Our travel here, from its start in DC and continuing through Seoul and onward to our new home, was surprisingly easy with little Anya, at least in the air. She did great on both of our flights: the fourteen-and-a-half-hour leg from Dulles to Seoul, and the two-and-a-half-hour one into Vlad. She slept for about four hours at a stretch on the long flight, and only had one minor crying jag. And on the short flight she was conveniently hungry right as we took off and nursed again as we landed, so that on both flights we successfully used this nursing strategy as a way to keep her calm and unaffected by the change in air pressure. But on the ground she has really been thrown for a loop and, in turn, is throwing us for one. Already in DC, at the hotel where we spent the eight nights after we moved out of our house, she had begun to lose the good nighttime sleep habits she’d formed over her first seven weeks of life at home in Bethesda. And I think, between the extreme time change and all the new places and spaces and smells that she must sense, her little baby biorhythms really have been thrown out of whack. After the ease of flight # 1, once we were in Seoul, our overnight in the windowless little cube of a room at the transit hotel at Incheon Airport was pretty rough, with Anya waking up about every two hours and super-cranky. It didn’t help, of course, that we too were exhausted and jetlagged. We made it from about 8pm to 7am, and then we took refuge in the business class lounge, had some brekkies, a couple of cappucinos, and enjoyed the quiet and some welcome sleep from Anya.
Ahhh, business class. Dan has enjoyed this pleasure a few times in recent years, on trips over fourteen hours, when the State Department allows employees to fly that way. Once on a trip to Russia with my job at Health and Human Services, in 2004, I also received an upgrade to business, but Delta and other US airlines of course in this respect as in many others do not compare to international companies. Korean Air’s newer planes, like the one we flew here on, have those great fully reclining seats that I’d heard Dan and others rave about from British Airways, and they really do make a difference. After some difficulty with our seat assignments in the beginning (the KAL desk attendant who checked us in at Dulles for some reason switched our originally assigned seats, which were all together, to another set that, despite his assurances, had us separated), we had a full row of three to ourselves, with Anya set up in her carseat in the center and mom and dad on either side. In particular now, in retrospect, I’m glad we had the comfort of that flight before the difficult days and nights that followed.
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