Here, now, is a blow-by-blow account of how I arrived in the Gangneung Media Village (from where I'm writing this post)...
Monday, Feb. 5
4:15 a.m. - Wake up at my brother and sister in law's house in Houston (shout-out to Sam Goldfarb for killing it at his Bar Mitzvah on Saturday, and welcome to manhood)
5:00 a.m. - Get picked up by Lyft driver, who has an explicit Kevin Hart stand-up routine playing on the radio in the car, which I was not expecting to hear at this (or any) hour
5:00-5:45 a.m. - Get driven to airport, during which time we begin talking innocently enough about the Super Bowl before the driver steers the conversation (pun intended) to such topics as "Americans' Feelings Toward Immigration," "Race Relations in the U.S." and "How Trump Turned the Political World on Its Head." Needless to say, I let him take the wheel (literally and figuratively) during this time.
6:00-7:00 a.m. - Check into my flight and get (an excessively greasy but surprisingly good) breakfast at Jack in the Box
7:15 a.m.-11 a.m. - Fly to Detroit
11:30 a.m. - Arrive at my gate for my flight to Korea, where I'm met by 2/3's of the U.S. Olympic ice dance team (Maia & Alex, Madi and Evan...I'm only going to use first names so the non-figure skating people reading this blog will have to go and Google who I'm talking about), their coaches (Marina and Igor) and some other ice dance teams (one from Ukraine, another "from" Korea, which made me think how weird it must be to be a Korean skater and have to fly 14 hours from Michigan to Seoul for a competition in your "home country").
11:45 a.m. - Talk to guy at the gate who tells me that he last flew when he was 5, which was 50 YEARS AGO. (He looked like a perfectly normal middle-aged gentleman, so I didn't press him on why he hadn't flown in half a century.)
12:30 p.m.-5 p.m. (Tuesday) - Fly to Korea. This was my first time flying to Asia, and I've got to tell you, I don't know if that's a trip you ever really get used to. It just seems endless. There are plenty of things to do to pass the time -- watch movies, eat, get some work done -- but spending 14 hours confined to a cylinder in the sky, you really lose all sense of place and time. It's disorienting.
Anyway, here are Mickey's short movie reviews:
The Big Sick - B+ (Two things about this movie: 1. I'm embarrassed by how long it took me to recognize Ray Romano in the role of the father and 2. What does Kumail see in Emily? She sucks in every way possible. Kumail, you can do better...move on, man.
Thor Ragnarok: Incomplete (didn't make it all the way through)
Spielberg: A- (A revealing look at the most commercially successful director of our generation. Seriously, the man put out Schindler's List and Jurassic Park IN THE SAME YEAR...incredible.)
And here are Mickey's airplane food reviews:
Bibimbap - Pretty yummy. Solid B.
Flatbread pizza and ice cream bar - Strange combo, but somehow, it worked (and the pizza was more than decent). B+
Kimchi fried rice - Not your traditional breakfast, but when in (or traveling to) Rome. C+
6:00-8:30 p.m. - Take high-speed train to Gangneung. Soon after I took my seat, my colleague, Lynn Rutherford, plopped down in the row behind me. A familiar face!
8:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m. - Take shuttle from Gangneung Station to Gangneung Media Village (GMV). During this drive, we got a look at Gangneung at night, which didn't look all that impressive. If it were not for the all the signs in Korean, we could have been in any mid-size American city.
10 p.m. - Check in, find room. The Gangneung Media Village is basically a complex of high-rise apartment buildings. (I'm told they've all already been leased for when after the Games are over.) The rooms are small -- smaller than they looked on the housing diagrams we got -- and as a result, my plan of sleeping on the floor (on an inflatable sleeping pad) in the common area of our 2-person suite has been rendered a failure. (Today, my main priority is finding a more suitable place for me, or someone else in our party, to stay for the next 2 1/2 weeks...it's the glamorous side of the Olympics that you won't see on NBC's broadcast.)
I also withdrew 400,000 won (Korean dollars) from the ATM...
10:30 p.m. - Eat dinner. I went with Lynn to the media dining hall, of which there are two in the GMV. (They're located in what will be the parking garage in the complex...I'll upload a picture at some point.) The two entree options were bulgogi and a beef curry. I went with the curry; shoulda gotten the bulgogi. Grade: C-
(They sell beer in the dining hall, which I didn't realize until we'd already paid for our food. Major bonus points for that.)
11:30 p.m. - Get back to room and crash.
And thus ends my travel odyssey from Houston to Gangneung. I'll have more tomorrow (I hope), but for now, here are a couple of pictures of some interesting features on the bus I rode from Gangneung to PyeongChang today...
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