Well, as I sat wishing I could've gone to the Seoul art museum with Chi-Hé (see http://chihe13.blogspot.com/2008/11/turn-and-widen-exhibition.html) and writing my 'back home' to do list, I remembered I'd written some things down when I was in Doha about the journey home.
Leaving Chi-Hé's at 2pmish I walked the 100 meters to the bus stop and waited for my airport bus to arrive. It was a crisp autumnal day, the men out the front of Chi-Hé's local supermarket were hawking the veg over the headset implemented tannoy system and sweeping the street of vegetable debris. It certainly felt strange to put Chi-Hé's key in the mail box and wander past the shop with my bags on - I wondered whether they'd notice I wasn't around anymore. This isn't just arrogance or an assumption that they'd notice a 50% drop in the number of Westerners walking past the shop, they did generally nod and smile as I (or others) walked past.
The bus journey to the airport was largely uneventful, combining in winning style some sleeping, some observation of the city scape, and some of the countryside on the outskirts - a combo I highly recommend for any 2 hour bus journey out of a city. I arrived at the departures hall 5 hours prior to my flight, assuming I'd be able to check in at 5pm (4 hours ahead). I wandered around for a while looking for where Qatar were based and eventually found the counters they would be using later, and then noticed on the 'flight status' boards that there was only enough space for check ins about 2 or 3 hours in advance - partly because codeshare flights were placed on separate lines, so when I looked at one point (I was bored and I'd been there a long time) no less than 50 flight lines could have been removed, which amounted to 50% of the flights, or 2 out of 4 'pages' of flights. So, I got a coffee, had a pain au chocolate with actually chocolate in (as opposed to the red bean paste that I got so used to being in the things which looked like pain au chocolate), and a fantastic sandwich - mozzarella, pesto, and tomato on a light rye bread with walnuts in...and I waited, and waited and waited until 2.5 hours ahead of my international long haul flight, I was allowed to check in...that's 2.5 hours pre-security right there. eurghhh.
When I spotted my flight up on the board, I had a double take as I was sure it said somewhere else as well as Doha. When I noticed there were only about 10 people checking in I really started thinking something was up. I had of course forgotten that my flight was going via Osaka (a natural detour from Seoul to Doha...except of course for the fact that it's about 1000km in the wrong direction - and yes, yes I am sad enough to have checked that). This detour of course also adds down time in Osaka, and takeoff/landing time. We were down for at least 1.5 hours there, and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. (so if we're all keeping up that means by the time we took off again I've been on the plane for 3 hours roughly, and out of Chi-Hé's for 10 hours). From there it was a hop skip and a 12 hour jump to Doha with a shitty semi-broken in-flight entertainment system. I don't know how to describe it technically, but it seemed the indexing system was broken - i.e. I'd select one film and another one would play.
Landing in Doha to a very beautiful sunrise was pleasant, although trying to work out what the hell time it was, and spotting a 9.15am flight to London (4 hours later) rather than my flight (7.00am) was slightly panic inducing. I had about 1.5 hours in the terminal at Doha before boarding...which gives me about 2/2.5 hours there (so that's 24 hours from Chi-Hé's). My first breakfast, going into Doha, was at 3am Doha time, 9am Seoul time, and about midnight UK time.
I was exceptionally happy, delighted, not ecstatic, but certainly relieved to find the entertainment system from Doha working perfectly, making the 8 hour flight from Doha to London a lot more bearable. Fortunately I got through security and baggage claim fast in London, and a short 1.5 hour car journey later arrived home. Arriving home at about 3pm - 12am Seoul time - means that, if we're all keeping up, I arrived back about 34 hours after leaving Chi-Hé's place, and about 27 hours after taking off from Seoul.
Films I watched on the flight:
Hancock - Will Smith plays a Superhero with some etiquette issues. Very entertaining, very silly naturally but perfect for a flight.
Nim's island - crap children's film, no character development, rubbish plot, crappy 'happily ever after' ending with no good reason for us having got there (except to make the film come to a much needed end).
Swing Vote - Presumably someone (possibly Kevin Costner) said to Kelsey Grammar "Yo Kels' you want to play a republican president?" and he said yes. The film is based around one man's vote being the deciding vote in a U.S. presidential election. Due to a voting machine malfunction on election night he has one week to cast this deciding vote - and thus the candidates devote all of their attention to this 'swing vote'. Now never mind the fact that American democracy doesn't work like this what with the whole electoral college thing, the film is fairly entertaining but although I wish I hadn't fallen asleep for the last half, I won't be going out of my way to watch the rest of it.
Donnie Brasko - Johnnie Depp plays undercover FBI agent who is getting rather too into his roll as a mafia man. Depends how you feel about mafia movies - quite entertaining I thought, but perhaps a bit slow.
Royal Tenenbaums - I will go out of my way to watch the latter half of this film.
Grindcore
14 years ago
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