So, here we go again.   Nothing like a 13 hours and 45 mins flight to start me off.

I took the subway train to JFK and was prepared with a printed copy of my ticket, as the police had been stopping JFK protesters at the end of the Airtrain, but perhaps Tuesday at 10am is not a big protest moment, as no problems.   At check-in, no one in the Biz line and the lovely young thing there of course stood up to greet me and we go into two-handed mode for passing things back and forth.  Suddenly just one-handed seems very rude.

Once more into the great big Airbus A380 of Asiana which came from Korea on time and even managed to leave on time.  Might well have been because there is only half a load, so not so many seats to clean and generally sort out in JFK.  And a brand new plane too, cos I looked it up.

The usual perky, all gracious smiles of slim young ladies, who line up in the cabin and bow low to us at the beginning of the welcome on board p.a.  You kinda know straight away that you are not on AA.  If they had to do this, many of them would never straighten up again. We leap into the sky with no problem and I watch it all happen via a camera somewhere around the nose wheel, so on the big screen in front of me the tarmac of JFK speeds underneath and then drops away and 1143,000 lbs of metal, stuff and liquids defies everything that is normal and zooms up.   (And this fact thanks to the poor chief purser girl who had to make two trips to the flight deck to find out).   And for the old load sheet bashers, the max t/o weight for this machine is 1254,417 lbs.    Yikes !

Menus and wine lists are distributed and I go for a glass of champagne to keep the spirits up and then  the Korean national dish of Bibimbap which a big china bowl full of minced beef and veggies, all artfully displayed and then you chuck in the bowl of rice and sesame seed oil and mix together furiously. I watched the mama-san Korean lady sitting opposite and she went in to mix mode for about 5 mins, just like she was in her kitchen, so I did too.  Fortunately it is correct to eat the resulting mush with a spoon, rather than the metal chopsticks also provided.  It is delicious.    

I loll around in my big space, of course in ‘an attractive attitude’ (which is a quote no one would ever get and comes from C. Dickens Nicholas Nickleby) and decide how to occupy myself for all this time.  I cannot look out of the window the whole way, especially in darkness !  Perhaps they have some coloring books, as that is a perfect occupation for planes. They have some old movies, like Dog Day Afternoon, a lovely look back to 1972 Brooklyn and a very bizarre (and true,) bank robbery) that goes monumentally wrong.  Ends at JFK with lots of old planes for me to look at and go ahhhhhh.  Come back TWA, Eastern and the intended getaway plane is a Convair 800 of Modern Air, which will only mean something to about 3 readers here, but they will be having a very big  AHHHHHH MOMENT, so let them have their nostalgia attack please.  And it was all on a suitably sweaty August night too.  And DW, a UA DC-8-63 taxied past too.    

Sadly their music selection has been much truncated since last time I was here and feedback@asiana.com may be hearing from me, as it was so good before and now is a dud.  Bummer.  

We zoom direct north from JFK and Montreal, 35 minutes later, is somewhere down there and then it is getting dark and the map shows us heading in to the very nowhere land of Hudson Bay and places that you wonder just WHY anyone needs to be there.   Last year’s noted settlement of Igloolik has not moved.  And I still do not want to visit, either.

One of the best things about being on the upper deck is the toilet at the front of the cabin, on the left hand side, is the one that Airbus designed as a shower. Asiana does not have a shower, so they ended up with the world’s largest flying toilet. For a place to change clothes, it is wonderful. No more hopping around on one foot, with your arms bouncing off the walls.

What bliss to be in a news-free zone.  All the current horrors of what is going on in DC are receding fast and I shall not be watching too hard to see what disaster happens next.   It may be difficult to stay out of that loop for the whole six weeks I am away, but I shall keep foreign info at a minimum.   Unless of course, DT comes wonderfully unstuck and then I shall be watching.

OK … now later and we have flown in to a pink dawn light.  It is right ahead and underneath is all completely very deep-frozen and then if I look backwards along the front of the wing, the monster great engines pushing us along are bathed in a translucent pink glow.  It’s all very pretty and exceeding unwelcoming and cold-looking below.  Must be the western top of Siberia.

And so we land so smoothly in Seoul, where I shall spend the night.  Going all the way through is just too tough and standing on the immigration line, I am happy to think a bed will not be too far away.   I made a reservation on line and have the print-out to prove it, so having been index-finger ID’d and taken my glasses off for a snap, I feel I am hallway to citizenship.  Outside I look for the info desk type of thing and spot the Tourist Police…. usually these are in places like Egypt and employed to keep the touts at bay, so I stopped there and the man was all smiles and looked at my piece of paper and found the tel number on it and called and I was given my rendez-vous spot, two floors up, at number 7.  And it worked perfectly, of course.  

