For one thing, it redefined my idea of what Y-class travel can be. I didn’t know a 13-hour flight was possible for my feet, back and butt. Now that I do, I guess no place on the planet is out of reach.
My favorite feature of the trip took place before the plane got off the ground. The stewardesses positioned themselves at the front of their cabins. This is a B-747 Pax, so there are a lot of cabins, upstairs and down. On cue, they all bowed at once to their passengers. They bow deeply, like they mean it, and for the next 13 hours, they prove that this wasn’t airplane theater, but an expression of a formal relationship between consumer and provider that is utterly foreign to most Americans. Interestingly, my first glimpse of Korea came on the tarmac in Los Angeles!
Flight 201 doesn’t cross the Pacific, as I had expected. Instead, it heads north to Alaska, then across the Bering Sea into Russian airspace, then south into Chinese skies before curling around to Incheon from the west. North Korea, which has been
jamming commercial airliners’ GPS signals, is given wide berth. Your view out the window is likely to be something like this.
I watched “Midnight in Paris,” Soderbergh’s “Haywire” and “The Descendants” on the way over. The choices were wide and impressive.
The meals were great. First bibimbap (rice and vegetables) with a squeeze tube of hot red sauce and a packet of sesame oil. For the imagination-challenged, a mini-booklet walks you through how to mix them all together.
When most people were asleep, flaky hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches were delivered, and a few hours later, a spicy octopus stew and chickpea salad, below.
At each meal stop, I opted for makgeolli, usually described as a rice wine, but c'mon, it's a rice beer. Shake before you pour! You want the yeast that has fallen out of suspension to turn it a milky white. Budweiser makes a rice beer, too, called Budweiser, but that's a different, and less happy, pasteurized story.
By the time we land at Incheon Airport, on an island in the Yellow Sea, I feel like I could fly another three hours. I credit this to insisting on an aisle seat, which allows you to get up every hour and march in place, the entertainment options and general sweetness of the stewardesses, who, at the end of 13 hours, looked as if they'd just boarded. For those reasons, Sluggh looked pretty good too (5 o'clock shadow aside) on the A'rex train to Seoul.
At home, I gazed out my fifth-story window.
When I woke up, I looked again.
The interior.
And from a different angle.
I visited Gyeongbokgung Palace today, where the un-scary beast at the top of this entry makes his home. I hope to explain more later.
How does the rice beer taste? How long was the train ride?
ReplyDeleteFood looks awesome!! What did you think of the movies you watched?
I want to hear more about the dopey looking beast!
The rice beer tastes like cold, fizzy sake. It tastes like other people's breath smells, but not in a bad way! The Koreans are master fermenters. They let everything go rotten -- beans, cabbage, fish, you name it. I think it started as a way to have food around during the cold months.
ReplyDeleteI was surprised to like "The Descendants" but they shut off service before the ending. I take it Clooney's character succeeded in scuttling the land deal? Soderbergh's self-aware cleverness is wearing thin. "Paris" was swell.