navigate:
Sunday 2006-09-03 - Amsterdam to Beijing, the Netherlands
Flying over Groningen
At the airport in Amsterdam I meet Frits again, the only fellow traveler I’d met before, and Thekla who will probably be my room mate. The others have gone through check-in already. Since we’re not checking in as a group, we’re also not sitting together on the plane.
On the plane, a China Southern Boeing 777, they tell us we’re going to fly 10,200km, a 9-hours flight. Take off at 20:20. At first, the in-flight information, shown on individual displays mounted in the backs of the chairs, is … well, hardly there: they seem to be setting up or debugging the system, and we see only screenful after screenful of unintelligible numbers. But when they finally get it going, it’s actually nice with a feature I have not seen before: the “satellite view” (showing the plane’s position and route as if from space) is alternated with a kind of “bird’s eye view”, looking forward from above in the direction of the flight.
At 20:30 I note we’re actually flying over Groningen, where my parents live. Mentally, I wave goodbye to them.
After a nice dinner I wait for the worst turbulence to pass before a visit to the bathroom and I go off to “bed”.
Tuesday 2006-09-05 - P’yŏngyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
Cucumber salad
On the Air Koryo plane to P’yŏngyang, a small Iljushin (IL 62) with a definite 50’s atmosphere and open overhead luggage racks, we immediately get our usual “homework”: a Health Declaration Card, Customs Declaration, and an Entry/Exit card {“FILL IN CLEARLY IN ROME ALPHABET”). The field “name of delegation” is a little puzzling (we opt for “CNK”, our travel company’s code for this trip) and just leave the field “invited by” blank.
Lunch is nice, with chicken (or beef) in a slightly spicy sauce with sticky white rice, and a delicious side dish of cucumber salad with little strips of fish and sesame seeds sprinkled over it all. I’m immediately addicted to this Korean dish which as it turns out we’ll have many times during out stay in the DPRK.
