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.

The Trip Begins

The day started off with a heavy frost, but fortunately the roads were clear, and we had no real trouble getting out to the airport. The plane went off on time, after we'd said our last lot of goodbyes. A couple of guys who saw us hugging a son and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and a grandson said they wished they had someone to hug them goodbye. I offered, but they seemed to think that was going a bit too far.

By this time the day was beautiful and we had a smooth trip. There was some concern on the part of the hostesses early in the piece about a petrol smell that was obvious around the area we were sitting in. It turned out that a guy accompanying someone who looked like a wrestler (his name was Big Boy, apparently, and one of the hostesses said she was a fan of his), had some petrol on his shoes, and had to go and wash them. Celia noticed that the hostesses had a partly-finished crossword on the bottom of their drinks trolley, and said she had our crossword machine with her. They told us that they were trying to finish the crossword before the pilots, so we offered to have a go, and in due course got it done - after some making some false starts.

Libby picked us up from the airport after we'd left our two big bags at a storage place in the International section, and we drove out to her new flat - they only moved in last weekend. It's a two storey unit, one of about twenty identical attached ones, and it's very nice: lovely big open plan living room/kitchen, three bedrooms upstairs, three toilets (one downstairs in the laundry, one in the bathroom, and one in the en suite next door to that!). There's a garage, and an outside area at the front, but no grass. Although along the back of the units there's a long stretch of (very wet) grass, and a path leading down to the marina. Hundreds of boats moored, almost as far as the eye can see. Beside the pier at the end of the path there were dozens of little sprat-like fish leaping up above the water level and vanishing again. Further along there was a dredge digging great slabs of mud out of the water, and further along still was a curious device that took boats out of dry dock in the boat-builder's yard, on a kind of sling slung from a crane-like machine that slid along a track on wheels. Very cunning.

About four Libby took us to our friend's place, where we stayed the night. She managed to get a bit lost - although she's doing very well in the Auckland traffic - and while her trip there took nearly an hour, her trip home took about ten minutes!

SO Day

Tomorrow is SO Day - Start Off Day. We leave Dunedin about 9.45 am and fly to Auckland, where we'll spend the day with my daughter and her family. They've only just moved up there. Later in the day we'll go to the Young's house and stay there overnight. They'll drop us at the Devonport ferry terminal, and we'll get a ferry across to the quay, where we should be able to pick up a bus going directly to the airport.
We then fly off to Korea and stay overnight in Seoul. We don't have a lot of time there, because we leave again the next day, but we should be able to fit in a couple of hours in the area near the hotel, and get a little feel for the place. After our overnight stay in Korea (courtesy of Korean Airlines, who have to stop overnight, and therefore have to provide accommodation for their passengers) we fly directly to London. We've been told by some friends that we fly over the Arctic in the process, something the travel agent didn't mention. That will be interesting: as long as we're not asleep!
We arrive in Heathrow about 5 pm, English time, and will make our way to an old friend's house. Old in the sense of she's been a friend for a long time. She's the sister of the bloke who was best man at our wedding. Unfortunately her brother died suddenly quite a few years ago, so we won't be able to catch up with him.
After a few days in London, when we'll be sorting out our English bank account - hopefully all the correspondence we've been getting from them means it's all organised and we only have to pick up eftpos cards and such - and then on the Saturday we leave for Norfolk with my brother-in-law. He's coming down to London to pick us up.
On the Sunday we begin baby-sitting our nephew's house while he and his family go off for a holiday. We'll also be baby-sitting their year-old dog, which will be fun - and will assure we get out and do some walking, something we've been badly lacking in over the last few weeks.
That's the current plan; we'll let you know whether it all goes according to Hoyle!

Champing at the bit

I'm at the point where I can't wait to get away, now. Not that I'm not enjoying being at my daughter's place; we feel at ease there, and it's not like we're 'visitors.' And the agents who are looking after the house have already rung twice about things; I passed the woman onto Celia the second time. She'll sort 'em!

I don't feel as though my house is home anymore – no doubt it will be once we're back and settled again – but in the meantime, we're in a kind of limbo, and still not thoroughly packed. At the last stages of leaving home, we still hadn't decided exactly on what we're taking, and so we have some clothes that we'll be leaving behind. It's hard trying to think about dressing for six months.

I don't remember having this kind of indecision when I first went to England, forty years ago. Being young, I probably ignored all my mother's advice about what I should take, and took things that I thought were important, such as books, and music and so forth. This time, the books are a bit thinner on the ground, and there's no music. But there is a laptop, a thing that hadn't been imagined in 1967, and there are clothes. Probably a better selection than I had previously, but still probably too much.

Counting Down

This weekend is our last in the house for six months. It's a bit scary, knowing that we're going to do the final lot of sorting out of the place out in preparation for other people to live here. This weekend will be a time for clothes-packing and clothes-putting-away; for making final decisions on what we take in that line and what we don't – and how much of my suitcase can be taken over by my wife. And then there's all the bits and pieces: medicines (of which we seem to have an abundance - because of our age); umpteen cords to charge up cellphones, the laptop, the MP3 player and so on; papers we need to take; bags for bits and pieces that we'll carry on the plane. It's all a bit mind-boggling. Normally, when you're only going away for a week or so you can just get on and assume you'll manage with what you've got; six months is a bit different.

The thought of sleeping in other people's beds for six months is a bit weird, too, and never having places to put things where they'll have any sense of permanence. The thought of not being 'home' for six months is strange. I've obviously become so settled that the idea of such a big change is almost too much for me!

And then there are things like needing to get up in the night to go to the loo. One of the women who used to volunteer in the shop was away from home once (when she was only about 75) and got up in the middle of the night – and walked into the edge of a door. She had a mark right down her face and chest, and wasn't well for months afterwards. I don't usually walk into things in the night (because I know where everything is) but in other people's homes it's a different story. And you don't want to wake anyone! As I say, I'm normally familiar with my own home, but one night I woke up, didn't quite bring my brain with me, and scrabbled against a wall trying to figure out where the door had gone – and it wasn't even the wall that the door was in. Fortunately such times are rare.

The nifty bedfellow comes from a StumbleUpon page.

Bearly Coping

The half a dozen teddy bears that we've got in the house (there are two more upstairs) have been ganging up on us. They want to go to England, and definitely don't want to be stuck in a room with all the bits and pieces that we're storing, for six months. They sit together with one of the large rugs wrapped around them, either watching telly, or muttering amongst themselves, and the other day, we came into the small lounge to find they'd written a note on an envelope: We're going to England, and we don't have to pack! I've tried to convince them that bears hibernate in the winter, so they won't even notice that we're gone, but they're not persuaded.

I'm not sure where all these bears have suddenly come from: there's Teddy, of course, who've been round almost as long as I have and has come back into view again after having been in hiding for years; there's Bill, with his little hooded jacket, his fluffy hair that gets in his eyes, and his please-love-me-because-I'm-a-pathetic-little-bear look – I suspect he's the ringleader because he thinks he's the most favoured. Balthazar, of course, just sits there being good and never saying a word out of place. He came to NZ from England with P G Tips, the scrawny and rather ugly little white bear who unaccountably went missing when the kids were quite young. He and Balthazar were in a trunk that got delayed on the way back from England, and I think we were more upset about not seeing them again than we were about the rest of the stuff that was in the trunk. And then there are a couple of other smaller bears who have come from nowhere: we think bears are breeding in the house.