It was around freezing outside and getting dark, so was happy to see the gold-toothed driver and his minivan and I was whisked about 15 mins away to a ‘new town’ which looked pretty much like any scruffy town around here, full of fast food and mom and pop joints.  The Sky Hotel lady only needed my name and I was given a key.  Fastest check-in in ever.  So I know to put the plastic key fob in the slot on the wall and the entry light came on.  I look for the light switches for further illumination and the more I looked, the more they were not there.  I have coped with switches behind doors or curtains or at near ground level, but there just was no way of lighting the place up.  I refused to give in and be a wimp and go back downstairs for a clue.  There MUST be a way.  I let my eyes get accustomed to the gloom and ran my hands over every wall and light fitting in the place, but to no avail.  I tried talking out loud in case they were voice activated (we are in hi-tech Korea after all…) and then I found a laminated sheet hanging next to the bed which I took back in to the hallway light to read.  Bingo .. the lights were all controlled on the TV remote !  Would have been good if she had told me to crash around in a dark room and to find this document next to the bed.  Anyway, there was light, but the TV defeated me.  Nothing new.  I just took everything off and fell in to bed, at all of 6pm and was asleep immediately.

Of course I woke up at 2am, but sleep was what I needed.  So I got up and cleaned up. Hot water should have had a warning on it that if you wanted to cook the veg, then just fill a pot, as it was lethal.    Eventually I realized I could sleep a tad more but made sure I was downstairs at 6am for the ride back to Incheon.  Same driver as yesterday and just me, so it took barely 10 mins to get there.  Lines for security were vast and looked unmoving, which was not a good sign.  Korean airports have staff in baby blue jackets just standing around to help and I was told immediately not to be here by door 5 but walk to door 2 “which is always empty”.  This meant about a 10 min walk from one end of the terminal to the other and by the time I got there, I was joined by everyone else who had been assured this was the way to go.  Seemed to be full of giggly teen girls and I was the only round-eye/foreign devil there.  Anyway I am secured and pass immigration and still had time to repair to the Asiana Biz lounge (knowing how to find it from last year’s visit) and a fast two cups of coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich on the whitest of pappy white bread. The sort of bread I was given to put on a fish hook when I was 10 years old and went fishing… needed no spit, as it was so damp fingers did the trick.  Oodles of salad available… we forget how much the east likes salad for breakfast.  

My gate is as close to the lounge as possible so I stop to take a look at the d/f shops (of which there are hundreds).  Many posh designer names too and all overstaffed with exquisitely turned out and uniformed young things and all exceedingly chirpy at 7am   AND doing business too. The Prada store had women looking at handbags and ditto Louis Vuitton.  And I could buy $400 bottles of pure malt too, which lovely it may be to the taste, I don’t think I could ever find the grounds to actually buy one.  I was offered a taste of something fine and rare, but even I cannot face booze that early in the day.   I was asked by a lovely young thing if I wanted (probably needed) her upmarket facial products, designed to ‘make you youthful’.  I asked if it would even work on the likes of me and she was all overcome with the giggles, which I had to interpret as a ’no’.   Koreans are hugely in to being beautiful and these shops are stacked with potions designed to keep both males and females forever young.  The Asiana inflight sales catalog is 286 pages long and approaching a Sears catalogue in weight and mainly full of making us all attractive.  Wrinkles are def. verboten. 

So I jump on my A321, which is a narrow bodied plane, 2 x 2 seats in the biz and am joined by a young man who was so lithe that he sat with his legs tucked up under him on his seat.   He produces of course some hi-tech gadgets, two of which get plugged in and then immediately we are flying, he puts his seat back, blanket over and is fast asleep.  No breakfast, no nothing.   I hope is not expecting me to unplug anything when they are done?

Breakfast by the way, was good, though slightly bizarre, as did we really need a pre-plated cheese course or a fancy cake for dessert ?  And in 16 full seats, I was the only person drinking coffee.  Mind you the Korean dishes on the menu included ‘Braised Chicken Legs’ or perhaps u would fancy ‘Deep-fried Broccoli Shrimp Ball and Seafood’ ?  Possibly coffee does not go too well with them?

Captain Speaking has spoken and assures us the 20 minutes ATC delay we had on the ground will be made up and the flight will just be 5 hours and 15 minutes, so we shall soon be in the tropics.  Tra la.

I think this had better end here or your eyes will be already glazing.   Standby by for the Return to Ho Chi Minh City City, or Saigon as I always call it, story.

Tim