I must say, it is an awesome perk to have a friend who can fly you anywhere in the world for $150. I am so grateful for such an opportunity.

We are currently in Vancouver and the only flight to Seoul was full. That’s right, all 208 seats were on time and not a single person missed their flight.

A little more detail. There was a party of 4 flying standby who had one step ahead of us in priority but there was only 3 seats available. So for a little while it was looking pretty damn good for us.

Now, before I go any further, I should explain the standby setup. Typically most people know that if you fly standby, you only get on if there is a seat available. This is obvious. What isn’t obvious is that in order for Airline employees to get their great discounts, they have to fly standby. In general, airline employees tend to get a little higher priority that regular standby but not quite the assumed ‘caste’ system of choosing who gets to go and who does not.

What happened in out case is that the party of 4 standby included an employee who was a stewardess. She asked if she could have the ‘jump seat’ and as it was the captains call, he allowed it. For those who aren’t familiar with ‘the jump seat’, it’s just a little seat really only meant for temporary usage under certain circumstances(“an auxiliary seat for individuals – other than normal passengers – who are not operating the aircraft”) The employee opted to take this seat for her 16hr flight. Not the most pleasant way to fly but if you have to get somewhere, then you do what you have to. Unless she wanted to wait till next tuesday before there was another flight out of Vancouver to Seoul. Which was now our problem.

Currently, my friend of working furiously with another co-worker to get us to Korea. We may actually have to fly BACK to Toronto…..which would suck.

Stay tuned…

So, finally unloaded the vast bulk of my Canadian material life and headed out for good.

Got up bright and early this moring, 4:30am, and hit the road by 5:15. My parents got me to Toronto Int’l easily and mom didn’t have a complete break down….she’s strong, she’ll do fine with me in another country. Of course, I got many admonishments of “email me every day, even just ot say ‘hi, I’, doing fine’ “.

I met up with my buddy who is flying with me to Korea (it’s awesome having the chance to only pay $150 and a friend who works for Air Canada). After a bit of a mad scramble to get one suitcase under the 25Kg limlit (can’t even pay for overweight on Employee Standby) we got on the plane just fine.

So, we got an outside row and my friend got the aisle seat, I got the middle, and a big angry guy was sitting by the window. How do I know he was angry? Oh that was easy. 30 seconds after I sat down he pounded the arm of the chair, where his headphones were plugged in, three times. After that I guess he had sound for his videos. Never said anything and I even caught him chuckling during his Dinner for Schmucks movie. maybe he was identifying with the plot and/or characters….

The flight to Vancouver was on a Boeing 777. Nice plane, pretty high-tech. Each seat had their own screens and a rather large choice of movies/tv shows/music/radio to choose from. The music was actualy albums and you could even make a playlist from any of the albums to listen to. There wasn’t a lot of music I was overly impressed with so I just settled for “Feels Good” by Tony, Toni, Toné replayed a few times. Then I moved onto a movie. Decided to check out The Karate Kid, it was pretty good but those of us who saw the original kinda knew the ending. There was a rather interesting but kinda lame reference to wax on/wax off but it was subtle if you didn’t catch it.

Flight was rather unremarkable otherwise. I did get a bad headache, taken care of by a couple of Advil, and one trip to the bathroom. It was good to get up a stretch during the just over 4hr flight, even if to use the ‘vaccuum powered’ toilets.

So I’m now in Vancouver Airport, finished some A&W food and killing some time before the next leg of the journey. Will update again once I am on foreign gound!