Incheon, London, Manchester, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
1. Korean Air flight KE122: 29 August
Sydney Airport: 5.15am. Most airport employees (apart from check-in staff) weren't even pretending a perky good morning as they stolidly opened up concessions and turned coffee machines on around the terminal. A series of mystery emails and a phone call asking me to bring my February bank statement had prepared me for a long bureaucratic time at the check in desk confirming that I was the actual person who had booked the actual flight on line by an actual HSBC Credit card, and for signing two declarations to that actual effect before we got to the "are you a safe packer" questions...
Looking out at the KAL flight deck from the boarding queue: pilot and co-pilot preparing for the flight. A huge, encyclopaedic book is open on the dash: Piloting rules? Airbus operations manual? Mammoth pre-flight checklist? Warranty documentation? Bible?
First impressions, relatively generous full-stretch legroom for economy. Most passengers brought little hand luggage on board so more than ample space in the overhead lockers. Friendly, solicitous and businesslike attendants and then the surprise - it's 2017 economy but they still deliver the little packages of cute slippers, toothbrush and paste and sleeping mask. For a daytime flight. Nice!
Next to me: Elena from Moscow is also doing the free-KAL-stay-overnight-between-flights-in-Seoul thing. She has several pages of English translations laboriously written out on A4 pages, none of which cover what we might want to say to each other for the next 10 hours. We both become fascinated looking for movies in our preferred language.
The meal: lactose free (rant to follow): at 8am I'm asked what drink I would like with my "special meal" without a clue about what the "meal" at this time of day might be. Sadly it wasn't breakfast, but the generous tray arrived with a real glass and real metal cutlery. The good thing about low lactose is that the accompaniments to the hot meal tend to be fruit and salad, here crisp and fresh and with a basic optioning accompaniment of vinaigrette. And a 9am glass of wine.
As to the "main course": since when did "low lactose" meals have to always be bland nursery/preview-nursing-home-food? The usual rank smelling but tasteless "special" fish, or the even blander chicken (usually steamed and identically grey - if it's got a sad lemon sliver on top, it may be fish...) with rice that is the staple of most low lactose meals is so sad when it could be an Asian coconut based curry or gingery stir fry. And since when did low-lactose always mean chickenish/fishish grey stuff... Particularly Asian airlines should be able to do better than that, unless, likely cunning planning is that "white and bland" is a "special meal" for pretty much most food allergies/gizzard issues/dietary requirements, so some industrial kitchen somewhere is turning fresh fish and chicken into industrial grey, bland mush which is considered "special". Not "special" enough, surely. To quote a former colleague: "we're school Principals: we know just what "special" means"....
A glance at the main meal on offer to my glum Russian companion suggested I was doing ok with my "breakfast time" meal - at least the julienne carrot and buck choy next to the fishy stuff tasted fresh and not over-cooked compared to the reconstituted-frozen-mixed-vegetables which amassed around her grey chicken fillet. The "special meal" soy milk looked like a better coffee option than the "whitener" sachets available on most meal trays.
The fresh fruit salad, side salad, roll and marg and green tea did make for a fine breakfast though. Sorry about the hot "special" meal.
And at 10am we flew out over the Central Queensland Coast across island clusters and the beginning of azure green Barrier Reef seascapes under a clear blue sky... And unlike recent experiences on Cathay Pacific, no officious staff member is demanding I shut the the shade, they just keep offering hot water to freshen up my green tea and translation assistance for Elena to answer immigration forms in Korean and English.
Headlines from today's "Korea Times":
"Talks Possible if no North Korea Provocation until October"
"Seoul U-Turns, Says NK Projectiles were Ballistic Missiles"
"Antibiotics found in 64% of Dog Meat sold at Markets"
"Iceland Safest Country In World".
Mid flight "Snack" is banana bread, prawn crackers, juice around what might be lunchtime in Korea and NSW. Feeling very naughty eating this stuff while luxuriating in 1970's era hot towels: noice...
Second meal: chicken (of course) in a mildly salty gravy with tread-marks approximating grilling. Somewhat better than the fish, but as this was late lunch, no breakfast alcohol was on offer. (!)
Elena and I manage to find out way through short queues and printed directions to the long line for the “between-flight” overnight freebies. In the coach over the huge bridge into Incheon (NSW people, think ANZAC Bridge on steroids) we share photos on devices and our 10 shared words. By the time we are checking in to this Texan-French-Bordello-Style-Gilt-Plated-Hotel, with huge windows looking from overstuffed beds into the huge spa and gold-plumbed toilet in downtown Incheon, I have become a kind of Russian/English/Korean Marcel Marceau. We end up in adjoining gilt-palace rooms.
