Hell is an Airport Named Incheon

Never again will I book a flight that has me laying over in a place like Incheon International Airport. This place is huge and especially designed for people making connecting flights from all over Asia. They have a gazillion duty-free shops and all sorts of special services for transfer passengers like massage rooms, showers, free Internet terminals. All of which are unaccessible before 8:00am.

Unfortunately I arrived at 5:00am. I was doing really well up to that point. I think I'd managed to reset my internal clock about as well as can be done. It was early in the morning and I felt like it was early in the morning. I was awake, alert and ready for adventure. There just wasn't any to be had in Korea. For one thing they wouldn't let me out of the airport, no that's not severe enough, they wouldn't even let me out of the security area of the airport. I did manage to find one sympathetic immigration official willing to stamp my passport, but then I had nothing to do for several hours.

There were a couple of Internet terminals working, but these had been commandeered by a pair of German tweenies who were hard at work trying to load Warlord on them. One kid managed to crash his computer so he huddled up in front of the remaining one with his buddy and pretended not to understand what, "Excuse me, could you let someone else use the computer for a while," meant in English.

To make matters worse, my flight to Tokyo was delayed for an hour. Even the flight crew were mystified as we all stood at the gate and stared out at our airplane, parked just off the runway, about a hundred yards from the empty jetway. After endless phone calls and lots of arm waving, someone finally appeared outside to climb into the tractor and push the big 747 over to the gate.