bali. Just when we were getting to the airplane they took our passports and said they'll do an update on them. We were wondering what that was about, but we got to the plane soon after that. Still five hours to go before we were at our first destination for the trip. I couldn't sleep at the plane, I can never sleep there or any other vehicle, but this time it was because I had a South African woman sitting next to me and she wanted to chat nearly the whole flight. It was nice to chat with her, but at this point I was really tired, having slept only about an hour in the last three days. My eyes could hardly keep open while we were talking. I hope she didn't see that, although she knew I hadn't slept well.

As we got to Ngurah Rai airport in Denpasar, Bali, we changed some cash and I changed the terribly warm clothes to lighter ones. The bathroom was in bad state, so bad, that I had to struggle to not wet anything on the flooding floor. Then off we went, next stop Ubud, the city familiar from the movie and book Eat, Pray, Love. That's not why we were going there though.