I see Mel Gibson's "Highlander" is one of the movies on offer on the flight to London tomorrow. Appropriate to pass the time when flying towards the a wedding in the Scottish Highlands... No?
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Arriving into London
2. Bloomsbury to Miranda to "Happy Valley": 30 August – 1 September, 2017
(Warning: this rumination contains various references to English TV shows of a certain age. If you are bemused by this or have never ventured into ABC TV, that's ok: it's not your fault...)
Thursday evening: a sleep-deprived jet lagged wander around Bloomsbury until real unconsciousness could kick in.
Friday: the sunny conservatory-glazed B&B breakfast room. A flamboyant elderly Chinese waiter kept a firm hand on the multi-ethnic breakfast clientele as he delivered the morning fry ups. Three Chinese tourists, dubiously pushed their fried bread around the plate, trying to work out what it might be, having already opened and hesitantly share-tasted the sealed breakfast yogurts/jams to see if they could recognise or possibly stomach the contents.
Today is that day after an extended overseas flight when you feel slightly, light-headedly, "other worldly": mildly sweaty with cooked eyeballs and seeking some quiet catch-up doze time. That's when I clambered onto the Virgin express to Manchester and stumbled across Matt from Miranda.
Matt, immediately recognised my accent, and was REALLY keen to talk to another Aussie after a month's constant Kon Tiki-styled travel across Western Europe. I then found my booked seat was opposite his, over a shared table...
He was in his Sharkies cap, Man United sweatshirt, and relentlessly enthusiastic and about to get onto a Ryanair flight to a one week coach tour of Ireland. A fitness trainer and footy fan (all codes), he was one of those well-meaning blokes who agreed with so much of anything you said and fed it back to you as statements of fact in a kind of recursive conversation. (I'm sure this was not just my sleep-deprived-addled brain here.. I was sorely tempted to see how far I could go with his enthusiastic agreement with every statement I made and test where the boundary of his enthusiastically consistent "agreeance" with everything I muttered could be tested and overtaken... But I was weary: I "did nice", and he retreated into faceboook to confirm the LOL news that Barnaby Joyce is a Kiwi, after only the first couple of hours conversation and a "selfie". This was briefly interrupted by the enthusiastic sighting of a huge Bunnings near Stoke-on-Trent.
A double/triple(?) shot coffee from the new and slightly confused barista-on-learners'-plates at Manchester Piccadilly (the store owner enthusiastically regailing her with extensive details on which cups/plates/saucers to use and when, as my head suddenly kicked into caffeined gear), wiring me for the remaining 3 hours of Trans Pennine Expresses into Newcastle.
Listening in to the nasally mellifluous Manchester/Parkinson/"Royle Family" accents on the Hull train to 'Uddersfield, with destinations such as Sheffield and Barnsley and Mickelfield and Leeds and ‘ull was endlessly entertaining (adopt the accent of any Midlands stand-up comic and you'll see what I mean...)., as an Eastern European woman shrieked relentlessly into her mobile phone for some considerable time. The crowd trying to get off at Durham were bemused as the train accelerated through the station, before it was announced that "an incident on the platform” meant that "this train was unable to stop", and passengers for Durham would "be able to catch a train back from the next stop". The regional crowd accents immediately became more pronounced.
From the stone terraces and picturesque abandoned stone mills, towpaths along canals with ramblers wandering from village to village along in dappled sun past moored canal boats, past cute "repurposed" abandoned railway stations... the train rolled through landscapes graduating from from "All Creatures Great and Small", into "Happy Valley" lines of brick terraces on grey distant ridges.
By late afternoon, I was in the far more depressed South Shields, near Tynemouth. Even Marks and Spencer has abandoned this once prosperous mining and shipyard town to the One Pound shops and daggy fast food concessions and sad charity shops. Across to North Shields on the Tyne ferry, and the waterfront seemed a bit more preserved-prosperous, until the hill climb to the shuttered shopfronts (no glass to be seen after closing), the Spice Inn ("Finest Indian Cuisine and Pizza") and a bouncer-contolled-door of "Booze masters: Open Times 8am-10pm Everyday". Taking the Metro back into Newcastle was looking goood.
I'm typing this in the pub restaurant which has just been invaded by a schoolboys' football team from Glasgow (which is doing wonders for my appreciation of regional accents, if not my semi-dozing concentration).
The Highlands now beckon.
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