Good Morning, America. How Are You?

I got four out of the five "Korean Culture" posts finished that I wanted to complete. Not bad. I'm giving up on the last one, "Lifestyle" or "Lyfestylez" as I like to call it, because there is simply too much to include. It is a complex beast to tackle a "lifestyle" vignette when, frankly, I'm just biding my time until my plane leaves.

Thus, I am scrapping it and moving on to: Coming To America. No, not the Eddie Murphy movie. The Steve Holcomb movie. And this movie is a month long. Try sitting down with a bag of popcorn and watching that, you stupid. Oh, I totally got you good. To make sure there is no confusion between Eddie Murphy and myself (I get that all the time...), I will call it Coming To America: America Edition.

The butterflies are just beginning to emerge as I have only one night of sleep before embarking on my long, long journey through time and space. On Saturday morning at 8:00 AM, I depart from Busan's Gimhae International Airport bound for Narita in Tokyo. There, I have a pretty uneventful layover before my 14 or so hour flight to Dallas and finally my last flight to Dulles. I do not look forward to the journey because of both the amount of time it will take me to fly and the airline on which I'm doing it. I will be flying with American Airlines.

I have not yet had the displeasure of flying with them, however I have heard nothing but bad things about the experience. I have been somewhat spoiled in the past couple of years with my choice of airlines always being foreign. British Airways is superb, Swiss Air is equally so, and Korean Air makes me a little weak in the knees with how courteous they are. I think the two things that make an airline great are personal media (screens on the seat back that you can control and watch whatever you want, whenever you want) and free alcohol/food. By law, American Airlines has to feed us on the trans-Pacific flight, but I'll be tickled pink if I get anything on that domestic flight from Dallas.

Hell, I'm flying with JAL Express, the Japanese Express Airline, to Tokyo and my two hour flight gets a free snack. There is no mention of such a luxury on my domestic flight to Dulles, as it only says "food for purchase" in the flight description. So generous, those AA folks, allowing me to buy food like that. It's the best because I'll be coming off of 20 or so hours of being awake and flying in three different countries, so I'm sure I'll handle that inconvenience well. I guess I'll have to scarf something down in the Dallas airport or woo a flight attendant or something.

As my final Korean post for at least a month, I will leave you with this one last picture someone found in this glorious country. I cannot claim it as my own: