El tiempo pasa rápido sin que nos demos cuenta en medio de nuestra aventura. Parece mentira que mañana se cumple una semana de nuestra salida de México y ahora me doy cuenta de que no he enviado ninguna señal acerca de nuestra sobrevivencia al viaje. Manos a la obra.

Time moves fast when you're in the middle of an adventure and not paying attention. It's hard to believe that tomorrow marks one week since we left Mexico, and I'm only now realizing I haven't sent a single sign of life to confirm we survived the journey. Better late than never.

Last Wednesday the odyssey began at five in the morning, when we dragged ourselves out of bed at the hotel next to the airport. Mexicana de Aviación came through beautifully, especially the woman who checked us in and managed to tag our luggage all the way through to Bangkok, where it arrived without a single problem.

The six-hour layover at LAX was brutal, and turned out to be a preview of things to come, the place absolutely packed with every variety of East Asian traveler. The flight to Taipei was punishing simply by virtue of its length, nearly 13 hours, coming on top of the almost 12 hours of travel and waiting we'd already done between Mexico and Los Angeles. The Taipei airport, while not especially large, has a clean, modern feel to it. A couple of hours there and we were back in the air, arriving in Bangkok in the small hours after a three-hour flight.

Marcel and Jenny were waiting for us at the airport, and from there we took a taxi to the shiny new apartment they've just moved into, in a relatively central part of the city, which makes it all the more surprising that it turns out to be a genuine oasis of quiet, no noise, and absolutely lush with greenery.

After a light dinner and a couple of welcome drinks, they took us to the hotel (a guest house, really) where we were staying, and where we finally fell into bed 36 hours after we'd last gotten up, at five in the morning local time.

These few days aren't enough to have formed any clear picture I feel confident putting into words, though a few things do stand out:

Even coming from the largest city in the world, the sheer density of people you encounter everywhere here is overwhelming. The traffic is terrible (far worse than our own great city was in the López era, and without anyone needing to set up a blockade on Paseo de la Reforma). The city itself, though, is remarkably clean. You barely see a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Public transportation is excellent across the board: the elevated train, the metro, street taxis, and the river taxis that glide along the canals, all of it first-rate, cheap, clean, and air-conditioned (which is sometimes less a luxury than a lifeline, because even though this isn't the hottest time of year, I personally am sweating out several liters a day).

There are shopping centers of every conceivable variety, the kind that make your jaw drop on account of their sheer scale and the volume of merchandise inside. On one end of the spectrum you have a bazaar in the style of Lomas Verdes or La Lagunilla, except it must cover twenty or thirty times the footprint of that last one. On the other end is the gleaming Paragon mall, where the anchor store (essentially the Thai Liverpool) is probably the size of the entire Santa Fe shopping center back home.

Communication gets genuinely complicated because of the language. The phonetics are so foreign that it's hard to retain even the simplest words, like numbers (of which I've managed to learn up to five in all this time). Street names are hard enough to remember, and when you do remember them, pronouncing them in a way a taxi driver can actually understand is another problem entirely. The first adventure along those lines was, I'll be honest, genuinely stressful.

The food is excellent, though I've always had a weakness for Asian cooking in general and Thai food in particular. Last night we had dishes from the north of the country, which distinguish themselves not only by being absolutely delicious but by a level of heat that is, shall we say, unambiguous.

People in general seem peaceful and warm. Everyone seems to have a smile right on the surface, genuine or not, and that alone puts you in a good mood. People on the street look, for the most part, clean and well put-together, especially the women, who also tend to dress in a way that is quietly sensual. Adriana feels very much at home here, given that most people (women especially) are exactly her height.

In short, the adventure so far is off to a pleasant and entertaining start. I'll tell you more in the coming installments about whatever new experiences come our way, which I hope continue to be as good as they've been so far.