30,000 Feet

So I'm sitting on Asiana Airlines flight 360 from Hangzhou, China to Seoul, Korea.  J is two rows in front of me.  She is totally getting spoken to in Korean, I'm totally getting spoken to in English.  I don't know if it's my loud hawaiian shirt, by the shorts/socks/sandles I'm rocking, but I don't care.

X had said that my current haircut is American hair; he found a past picture that was Filipino hair.  I will try to go back to Filipino hair this fall. 

A little word about A-ban hua:  this is a little dialect of Chinese that the A-ban party crowd created to amuse themselves.  So deng yi xia became "deng ish!"  wo bu zhidao became "booge."  There was also "pengs" for pengyoumen, etcetera.  There were attempts to make it more urban, with sth jigga, or whatever, which was just their idea of urban, I guess.

More interesting was the advent of A-ban English, which arose when the language pledge expired and we were allowed to speak English again.  It didn't have much time to flourish, but A-ban English was much more of a dialect (and less of a pidgin) than A-ban hua.

Not everyone wanted to speak A-ban hua (why would we create a pigin when our Chinese is basically a pigin?), but A-ban English was undeniable.  My favorite sentence was "We can go wherever you want, dude, I'm woose."  "Woose is A-ban English for wusouwei. 

This flight from Hangzhou to Seoul is basically an hour.  So awesome.  Within two hours I will be in my hotel resting, probably checking the internet.  I may leave the airport to check out Seoul.  We'll see.

Before we took off, some snow started falling from the air conditioning.  I'm not sure what it was exactly, it looks kind of like kleenex that's gone through the dryer.  Now a flight attendant is walking through with one of those rolls that defuzzes and de-pet-hairs your sweater and actually grooming some of the passengers.

Ok, they just served dinner and I devouered it.  It was beef and peapods on rice, and the rice was glorious Korean rice.  The beef was not overly salted, and I got a little toothpaste tube of gochuchan, which brought a tear to my eye.  There was a salad of kidney beans, cut corn, and green pepper strips, which I ate without the dressing, and the non-saltiness of it all was feichang awesome. 

The only bad part about this flight is that after I scarfed down my dinner, I looked up and saw that they were playing "Baby and Mr. Bean."  And I loath Mr. Bean.  

I wonder how long it would take me to learn Korean.  Not that I have any plans to, but just looking at the written language after six months of Chinese seems to calm my soul a little.  I know I read more Chinese now, but there's just something about the aesthetic of a phonemic alphabet that makes it look more doable. 

I am going to have to work hard for a long time if I want to read and write Chinese.  Sigh.

I'm still debating whether or not I want to go into Seoul tonight.  First I have to see if they will let me back into the airport security zone if I leave.  If not, then I have no problem shutting myself in my room for 24 hours,  watching tv and surfing the internet.  However, if I'm permitted to come and go, then I will try to take the subway into town and spend some of the Korean money I changed in July.