Being in Australia, Europe is obviously a very long, long way away. About 23 hours worth of flight time later, and we are in Zurich.
We decided to fly Korean Air due to cost factor - they were much cheaper than other airlines. We had also heard pretty good things about them.
So yesterday (Friday) we left Brisbane International at about 8.25am. We boarded an Airbus A330 - 300, which has rows of 2, 4 and 2 in economy. Korean Air let you pick your seats basically at time of booking, so we booked one of the sets of 2 seats by themselves. When we boarded, we realised we had been lucky enough to book, by chance, the row in front of the crew sleeping seating, so for the most part of our journey had no one in the 4 rows behind us, so we could recline to our hearts content.
The flight was as comfortable as a 10 1/2 hour flight could be. Korean Air, when you board, give you a bottle of water (about 200ml), some slippers (everyone on the plane basically took their shoes off & used these), a pillow, headphones and a blanket. It made me pretty happy, because I basically just made myself a warm snuggly cocoon of blankets and pillows to ride out the journey.
The food was standard aircraft fare - Hugh tried something called Bibimbap which was too spicy for me, so I just ate the most normal meals they offered. Korean Air also feed you on a pretty weird time schedule, with one meal at the start of the journey and one meal at the end - which created around a 7 hour gap between food.
After the 10 and a half hours, we reached Korea and went through a very long and slow Immigration process. In Winter months, Korean Air will put you up in a hotel for a nights stopover, so our luggage was sent on to Zurich without us and we got to leave Incheon Airport to go to a hotel for a proper sleep (as we hadn't slept on the plane).
We arrived late to the Orakai Songdo Park Hotel, where a hot buffet dinner was waiting.
After a decent nights sleep we woke up this morning to continue the next leg of our journey - with a bit of early morning Korea thrown in for good measure.
Hugh & I got up extremely early this morning to see a bit of Korea, before our shuttle back to the airport at 10am. We had seen a park across the road, so we wandered through here. It was quite peaceful at that time, with pavillions and traditional Korean buildings. The mist hanging around was freezing and gave an eerie feeling.From Central Park, we made our way to a main street and walked along it. It gave an interesting sense of Korean culture: We saw a lot of Engrish (Only Jesus. Only with Salmon - the name of a cafe), we saw a park near Central park that was more rubbish heap than park, we saw many different restaurants touting other cultures foods (including an Aussie Fish & Chip shop) and we learnt that Koreans really like billboards. Every shop had a huge billboard advertising their name and company.
After our brief walk around Korea, we headed back to Incheon Aiport to begin our next leg. This time, our Boeing 777-300ER had 3 rows of 3 for seats. I had swallowed my fear and picked a middle seat so Hugh could have a window seat (I really only like the aisle seats because I hate getting past people to pee. And I always need to pee on planes). My heart sank when a Korean gentleman squeezed himself in next to me. Or not squeezed, because the seats were actually really roomy & even had a little leg room to spare! However, not 2 seconds later he decided to just move himself to another empty seat closer to his friend at the back of the plane. So for the 11 and a 1/2 hour flight Hugh & I had 3 seats to sprawl across. I was glad of this because it was a very bumpy flight for the first 3 hours, with the seatbelt sign going on and off constantly. I had a feeling the captain was only taking the seatbelt sign off in short bursts to allow people to use the bathrooms, because it was still very bumpy when the lights did go off. He also advised crew to remain seated due to the turbulance. After the 3 hour mark the turbulance quietened down and Hugh & I watched a few movies.
We touched down in to Vienna for an hour and a half before leaving on a short 1 hour flight to Zurich, and arrived at our hotel at about 8.30pm at night, to go straight to bed, as we hadn't slept at all on the plane and with the timezone differences, we had been awake for 23 hours. Zurich was a very quick and easy airport to get through on arrival, thankfully, as there was every chance I would have fallen asleep in the passport line if it had been long.
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