The flight was fine, I got some sleep, breezed through customs, and now am back at work.
I've got a ton of stuff to post, and will do so over the next few days. I expect I'll just revise my previous entries, so that the postings follow the chronological flow of the trip. More anon.
LATER, AIRPLANE TIME. The live map of our route shows the International Date Line not far from us: just on this side of the horizon.
Night fell with amazing speed: we're flying into the terminator, rather than with the sun, as we did on Sunday. It emphasizes the way that after a couple hours, transoceanic flights feel like they cease having any relationship to either their departure points or their destinations. Even as they're little portable pieces of Airport Culture (that world consisting of airline people, frequent travelers, and those pieces of material culture and retail that seem almost exactly the same no matter where you go), they become their own little worlds, metal cocoons with miscalibrated time-space coordinates and confused biorhythms.
At least the movies are different this time around. I finally got to see "Star Trek: Nemesis," my other choices being "Stuart Little 2," "The Scorpion King," "Clockstoppers" (whatever that is), and something called "The Transporter," about a Mafia driver whogasp!defies his boss, or something. (Mainly it's an excuse for lots of car chases that end with police cars crashing into each other.)
What else did I want to mention? Ah, yes: The lamb was really very good.
FLIGHT 838, NARITA TO SFO, 5:05 local time. I'm now on the plane, waiting to back away from the terminal.
Just got the menu. Let's see. What to eat, what to eat? I think the crispy scallop poststickers and tasai with oyster sauce sounds good, but I'm torn between the filet mignon with roasted corn and sausage ragout, and the Malaysian herb-crusted rack of lamb with Sarawak pineapple salsa.
[dramatic pause]
BWAHAHAHAHA!
The thing I REALLY could get used to about flying first class isn't the nice lounge, or the food, or having someone basically turn on a beverage tap a few minutes after takeoff.
It's not having to wait in lines.
I never actually paid any real attention to how first class travelers are treatedannouncements to "first-class passengers" being part of the background noise of airportsbut it turns out that when you fly first class, you Don't Have To Wait. There's this near-empty line that you get to stand in (you can't see it when you're standing in the economy line); you wait at most a couple seconds; someone takes your ticket; then you're on your way. While boarding at Narita, we had to wait for a full two minutes with the business class travelers. It suddenly felt like I was packed in amber.
First class is for travelers what standards are to goods: both are social technologies that lowers transaction costs and speeds movement.
NARITA AIRPORT. Back in my home away from home, the United Red Carpet lounge. It's very interesting how we develop incredibly specific information about spaces in the course of our travels: Anyone who wants to hook up a keychain drive in the Red Carpet Lounge should know that the PC on the far right side is the one that you want.
After we got settled into the lounge, I spent a little time playing tourist, and bought a kimono for Elizabeth (I'd told her I might get her a Korean dress, and I figure this is close enough; I just hope it fits her), and some CDs of the music I'd heard on the way over here. They CDs were more expensive than their American counterparts (today's exchange rate is about 115 yen to the dollar, which is not good-- all this concern about war is hitting the markets hard), and I just heard that there's a place in San Francisco's Japantown that sells the same things.
But now I've renewed my connection with Japanese consumer electronics culture, however tenuously. Maybe the next time I come over here I can work out a long layover, go to the Akihabara, and emerge 18 hours later, encrusted in the latest gear.
Besides, if a silicon exoskeleton is good enough for mollusks, it should be good enough for me.
On the plane, headed to Japan.
I'm at Incheon airport, ready to fly back to the States. This has been a very good trip, though very short. It's certainly been eye-opening, both for what I've seen in Korea (Seoul is definitely one of those places where the future already exist), and as a brief piece of fieldwork in the Land of Luxury Travel.
And on that note: The dim sum in the Singapore Airlines first class lounge is pretty damn good, I must say.
From here, it's on to Narita, and then back to San Francisco. And my real life, thank goodness.
I've got a million notes, and will start writing them up on the plane. More from Narita.
I'm off to San Francisco this morning. It'll take about 12 hours to get back across the Pacific, but thanks to the quirkiness of the international date line, I'll be returning yesterday-- or earlier this morning. It's not the kind of thing you normally have to think about.
More from Narita, I hope.
So now it's Wednesday morning, and I'm about to start my second day of meetings. I'll write about it at length later, but I had what may have been the most extraordinary dinner of my life last night at a Chinese restaurant in Suwon. The lobster and shark fin soup may have been the high point.
Tonight after dinner we went to Kangnam, a neighborhood in the south of Seoul (the city is bisected by the Han River; the Shilla is in the north). Kangnam is a very hip place, full of crowds of young kids. We started out walking down Kangnamdero, one of those great Asian city avenues heavy with crowds and ablaze with neon signs.
[Walking south on Kangnamdero]
The last time I was in Seoul was in 1998, in the depths of the IMF crisis. Of course, it's always interesting to visit a new place, but Korea was not at its best then: it was in the worst economic depression in years, the North Koreans were acting up, and there was even starting to be a problem with homelessness (previously unheard-of). This time around, my futurist's radar was going off constantly. William Gibson has a lovely saying that the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. This is a place, I kept thinking, where the future is already here.
It reminded me of something I saw a couple years ago, that was my first signal that something interesting was going on in Seoul. I bought the game Descent 3, one of those games whose rules are: 1) pilot a spaceship around the solar system, and 2) blow up everything that isn't you. After playing it for a few days, I got to a level that was set in... Seoul. Of course, it bore as much relationship to the real Seoul as the level that took place on Mars bears to the Red Planet, but still: some hip young designers, obsessed with making a game that would be a hit and continue a hugely profitable line, thought that it made sense to set a level in Seoul.
I'm a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley. I'm also an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Science Technology and Society program at Stanford University.
At the Institute, I work on the future of science and technology. In my free time I'm working on a book on the end of cyberspace. More details are available in my c.v. (PDF). My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.
I also keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
The banner is from a picture taken by Anthony Townsend, while we were walking along Raday Utca in Budapest, Hungary, October 2007.
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