It's only a small world if you're a disney character...

for the rest of us, it is quite large and it takes a rather long time to fly around it. However, I successfully made the trip, and I'm now in America.

Maybe the trip wasn't really as long as it felt this time. Maybe it was just because of the moving insanity and finishing up everything at KBU in the two days before I took off. All I know is this trip was significantly harder than the other times I've flown this route over the past year.

I was rather annoyed in the Incheon airport. I went through security and immigration, and they were both organized, efficient and fast. I love the Incheon airport in that regard. I had about an hour to kill, so I went to a Paris Baguette near my gate and ordered a black tea latte. I also picked up a bottle of water. I drank the tea, but I hadn't opened the water bottle yet. Boarding time came, and I handed the flight attendant my ticket, she scanned it, and I walked down the boarding hallway thing. Only it wasn't a normal boarding hallway thing. It was a set of stairs leading to another hallway, and we had to go through a second round of security. The security agents opened every carry on bag and looked inside of it. They also took away my bottle of water. My sealed bottle of water that I'd purchased from the airport, past security clearance. I don't understand what the purpose of this second security check was, but it was frustrating.

The flight itself was relatively uneventful. We flew from Seoul to Tokyo first.I sat next to a Korean man who was very interested in American politics. We had a rather lengthy discussion about the debt ceiling, the differences between Republics and Democrats, and what the general opinion was about President Obama. As we were landing, he asked for my email address. I gave him one, but it wasn't my personal email. I'm not entirely sure that I want to continue this particular friendship.

Even though the flight was only about two hours long, they actually gave us food and drinks. I was expecting a dixie cup full of ice with a few sips of juice and a tiny bag of pretzels. They actually gave us the full can of whatever we were drinking, and they gave us sandwiches. The tuna didn't excite me very much, but the ham and cheese was rather amazing! Especially after a year in the land with no good sandwiches.

I spent a few hours wandering around the Tokyo airport. I bought some Japanese snack food to bring back with me, but we haven't opened it yet. As a result, I now have some random Japanese currency floating around in my wallet. This is about as close as I got to Japan.

The flight from Tokyo to Chicago was very, very long. I had a pleasant seat companion for the trip. It was a girl who was a few years younger than me, who had spent the summer working with a news agency in Hong Kong. We spent some time talking, but she slept a lot. It is an unfortunate fact of my life that I can't sleep in a moving object. Bus, plane, car, roller coaster... It doesn't matter. I just can't sleep. Normally this isn't such a big deal. I use the time to catch up on all of the movies and music that I don't pay much attention to in normal life. 

Only this plane was really, really old. The screens in the seat backs were pretty tiny. They didn't have on demand movies or music. There were six channels, and each of them just looped a movie. This was fine for the first movie, but since the six movies aren't the same length, it gets a bit sketchy after that. There were only two movies that even remotely interested me. One of them was pretty good. I tried to watch the second one, but the sound cut out on every third word or so, so I quickly gave up.

I ended up watching the first movie two and a half times. I also spent a lot of time staring at the moving map. It was in English and Japanese, and it had both Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. I tried to improve my temperature conversion and see if I could figure out any Japanese. I walked up and down aisles when I could. There was a lot of really bad turbulence on this flight. At one point, it got so bad that the pilot made the flight attendants stop service and go buckle themselves in. All in all, I was glad to be on solid ground again when we hit Chicago. 

Of course, no blog post about a very long flight would be complete without some food pictures. So without further ado, I give you the airline food.  

This was some sort of pasta. It was overcooked, so every time I tried to take a bite, the noodles would almost disintegrate on my fork. Trying to eat that in a bumpy plane was quite interesting...

They gave us a mid-flight snack. The pastry had some sort of unidentified fruit filling in it. I'm still not sure if it was peach or orange or apple ;)

I also had some sort of beef in some sort of sauce. It was pretty unremarkable. 

I was glad for the food service though. It kept me from going absolutely crazy on the flight and broke things up into nice little segments. 

I landed in Chicago around 2:30 pm, and I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to force myself to stay up late so I could get over jet lag faster. I did actually manage to stay up until almost midnight, and I slept through the whole night. However, I felt like death warmed over on Sunday. I spent pretty much the whole day lounging on the couch, silently moaning and clutching a bottle of Advil. Things have gotten a bit better since then, but it seems like the slightly gentler approach would be better to return to in the future. 

I've been doing lots of shopping and eating lots of good food in the past few days. I'm starting a smallish road trip across Indiana tomorrow, so maybe there will be something blog-worthy to come out of that. If not, I'm sure there will be adventures when I get back to Korea and start my new job and unpack my apartment.