Left Albuquerque at 11:11 AM, right on time.
Wouldn’t happen on a flight where being on time actually mattered.
Over the next 14 hours or so, what’s a few minutes between continents going to matter anyway.
Then, in LA, I had to walk about five minutes, wait another fifteen, and I was on this plane.
Imagine that?
They actually do use gates with numbers lower than 94 and closer to the actual airport than a half hour train ride.
Had breakfast at the airport, with Ann who drove me after we dropped her daughter at school.
I often don’t feel much like hanging around making smallish talk when waiting to get on a plane. Too mush minded and distracted to make it comfortable.
Like a patient feeling the need to take care of the visitors .
But, this was nice and unrushed and I was having “leaving for Vietnam” kind of scared feelings anyway and so it was a nice thing to have her be there to see me off.
She’s traveled a lot and that feels solid to be around when starting out.
Check in was surprising in a couple of ways, the first being that I didn’t get charged for the 55lb bag I checked (! :-o); the second being that I -
Upgraded my seat.
Get this, 5 inches more of leg room on the aisle (or, for those of you who, like me, spell whatever comes up at the moment – on the “isle” seat) for only a hundred bucks!
Okay, I tried for business class but they were all out.
Not to be defensive about it but It’s surprising how big that 5 inches feels at the moment.
6 thousand miles and some to go to get to Japan the stop before Korea.
One movie down – Rio. Good desert choice after my gluten free meal of chicken, wild rice, broccoli, and coffee.
Not bad.
Not the five courses that the Japanese man in business class I can see through the mesh curtain just had.
Good enough for government work.
Speed 591mph.
Altitude 10,000 meters up.
Destination Japan: 8 hours.
Cold out there: -44cc’s or something.
And so forth.
All on a video screen, the map with the little airplane which is approaching Hawaii now.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen to be the one I’m on.
That one appears to be heading directly down into the ocean.
There’s a red line coming out of it’s tail and three parachutes just exited via the pilots window.
I think that’s not a good sign.
Nor the message which just came on the screen: “Program Suspended”.
On the other hand, no one’s watching the duty free goods cart which is loaded with a large number of expensive liquor and other goods which are now mine, all mine!
All like a movie.
Surrealistic.
After all the thinking about going and getting ready to go to Korea! and trying to stay in the moment with whomever I was with at the time,
With myself even, don’t you know,
Now here I am on the way and it seems like just another flight.
Only on a much bigger plane than I believe I’ve been on before
(except the military transport that hauled me and a dozen aluminum coffins from Vietnam to Hawaii once).
No sense of flying in an oversized cigar tube.
Maybe an undersized basketball court.
Skyped my friend Carl from my smart-ass phone just before we took off.
Couldn’t hear what he said but it he was like the second person who came to see me off in one day.
I keep feeling shades of heading off to Vietnam, anxious feelings, and so this thing of having people wave goodbye in vitro, as it were, is kinda nice for a change.
Oh good, no more seat belt sign but the lavatory IS occupied.
Had to pee but “wasn’t free to walk about the cabin” and now I am and there’s no place to go.
I see we have a -28kph head wind.
What the hell could that mean unless we’re now flying into a vacuum?
If it goes to -556kph will we be standing still, like a hawk hanging on an updraft looking for prairie dog lunch?
I’ve got with me 2 Australian flower essence’s, one from daughter Hilary and one from my naturopath, to smooth out the inner trip and outer trip, as it were.
Calm and Clear and Travel Essence.
I could probably have skipped the plane.
Just seven drops under the tongue and off I go.
The flight attendants are prowling the aisles with flash lights to check if we have our seat belts fastened.
Man, it’s got to be a painful routine after all these years.
They probably would rather just let you fly into the ceiling if the plane suddenly drops us a couple thousand feet.
Get a big laugh back there in the galley.
Maybe it’s time for another movie.
Some time later:
Reading a book by Tina Fey that I down loaded onto my Kindle just before takeoff.
I like the Kindle for the convenience and it was less than half the price at the news stand where I had just noticed it.
So far, so good.
I keep thinking I should go to sleep for some reason.
I’ve heard differing theories about how to handle jet lag.
I’ll arrive in Korea in time to get to bed and sleep the night.
But WHAT night?
