Plane Ride

I've made it to Korea.

It was a very long Friday for me. My day started in Chicago, and I flew from there to San Fransisco. I was stuck in a middle seat, but it wasn't too bad as I could fit my feet under the seat in front of me.

On that flight I sat next to a guy from New Zealand who worked for a company that makes milk separators. He had made the trip quite a few times and he would tell me what we were flying over on the way to San Fran. Seemed like it was an awful lot of Wyoming.

I was really worried about finding my gate in San Fransisco on time. I had an hour and 45 for my layover. Well it took about 11 minutes to find my gate, which left me plenty of time to find food and so on.

I was expecting the plane to Korea to have a lot of ESL teachers like me on it, but when I got to the gate I could tell I was wrong. Nearly everyone was Asian. I saw a few people who might be teachers, and a few guys who were definitely military.

As I boarded the plane, and walked nearly all the way to the back I found my seat. Thank goodness it was an aisle seat! And even better instead of having someone as big as I am in the seat next to me, there was a young lady named Hanna.

I said hello to her, and she shook my hand and told me she was, "10 in the us but 12 in Korea." Very quickly she needed to beat her little sister in filling out the little game book she had. Mostly it was the pictures from Highlights where a bear is having a birthday party and you need to find the hidden thumb tack, and needles. You know the kind right? Well we beat Minna, most of the time. Minna looked to be about 4 or 5, but she was getting help from the people sitting next to her, an young married couple.

This airplane was what I had expected an airplane to be like. We had pillows, blankets and a little TV screen. We also had satellite radio to listen to with our "souvenir" ear phones (in other words, "please take the ear phones with you so we don't have to throw them away). The TV showed 4 or 5 movies, one or two episodes of Desperate Housewives, and a few hours of the Disney Channel. There was also a cool map function where we could see where we were, our speed, and all that fun stuff. Of course about 8 hours in it wasn't nice to see that we were only in Alaska.

We were fed 3 times, and a person would come by with a drink about every hour.

Most people seemed to sleep most of the flight, I did not. Mostly because I had such a good flying companion. We had fun watching the Wizards of Waverly Place, and cartoons. Unfortunately, because the flight was 13 hours long, we saw the same episodes about 5 times or more. Hanna was not pleased with this. "This one again? Ohh this isn't really the Disney Channel, it's just a tape."

Koreans love to give each other business cards, and I got my first one on the plane. It was from this guy who is a Korean Mennonite Preacher. He has a Youth Culture Center in Elkhart Indiana. He takes Korean kids to this center so they can see if they really want to go study in the US. He only takes kids from rural areas. And while he was clearly Korean, and had a heavy accent, he assured me he was 100% American and a citizen of the US. This was a big point of pride for him.

Hanna and Minna's parents sat right behind the girls, and once the girls were sleeping their dad grilled me on Hanna's English abilities. I told her she spoke very well. I found out later that many Koreans can read and write English, but they struggle with speaking it. And that was what Hanna's dad was most worried about.

I told him where I was going to live, and he said I will like it very much. I told him I was going to teach ESL and he said, "Oh, very good. You makes lots of money."

Right before we got off the plane Hanna had to give me something: