Dylan Schiemann

After a couple of late night and early morning conference calls, and breakfast where I actually wrote and sent a first batch of postcards, on Saturday it was time to head to Incheon airport to depart for Beijing. Incheon is approximately an hour from Seoul by car (with train service still under construction). I took a number of photos from the car of interesting buildings, bridges, and road signs. It’s a very pleasant ride.

I checked in at Air China and was told my luggage was over the free limit for business class travel (too many Dojo shirts!), but my Star Alliance Gold status alleviated that problem. Incheon (pronounced in-chon) airport is fantastically modern and beautiful, including energy efficient escalators that only operate when people are on or near them, and the foreign airline business class lounge:

After catching up on a little bit of work, it was time to board for the flight across the Yellow Sea to Beijing. The plane had two separate boarding jetways, one for first/business and one for economy:

I felt a bit weird being the first person on the plane, but not as weird as I did once I realized that I was the only passenger in a 49-seat business class section. The flight was fairly full in economy, but apparently my round the world trip ticket put me in a class that is underutilized:

A somewhat odd experience was having four people waiting on me, watching me as I ate my lunch (take-off of the flight was delayed an hour so they served me lunch prior to departure). While the business class section on this 777 was nothing like Asiana’s in terms of seat comfort or amenities, the level of service for such a short flight was astounding.

They provided me with two local news sources translated to English, one newspaper and one magazine. The interesting thing about the stories was that each article concludes by telling the reader how they should interpret the story, making them read more like op-ed pieces than typical American news sources.

After landing in Beijing, I was met by couple of people from QCon and taken to my hotel. First impressions of Beijing will be in my next post, but here are some pictures from the airport and the drive to the hotel including IKEA and the Olympic Village:

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