Precariously Perched on My Proverbial Seat

Have you ever played "Never Have I Ever"? It's a common icebreaker, though my experience with it over the last few years has mostly been with larger groups of friends, and last year especially, mostly incorporated within everyone's favorite royal card game of social lubrication. Everybody in the circle starts by holding up a certain number of fingers (generally 5 or 10), then people take turns around the circle saying things that they have never done. If anybody else in the circle has done what you have not, then those people put a finger down, and the first person to put all of their fingers down loses (or wins, if you want to look at it that way). One of the phrases that I've come to use almost every time I've played is to say "never have I ever left the continent." Well, in about 12 hours, I will no longer have the ability to use that particular finger-dropper.

My flight departs from Flint at 1:30pm and the first stop is in Detroit. If this seems strange to you, it should. Apparently, through a travel booking friend of my father, departing from Flint was about $200 cheaper than from Detroit because it's a Canadian flight... and since Canadians are obviously worse pilots than Americans, the price decrease is entirely justified. Or something like that. I clear customs in Detroit, then from there I fly 14 hours to Tokyo Narida airport. I hope to catch up on some sleep over the Pacific, which is the reason that this blog is going out in the early, early morning – I'm purposefully exhausting myself by pulling an all-nighter tonight. My final connection is from Tokyo to Seoul Incheon, where I am scheduled to land at 11:15PM local time.

USS Enterprise Seoul Incheon International Airport

Seoul Incheon airport is a really, really nice airport. It is in a short discussion of the world's best, actually, consistently competing with Singapore Changi and Hong Kong International for the Skytrax Airport of the Year Award. It last won that award in 2009, and in 2011, placed third behind those two I just mentioned. The only reason I bring that up is that I will be spending the night there. Since Seoul is in the opposite corner of the country, I have to take a train from there to Ulsan; however, trains don't run past midnight, so I booked my train for 7:30AM the next day, and will have all night to explore the world's (third) best airport. I'll be bringing my video camera for the occasion, so if I find something interesting enough to film, I shall do so and share it with the rest of you.

While cubicle shops are not interesting in and of themselves,
I'm sure I can make them fun somehow.

In conclusion, these next two days are going to be the strangest two days of my life. I will be thrust into a strange continent, totally unfamiliar with the language, hopping from plane to plane to plane to train, with many hours of layover and other random grief in between. I will be disoriented, confused, stressed, exhausted, bored, restless, cramped, paranoid, hungry... and I am absolutely thrilled to get started.