I'm woken by a phone call that sets my day off on the right foot, someone important in my life calling to wish me luck.

I leave around 10:30 a.m. and immediately catch a taxi that, in a rare Bangkok miracle, smells of absolutely nothing. The driver is equally unusual: he understands right away where I'm going, even before Juan shows him the map just in case. Juan and I say our goodbyes there, and the driver takes me to a temple near the old airport. These were the instructions I'd been given, and there are not many countries in the world where I would have followed them with my eyes closed.

The temple turns out to be enormous, and at that hour of the morning it's packed with people. You can hear, as is perfectly normal at every temple here, a monk speaking over a loudspeaker, and it's all very relaxed, nothing like other religious ceremonies I've known. There's a long, orderly line to go inside and pay respects to the Buddha, which is done in a particular way.

Outside, meanwhile, canopies have been set up so people can sit at tables and eat, because the whole perimeter is ringed with food stalls and everyone helps themselves.

The usual bicycles with their little mobile carts also weave through the crowd, hawking their wares. The whole scene is one part religious gathering, one part food market, one part neighborhood social hour.

Some people look genuinely devout, listening with quiet attention, while others are simply eating, and better still, more than a few diners are on their phones, as is very much the custom here. I don't think there's a single person in Bangkok who doesn't have at least one cell phone.

Since I've arrived early, I decide to take in the spectacle, and while I do I keep an eye out for anyone carrying a backpack or a bag, someone I can ask.

I spot a couple of young men with backpacks and they do indeed point me to where I need to go to catch the bus. So right from the start, this experience begins feeling different.

When I reach a spot where several people are already seated in chairs, the first face I see, long and wearing an expression that says don't even try it, belongs to an Asian woman, and I don't try it. But next to her I find two friendlier Asian faces: he is Chinese and lives here in Bangkok, she is from Singapore. I sit with them, and only she is going to the course. He's a friend who picked her up at the airport and brought her to catch the bus. His face says it all: how brave, I could never.

The first thing she tells me is that this is her second time, that she did it four years ago and has decided to come back. She works in finance, and as it turns out she's representative of the group I'll find at the course, professionals almost across the board, people who think about things. This encourages me.

While I have to go find a bathroom, this kind man offers to carry my luggage to the bus, which, again because this is Thailand, I agree to, even though I've just met him. When I come back, my new acquaintance is already on board. I climb on, and at first glance I see almost nothing but Asian faces, so when I spot two Western faces near the front I head straight toward one of them: an American woman with a lovely open face and only twenty-four years old. Behind her was the other option, a man older than me, and though he gave me a look that said sit here, I chose the younger face.

As you all know by now how much I like to talk when I have a willing audience, I talked the whole way there. She turned out to be wonderful company, a graphic designer living in Vietnam with her boyfriend.

At a rest stop midway, several people were going absolutely wild over ice cream, and I wondered why. I'd find out soon enough. Many of them were on their second, third, or fourth experience of this kind.

The rules I had been asked to observe for the course ran to several pages, and of course when you decide at my age to take on something like this, you're not thinking about how to bend them, so I followed them to the letter.

Some of them were: no jewelry, loose clothing that covers the body so as not to distract others, no verbal or physical contact of any kind. And more specifically, "no sexual contact with the opposite sex or the same sex during the course." Men and women were of course separated, though meditation sessions and explanations were held together, without being mixed together. Women always on the left side, men on the right. Worth noting: in our group of women, there was a kathoey (a transgender woman).

To be continued....