Wednesday night tonight which is Tuesday really but I will still only have been up until 9 or so “tonight” then tomorrow morning will be Thursday and I’ll have a normal night’s sleep when I show up for work.
Whatever….
Maybe time for another movie. Here’s the selection:
- Dumb and Dumber
- Fast Five
- Red Riding Hood
- Rio
- Robin Hood
- Water for Elephants
- Wrecked
Makes me want to watch the plane picture and imagine those pilots mentioned above floating about like Tom Hanks in Castaways.
Actually, maybe it’s just time to take out the dice and see what it has to say.
If I eliminate Rio which I’ve already watched, there’s six left.
Make D & D 1 and Wrecked 6.
Wrecked it is!
I was hoping for Elephants.
That’s dice life for you.
Here we go…..
(Just realized that my left foot is numb, but I have a KitKat candy bar left over from lunch. Doesn’t help the foot but takes my mind off it for a second).
So far the music is pretty creepy.
At least it isn’t about a plane accident.
Too creepy.
Next roll, D & D.
Watched the whole damn thing, a couple of good laughs, not quite as creepy.
(Some time later, e.g. I’ve landed in Japan, walked ten minutes to the next gate, waited an hour and a half, flown to Soul, passed through customs, etc.)
On the way out of the customs area, a wild fortyish Korean (I assume, but could have been Japanese I guess (them Asians all look alike, don’t you know) was screaming and trying to fight her way back into the customs area. Another woman, older, whom I immediately assumed was “mom”, was hovering around behind her. Two twenty-something looking custom agents were holding them back. This woman was screaming and biting the shit (or trying to) out of the one agent. Mom kept trying to make an end run. Several of us were trying to make it out through the sliding glass doors to the baggage area but the fighting action kept us blocked. Finally, a couple made their own end run out the door with me close behind.
There was quite a number of people watching the action, from a safe distance I might add, and the whole thing seemed only to add to my sense of the surreal that I was already experiencing.
Why would someone be fight so hard to get back into the customs area unless someone close to them had been detained or they really, really needed something that the customs folks had lifted from her.
I think that that customs agent won’t have full use of his arm for awhile and hope his wife believes the story about where the teeth marks came from.
Once again, the walk to the baggage area was only about ten minutes, my bag had made it, and ten minutes later I was on the van that took me to the Marriott Regency Hilton Royal Castle Crown Airport Hotel.
Whatever, it felt like every bit like heaven had had a place saved for me.
Young men and women glided up to us as we unloaded from the van, quietly and politely bowed as they took the tons of rolling luggage from us and conveyed us into the lobby, which looked as though it could hold the airplane we had just left.
Fifteen minutes later, or two hours, I can’t vouch for my sense of time any longer, I was in my room where another young man in a suit, apparently paid to prowel the hallway, showed me where everything was including the panel that operated all the lights in the suite from bedside.
There was something James Bondish in all this, though I can’t exactly say why.
I didn’t have a martini, stirred or shaken, but the Heineken sure tasted as good as any in recent memory.
I could feel my aura unfolding from the little hard ball it had shrunken to over the course of the preceding 14 or so hours.
I bought some wifi (yes, the room was wired for broadband but do you can understand that the two brain cells still functioning couldn’t entertain more than one concept at a time and grabbed onto the first possibility that came along.
I suppose I can be glad the thought wasn’t to buy a computer first.
Skyped Ann, partially successfully as the connection kept dropping off.
Skyped Zac because he happened to show as being on line and because I wanted the company, and it turned out our connection worked fine.
I think the last time I was someplace and wanted to try out the Skype, he put up with it then too.
I’m still not sure what time of day it was for him. We were doing the time travel thing of talking to each other from different days.
It’s too weird and I’m still messed up about it.
The beer not only relaxed me to the point of complete imbecility which had me getting out a pair of pants and a shirt from my backpack and actually pressing out some of the wrinkles for the next day.
It took awhile for me to get that the water in the iron was coming out as, well, water and not steam and that indicated something to do with heat settings, etc.
Mom would be proud.
On second thought, she’s probably laughing her angel ass off.
Next morning I met up with the other MFLC’s (Military and Family Life Consultant) in the lobby with all our luggage as we were going to Osuan, the Army base in Seoul, to get our military contractor id. cards and become officially acceptable to the Korean government.
Some of us had breakfast first.
