On the way to Korea

I’m trying to write this over the Pacific Ocean - with some difficulty. Turbulence has started since I got the laptop out, and as well I’ve just managed to lose the paragraph I had written. Anyway, we’ve not long passed over New Caledonia, which wasn’t very visible, as there was a lot of cloud about. Nevertheless, the long white beaches and the bright blue waters inside the reefs were plain to see.
We’d had lunch not long before that, which for Celia and me was a great relief, as both of us had had breakfast about 6.30 am, and it’s now 3 in the afternoon. I had bought some Oddfellows (the last packet of ordinary ones they had on the shelf in Whitcoulls - the others were Spearmint and Strongmint which I don’t like so much) and at the same time had bought some top-ups for our cellphones (for some reason Vodafone couldn’t accept my ordinary credit card, even though I bought the top-ups and Oddfellows with it a few minutes later). While I was busy paying for the purchases, my precious wife was hassling me in the background, telling me how clever she’d been to prove that the card was working, and I left the Oddfellows on the counter. Of course she’ll blame my imminent dementia, but! (We discovered these a couple of days later in a different part of our baggage.)
So we had lunch, as I was going to say. And what a lunch! Wine was served with it, for starters - as part of the package. Celia had a Korean meal, with steamed rice and vegetables and beef and hot pepper - which came in a little tube you mixed in with your rice and sesame oil. She also had seaweed soup. (And her neighbour’s little container of salmon and potato salad - this was from a family who had brought a pile of food on board with them, so perhaps they weren’t hungry by that time. We’d been sitting here enviously smelling the wonderful aromas wafting across the aisle.)
We both had melon and pineapple pieces for dessert. I had a more European-style meal with pasta and beef and vegetables. Delicious. I think inflight food is always nicer because you have to wait for it so long. I had a small bun with Anchor butter spread on it - and the wines were NZ too.
At present we’re doing 896 kilometres an hour - that seems a phenomenal speed. But in spite of that we still have a long way to go: about the equivalent of a full working day According to the little map that keeps coming up on the computer screens we’re heading towards the Coral Sea at present, Cairns is off to the West, and Fiji to the East.
The terminals (one on the wall and one hanging from the ceiling) keep going all the time, either with advertising or clips from movies, or sports, or news - or our present whereabouts. We don’t have little screens on the back of the seats in front of us, unfortunately, but we can listen to our own choice of music via earphones plugged into the seat arms. However, these haven’t proved very satisfactory. The classical selection is very much top of the pops classical, and with all the noise from the engines, most of the time you can only hear the loud stuff, not the quiet.