I love long haul flights. I'm currently* on a flight from Oslo to Bangkok, and it's 5am Thailand time. Being enclosed in a plane for hours - this flight is over ten - forces me to relax. I have no choice but to take my shoes off, curl up with my book, eat the perfectly packaged dinner set before me, and close my eyes at approximately the right time. Mealtimes are the main activity and provide much excitement. Life becomes tidily and externally managed.
Our flight path takes us over Sweden, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, northern India and into Thailand. We flew away from the sun and it grew dark very suddenly. When I look out of the window now I can see networks of lights, arteries of white and orange connecting towns - or cities; I can't tell what I'm seeing at this altitude. There's a wide area containing little villages gently lit up in white, each at exactly the same distance apart, like a shoal of floating phosphorescent jellyfish. There's a soft blackness of nothing which must be a large lake. A fire, far below, dances brightly in the dark. The stars are everywhere and very close: some seem below 180 degrees in my field of vision. Are they the same constellations as mine at home? They should be but I don't recognise any from here. I think that if I press my face too hard into the window trying to see everything and I'm sucked through by osmosis, I'll just float gently down through the clear air and wait on a little hillock somewhere till morning. I want to find out where we are and what I'm looking at, but everyone is asleep and when I check the screen in front of me for flight information, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appears in Norwegian.
I've never flown into Bangkok before. The last time I was here I took the train north through Malaysia and crossed the border at Hat Yai. I land at 8am in the morning and I'm aware that I haven't had any real sleep, although I have vegetated for some time in that semi-cogitative state between sleeping and waking, during which, if I can't sleep the night before a run, I tell myself frantically, "I'm physically resting, this still counts as race preparation!" But I have a few things to get done tomorrow before I crash: I need to buy my bus ticket to Cambodia; get a haircut (it's 37 degrees down there and far too hot for hair long on the neck); find myself ahostel shower, and, most importantly, get to work on the Thai cuisine. I've been dreaming of fresh coconut juice and papaya salad and sticky mangos and tom yum soup and curries red, green and yellow. I'll start with a coconut, I think, to rehydrate and enliven me. I think of my brother who arrived here last year and was too jetlagged and dehydrated to arrive at the decision to buy a coconut, and instead walked past all the stalls in a desiccated stupor. A sad story, and one I won't repeat.
*I have some lag between writing and posting at the moment. Don't take my words too literally.
Our flight path takes us over Sweden, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, northern India and into Thailand. We flew away from the sun and it grew dark very suddenly. When I look out of the window now I can see networks of lights, arteries of white and orange connecting towns - or cities; I can't tell what I'm seeing at this altitude. There's a wide area containing little villages gently lit up in white, each at exactly the same distance apart, like a shoal of floating phosphorescent jellyfish. There's a soft blackness of nothing which must be a large lake. A fire, far below, dances brightly in the dark. The stars are everywhere and very close: some seem below 180 degrees in my field of vision. Are they the same constellations as mine at home? They should be but I don't recognise any from here. I think that if I press my face too hard into the window trying to see everything and I'm sucked through by osmosis, I'll just float gently down through the clear air and wait on a little hillock somewhere till morning. I want to find out where we are and what I'm looking at, but everyone is asleep and when I check the screen in front of me for flight information, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appears in Norwegian.
I've never flown into Bangkok before. The last time I was here I took the train north through Malaysia and crossed the border at Hat Yai. I land at 8am in the morning and I'm aware that I haven't had any real sleep, although I have vegetated for some time in that semi-cogitative state between sleeping and waking, during which, if I can't sleep the night before a run, I tell myself frantically, "I'm physically resting, this still counts as race preparation!" But I have a few things to get done tomorrow before I crash: I need to buy my bus ticket to Cambodia; get a haircut (it's 37 degrees down there and far too hot for hair long on the neck); find myself a
*I have some lag between writing and posting at the moment. Don't take my words too literally.
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