After over 22 hours of flying, my team and I have arrived safely in Bangkok. We left Saturday morning and arrived at the hotel around 1 a.m. Monday, which is kind of a trip.

While driving to the hotel, I noticed a U Turn sign (written in both Thai and English), and it made me realize how privileged I am to be born in the United States and to learn English from birth. Almost anywhere you travel in the world, English is both written and spoken. What luck I have to be born in a country where I learned it naturally.

I am not going to get into why it is that English is universally spoken and the political and historical atrocities associated with English dominance (though, for the record, Thailand was never colonized, so their use of English is because of the economic dominance and not oppressive forces), but I am just going to be thankful for the privilege into which I was born. Maybe you should be too.

In five days, I am leaving for five weeks in a country halfway around the world and these words, sawatdee kaa or hello, seem to be the only thing I can say with confidence. I’m a bit nervous.

Along with four other people from central Illinois, I am embarking on a cultural and vocational exchange to Thailand through Rotary International. (Who would have ever thought that I would be an emissary of world peace?) I am going to be leaving the safe confines of the Journal-Courier newsroom annex (where I typically bring you all the news that’s fit to be commented on later in Open Line) to go to a country where, I hear, I might occasionally have to pee in a hole and supply my own toilet paper all in the name of cultural understanding.

But what good is cultural understanding if I can’t share it with you, the Journal-Courier readership. So that is what I will be doing through this blog for the next five weeks. At this point I can’t quite say how often I will be sending you updates from around the world. Without a guarantee of Western toilets and hot water, it is even less safe to assume that I will have Internet access. When I do, however, you can be sure you’ll be the first person I write.

So for now, lagon or good-bye. (Hey, look, that’s a second word. I’m smarter than I thought.)