I chose what the person I sat next to was having – oatmeal and coffee – because the breakfast buffet was twenty-five dollars and took my appetite away.
Also, the beer plus WiFi was $21 which makes it definitely the most expensive beer as well as the best.
The oatmeal turned out to be a bargain at only $16 (or approx. 1600 Won in Korean money).
I really enjoyed it!
About the pressed pants and shirt – it wasn’t necessary because I forgot two relevant points: one, that everyone else would have clothes on fresh out of their suitcases, i.e. wrinkled as hell; two, it wasn’t a work day we were going on, we were just going to be herded around in-processing.
Plus, the day turned out to be quite warm and humid and all the wrinkles fell out on their own, including the crease in my pants and maybe even a few around my eyes.
Or, maybe that was just puffiness from lack of sleep.
It turned out to be an hour bus ride from the airport to the processing center and I got to cross a really cool looking bridge that I’d seen from the air flying in.
Soul is an interesting looking city in ways that I’m way too vague about at the moment to describe.
The most notable thing about the ride was the Mercedes taxi we rode in (kind of like the van in the Cash Cab quiz show) and the fact that the wall-to-wall, rush hour traffic was quiet!
That’s right, folks, NO HONKING! And no cursing from the driver even though everyone on the road was doing more or less what goes on in rush hour traffic everywhere.
It was amazing and sort of eerie at the same time.
I swear I didn’t hear one honk the entire trip into the heart of Soul (no pun intended).
It wasn’t until I was on the bus later in the day that I heard A honk.
The in-processing went as smoothly as these things do, which is to say, when it came to confirming my paperwork, I wasn’t “in the computer!”
It took another hour an a half of some very nice people doing some creative cutting and pasting on the computer (literally what I heard one person advise and turned out to be the fix for the problem) to get me my ID and PX cards. Another poor MFLC was even more distressed to find that he might have to go home if they didn’t retrieve his info. And it wasn’t clear where he would stay that night. Last I saw of him, he was sitting by himself in a little office looking what I projected to be forlorn, miffed, and pissed. I felt (briefly) guilty for abandoning him.
After that, we had a nice lunch at the base hotel the Thunderbird Lodge (not in AZ) wherein the remaining 6 of us shared MFLC bullshit and rumor and generally tried to relieve our nervousness about starting our respective new assignments.
A couple had been to Korea before and it was reassuring to see that they had obviously survived the foreign culture, the clients, the really boring staff phone conferences, and had good things to say about being in Korea.
After that, we dragged all our luggage about a mile in the heat and humidity to the bus station where we boarded different busses for our respective assignments.
Some headed north towards the DMZ (camp Red Cloud, just south of the DMZ was not named after a native American. Camp Humphreys was not named after a Civil War General which is the case for Humphreys Peak in Flagstaff. But, that’s a near fetched an idea, come to think of it).
My bus headed due south about an hour or so after the others.
I had been feeling really grateful for their company, especially for the experienced and departing MFLC’s for coming and walking us through what would have been a nightmare process to figure out on our own.
I guess it’s another effin’ lesson about trusting the process.
The MFLC I was replacing at Camp Humphreys got called by one of these kind people who let him know when my bus would leave so he could meet me on his end.
The bus service is run by the Army and runs regularly and on time.
It was another two hours of travel for me and I felt grateful to sit and chill and stare out the window. At the same time I was also feeling like screaming and maybe biting someone like the lady at the airport.
“Enough traveling already! What day is it?!”
I can’t say I enjoyed the ride.
That’s because I didn’t.
I kept wanting to doze off like the woman across the aisle but I was too tired and buzzed.
I tried to read and that worked for awhile but I was too tired and buzzed for that too.
I tried to be interested in the passing views but, etc. and…
Well, the truth is that we mostly passed through urban areas interspersed with some wooded hills and a few fields that were growing mostly nothing I could see.
The rest of the time we passed by high rise complexes which some were old and stained and run down in the way that buildings get in damp, hot climates.
Or there were what seemed like hundreds of randomly dispersed conglomerates of high-rise housing ragging the skyline with some of the most unattractive examples of this sort I’ve ever seen.
It’s as though they were designed by blind people out of poorly designed Leggos, the one’s that were rejected because the colors were too bland and they didn’t really fit together right with the other pieces.
