First Long Day En Route to China

I have never been one to BLOG before, but I thought I would give it a try on this trip. I left my office in Salt Lake City on Wednesday at 2:00 pm. Twenty six and one-half hours later, I find myself sitting in the airport near Seoul, Korea, with more than an hour before our flight leaves to Shanghai, China. The airport is very nice, but all of the advertised amenities, such as showers, kid play area, and so forth, are all closed (we arrived at just after 4:00 am local time). I loved the airplane. I have never been on one as nice as the Korean Air liner we came in on. And the staff is incredible. If every airline had customer service like that, people would be willing to pay a little more for their ticket prices, and the airlines would once again become profitable.

On the airplane, we were fed a dinner and later a breakfast. I decided that even though it was airplane food, I would still try to local fare. I don’t recall the name of the rice bowl I had for dinner, but I liked it. Short grain sticky rice, hot paste seasoning, mixed with sea weed, bean sprouts, and some type of meat, with a sprinkling of sesame oil. I had instant sea weed soup on the side, and a few non-dill pickle slices. For breakfast, I had the green tea rice porridge. Short grain rice in a warm milky liquid, to which i added a small “green tea” seasoning packet. To me, the green tea seasoning did not smell at all like green tea, but reminded me of the rabbit feed pellets that we used to buy at IFA or Oversons. I ate, and I am still not a rabbit.

Soon we will be boarding for the two hour flight to China, on a Boeing 747-400. It is my first time on a double decker plane . . . too bad I don’t have the funds to upgrade to the upper level, business class section. Maybe next time. I thought it seemed like a big plane for such a short trip (it will barely get to cruising speed before slowing down for the descent) but it appears that it is airline code sharing trip, so four different airliners will be putting passengers on the plane.