Friday

Way back in December, in the early hours of Saturday the thirteenth, we boarded a Korean airplane for a holiday visit home. I used to keep track of the number of times I've flown in an airplane, but I can hardly do that anymore. An inaccurately hasty count has me taking off in thirty-seven different aircraft of seven brand-name carriers over the last eighteen months. With such practice, even minute details come to my attention if they differ sufficiently from familiarity. Stepping onto the really huge Korean 747 I noticed it was decorated for Christmas. Corsages of tiny red and green flora decorated cabin light fixtures all down the plane, pretty red bunting swung. Our plane was dressed for the prom. This was a first for me. Another first: when the safety demonstration began playing on the touch-screen monitors in the back of every chair, I noticed the prestigious demonstration plane in the video was identical to our, giving me the feeling I was taking Korea's most photogenic flight. Usually I watch the taped attendants buckling disembodied seatbelts in a far more advanced environment than the one in which I'm an audience member. That's assuming I'm on a flight technologically sufficient for television, of course. In December, even though some gross mismanagement prevented my seating arrangements from materializing--forcing me to sit several rows from Sunshine on that first leg to Incheon Airport as well as causing, I suspect, the disappearance of my special vegetarian meals throughout the entire twenty-six hour sky-day--I had a really comfortable five-hour flight. The flight from South Korea to Atlanta, while mercifully short compared to the HK-to-LA route I'm used to, was less so: we were evidently seated in the children's section of the plane. That's an experience woefully, sadly, exasperatingly familiar. [Cavin]