The Flight

Sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting for my connecting flight to Chicago, I watched the sun rise around 7am.  I realized then that I would be going more than 24 hours without seeing the sun set as we chased it westward, and that jet lag would be an unavoidable, uncomfortable reality for me very soon.  I texted my friend Ryne and told him I felt there was something literary to be said about the whole thing.  Maybe something to do with Icarus flying too close to the sun or how technology has progressed faster than our ability to cope with the changes it brings, but I was too tired and too far from those free-wheeling college English courses to be able to put it all together.

I guess you could say that the slowly approaching reality of it all introduced me to a new perspective, one that would help me shape the way I viewed the whole experience.  The jet lag was about to make my own body become something simultaneously familiar and alien.  I think it’s a good thing. I mean, what better way is there for you to start your life in a new country than to be in a state of physiological and mental ruin?  All the better to build yourself back up from the rubble.

It wasn’t two minutes from the time that I got on the plane to Incheon that I met two other nervous, excited English teachers.  Not that we even had to say what we were going over there for.  Being white, native English speakers in our early-to-mid-20s was a big tipoff.  We marveled at how many other white, native English speakers in their early-to-mid-20s were on the plane.  About a third of the passengers were obviously teachers, and the rest were all very sleepy Asians. (I’m not sure why, but just about every Asian on board was passed out, head back with mouth agape before the plane took off.  I envied them.) 

For the pre-flight demonstration, Asiana Air played wacky Eastern-style computer animation.  You might know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen the Tiger Woods scandal re-enactment they played on the news back in 2009 (Tiger Woods Animation).  Again: familiar and alien.  I had seen these instruction videos before with live-action, but why animated? Was that really more practical than using real actors?

Speaking of flight attendants, the actual ones that worked for Asiana Air were, how do I say this…freaking beautiful.  We’re talking Korean actress beautiful.  When I mentioned that I flew with Asiana to the other teachers in Korea, without me bringing it up, they said, “Oh, Asiana.  Yeah, they only hire gorgeous women for their flight attendants.”  Can’t say it was unpleasant having them onboard, but I also can’t say the airline’s hiring practice isn’t a wee bit lookist.  (I know. I’m surprised “lookism” is a real word, too.)

The Boeing 777 took off, and we were free to get comfortable with what would be our floating metal home for the next 15 hours.  I was sitting next to a Vietnamese mother with her little four-year-old daughter.  She was one of the cutest kids I have ever seen.  When she wasn’t napping, she’d wake up and talk to me or play hide-and-seek, which was pretty easy for me because she just hid under her blanket every time.  And she never stopped smiling.  I guess I should mention that she was cross-eyed.  VERY cross-eyed.  I think maybe that’s why I found her so endearing.  Her and I are on opposite sides of the aligned-eyeball spectrum, which goes from crossed to lazy, if you didn’t know. (As a side note, I tend to have interesting encounters with the people I sit next to on international flights:  [LINK])

There were a few things I made a point to remember from that flight.  There was the middle-aged Asian businessman who would walk ten laps every half hour from the cockpit, to where I was sitting in row 39, past the bathrooms in the back and around again.  He had a specific set of arm and hand exercises that he’d do along the way.  He was getting more of a workout during the flight than I had gotten in the past three months. 

Every four hours or so, I’d sleep for exactly 45 minutes with my iPod playing.  If 45 minutes sounds specific, that’s because at 45 minutes into the playlist, there was a song that was approximately 5000x louder than all the others.  I’d wake up thinking we were getting attacked by dubstep robots, only to realize that I was an idiot for once again leaving that song on there and too tired to take it off.

On one of those occasions where I tried to get some sleep, I was about ten minutes in, halfway dreaming about Korea and abstract nonsense, when I got punched in the face with the force of an airbag.  It was a five-year-old boy in the row behind me who went to grab my seat for leverage and accidentally threw the entire weight of his body into my jaw.  It hurt.  He was five.  I will never be a boxer.

The flight path was not what I had expected it to be.  We flew straight north from Chicago over Canada and up into Nunavut before we started heading west.  We were north of Alaska and Russia up in Santa Claus territory before we came straight back south over Siberia.  SIBERIA! Looking out the window, there was no sense of scale, but we could see an unimaginably long crack in the ice below.  Given how high we were flying and how far the visibility was, it would've been about forty miles long. 

After we took a half-hour detour to safely pass around North Korea, we finally reached South Korea.  (A month-long break in blog writing occurred here.)  We landed at Incheon International Airport, which means that a Midwesterner was now on an island off the east coast of northern South Korea.   As we walked towards customs, a strange looking camera was pointed at the hundreds of people coming down the hallway.  Once we got past it, I turned to look at the monitor it was connected to.  It was doing facial recognition scanning and thermal imaging for every single incoming passenger.  That was a good introduction to the camera culture of Korea. Essentially, every time you step outside of your apartment, your image is being filmed, either by the CCTVs at your job or by the government security cameras that line the roads and sit on top of lamp posts in the parks.  It’d feel like being watched by Big Brother, except I don’t think anybody is actually on the other side of the cameras.

I got through customs without a hitch, which was one less thing to be nervous about.  Naturally, as soon as that was over, I began to worry about whether my luggage would arrive.  It did.  What a surprise!  The informal group of foreigners that had been walking through the airport together found its way to the pickup area.  I saw a middle-aged man and woman holding a sign that said, “Chadwick.”  I parted ways with the two teachers I had met on the plane, and took my chances that I was the Chadwick the card was referring to.  This truly began my first few days in Korea.