Time Travel! (5.17/5.18)

Flightpath: Georgia > Canada > Alaska > Syberia!!! > China > Korea!

I  H A D a pretty good idea that this trip was going to be a Trip months before I set foot in Hartsfield-Jackson, but the gravity of the situation didn't sink in until I felt my stomach drop as my 777 beat gravity and bid adieu to American soil. (I don't know if that feeling will ever grow old-- it's easily the best part of flying; that visceral point of no return)
I could tell I was in for a slew of surprises when something as simple as flying blew my mind, but the surprises certainly didn't stop there. It seemed like every aspect of the flight was foreign, ranging from the superficial-- the language, look, and uniform of the stewardesses (who really are as attractive as the Korean Air adverts make them out to be), to the surreal-- the fact that the sun stayed stubbornly still in the sky as we flew against time and daylight; the way that time turned to putty and folded around the plane as it flew. My excitement, the novelty, and the absurdity of the flight conspired to give it an other-worldly aura which simply reinforced the voyage's allure.

Around 11 hrs in, insanity began to take over-- note Aveek's fingers in the row behind me: I think they're trying to crawl into his nose. Absurd.

I'm sure the ceaseless sun had something to do with it, but for some confluence of reasons I was ridiculously productive on the plane. That too seemed to separate my time in the air from reality-- I never got bored; I never got tired; I never wondered what time it was or how much longer was left before arrival. My mind was going about as fast as my flight (approximately 565 mph, to be precise)-- I tore through a slew of dense articles on Orientalism (by the likes of Said, Menon, Prakash, and Ning), a few movies (Haywire, Coriolanus, and Dangerous Method), and a ton of classical composers (Saint-Saens, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Copland, Liszt, and Mozart).

My true focus was the articles-- I thought it would be intellectually negligent of me to go to Asia as an ignorant Westerner and NOT expose myself to the influential and controversial scholarship that spun from Said. To summarize, Said and the scholars who follow him are interested in the shortcomings of “Western” conceptions of the “East” as the Other, specifically revealing how biased assumptions can pridefully be mistaken for understanding. The name of this blog is a nod to the problematic conception of "The Orient" as an essentialized and generalized amalgam; one goal of mine for this trip was to test Said's theory and see first-hand just how true or false "Western" claims about "the East" are. I figured the flight was the perfect time to crack into the canon, so I did! And I loved it!

(The movies and music were just icing on the cake between articles, to give me time to reflect and make sure I didn't melt my brain too thoroughly, although they all were valuable in and of themselves. Particularly Coriolanus-- a rather tenuous film due to the original Shakespearean dialogue, but an interesting and apropos rendition nonetheless. Check it out!)

A view of Syberia from the plane-- purely breathtaking.