Really, this isn’t just the jadedness of exhaustion speaking.
I’m sure that there are plenty of beautiful buildings in this country.
After all, there are Buddhists here who like beautiful and gentle surroundings.
They just aren’t along Route 1 to Camp Humphreys.
Anyway, the bus pulled in, Barry was waiting, and I dragged my bags about two hundred yards to the Humphrey Lodge, a hotel run by the Army in which I have a one bedroom apartment/suite with all that implies.
I’m on the fifth floor with a view of a kind of field in the midst of the military complex of old and not so old buildings which constitute the base.
There white Herons or storks that hang out there.
Otherwise, it’s just sodden grass with vehicle tracks in it.
The Air Force is here too and the runway is only about a mile away and the base has what is touted as the best gym on any military instillation in the world.
Maybe I’ll wander in there one of these days.
As for all the walking I was told to expect to do on this assignment
(we aren’t given vehicles or actually even allowed to drive here. And, even though the Koreans apparently don’t honk, their traffic is constant rush hour and pedestrian travel is a high risk event, I’m told), most of that for me has happened already. Here on Humphreys, from my hotel, I can walk to any place that I need to go within five or ten minutes.
Or, there is base bus service and taxi service.
The walk-in main gate to/from the town (the name of which escapes me at the moment because I don’t know it yet) is on the other side of the airfield, about five miles. Still walkable in less hot weather.
Speaking of which, since I’ve been here, the sun has shown every day and Barry, still sodden from the monsoons which have been continuous for most of his sixty days here, turned over his umbrella to me with a certain amount of chagrin at having warned me to expect to be damp like he’s been.
So, now it’s Saturday evening and I left Tuesday and I am floored to realize this.
It seems as though the lines between the days have blurred and it is all just one long day.
I have not been having fun on the emotional and mental front to say the least.
Or the most.
Whatever.
Jet lag sucks.
I keep feeling guilty and frustrated that I haven’t been able to focus on communicating “back home”, but the truth is that my mind feels like mush, I have not gotten my computer working right to Skype, I don’t have the energy to try to figure it out and I feel scared when I realize that the people who probably could help me best speak a different language.
Even the one’s who have some modicum of English (bless them for knowing more about my language than I theirs) there is something about the fact that their accent is so different than any I’m used to, that I can’t understand the English they are able to use. Especially the young women here at the hotel front desk. I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that the experience is similar for them when they try to understand me.
A lot of smiling, nodding and bowing goes on between us.
It is now Sunday evening, Aug. 28.
Earlier one of the other MFLCS, Don, screwed around with my computer and managed to figure out how to get it to connect to the broadband connection in my room. It was one of those kind of “hail Mary” salvation events where he suddenly noticed something he hadn’t tried and it did the trick. Lord help me if I need to do it again. He’s leaving on the early bus for home tomorrow, but I got his email address….
So, the next thing was that Ann Skyped me just before midnight her time and we talked all the way from yesterday to today, a romantic sounding thing that actually took only ten minutes or so – the date-line phenomena again.
And here’s a hint for iPhone 3 Skypers. If you want to use your camera to project yourimage without turning your phone around (so you can continue to see the person you’re talking to on your phone) just stand in front of a mirror and hold you’re your phone so the camera captures your image in the mirror. Works like a charm and is way cheaper than an iPhone 4 to boot!
Anyway, had dinner with Barry and Colleen (the MFLC who works with kids on post here) and we walked around some on a very nice coolish evening here in Korea.
Barry offered me twenty dollars to pack for him.
Even if he had been serious, the very thought of packing for another trip set my teeth on edge.
I was thinking about George Carlin’s riff on how much time, energy and focus our “stuff” take up in life, even on a trip. Maybe especially on a trip.
I’ve got less stuff around than most people and yet I still have things stashed at the places of four different people, some of which is more than a decade old.
I don’t miss it and if it all disappeared today I wouldn’t even know what it was that was missing.
So, why am I thinking of buying more while I’m here!?
I guess because it’s just what we humans do and that’s that.
Maybe I’ll just pack an empty suitcase for the return trip and see how that feels. And Bill, Carl, Lauren, Ann, (am I leaving anyone out?) I promise to clear out my stuff from your place when I get back so you can have more room for your own stuff.
You want anything?
No comments:
Post a Comment