OCD: The Road to Incheon
All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click below.
OCD: Ophelia Chong's Diary / Day 1
Oct. 21, 2009: I leave for LAX, my flight is at 12:20 AM. The airport is busy, people traveling to Mexico, France, England, and me, to Beijing China by way of Seoul, Korea. As per my usual obsessive compulsiveness I am there 2 hours early. After checking in and going through security, I had about an hour to fritter away.
I pulled out my iPod touch to see if I could Wi-Fi. I could if I wanted to pay for it. Besides being OCD, I am also thrifty to a point; I refuse to pay for something I think should be free in airports.
On the plane.
The stewardess asks me if I would like to move to another seat, because the video display is broken. I decide to stay in my seat, there are only so many times you can watch "Wolverine" and not grow back hair.
Free Treats with a BTW
I take Vitamin C religiously, I got my flu shot, I avoid shaking hands unless I really have to. I get my blood panel down once a year. I even send in a sample of my you-know-what to check for colon cancer (my grandmother had it). All to avoid giving other peoples' germs a free ride. I spin at least twice a day. To put it in a few words, I am obsessively healthy.
After a dinner of BimBamBop, the lovely stewardesses hand out Sleepy Eye Patches, tooth brushes and slippers. I did into the bag and place the Eye patch on my eyes. I notice a smell, a very weird chemical smell. However I had just taken my first Ambien and I was not in a very take action mood. About ten minutes into the Eye Patch session, I felt my blood pressure drop and I started to get chills. Then of course I had the 13 hour flight travelers' nightmare; abdominal flip flops. I get to the lavatory and I proceed to wonder what the hell I ate before I got on the plane.
I get back to my seat and I am chilled and shaking, a light sweat covers me. I remember in Girl Scouts that if you feel dizzy, you put your head between your knees. I did this and felt much better. I spent about 4 hours there. The guy next to me must of thought I was his nightmare seat mate, and is probably telling his friends about the woman who spent her flight with her head examining her shoes. So what was the cause? The eye patch. I must have some new allergy. Oh great. something else to obsess about.
Landing in Incheon
Its 5:30am and the airport has a silence about it that is quite comforting for such a large space. The closest I can equate it to is to being in the Duomo di Milano. A 500 year old cathedral with soaring ceilings and a sense of peace about it, even though it is filled with hundreds of silent people much like airports.
I'm Connected
Korea is the country with the fastest broadband in the world, the airport offers Wi-Fi free.
Seoul is the only city in the world to offer DMB, a digital mobile TV technology and WiBro, a high speed internet service. Their fiber-optic broadband network runs at 100Mbps and will be upt to 1Gbps by 2012. Compare this to the US the FCC definition of broadband is 768 kbit/s (0.8 Mbit/s). Back home my internet service Road Runner Standard promises speeds 7x faster then 768k DSL.
I will be back in Seoul for 3 days, and one of my highlights besides the spas will be a trip to Yongsan Electronics Market, the largest of it's kind in Asia. I will compare this to Beijing's version (as you can guess which one will have the most pirated items).
Almost time to get onto the next and final leg of my flight to Beijing. I wonder how the internet fares there?
Image: Ophelia Chong / Inchon Airport 2009