A few months ago, on my way to Busan for the first time, I lost my bearings.
Airplane travel is somehow strange, I think. In a way, planes are like time machines. Or more precisely, "position machines". They're big and metallic and full of complex technology. I walk into them and sit down. The door is closed, and then there's a wait period. Finally, after some time, the door is opened again, and I step out into a completely new location, often not knowing exactly how I got there.
It's comforting for me to see the path between my start and end points when I travel. But my first flight to Busan was an overnighter, and so even if I looked out the window of the plane, I could obtain very little information about where in the world I was passing. And during the last leg of my flight, the skies were cloudy. So after a half-day of travel, I found myself in a city that a few months before, I had never even heard of, without catching even a glimpse of the path that I had travelled to get there. It took me a while to start feeling comfortable in Busan, and the process only truly started when I visited Seoul, travelling there and back over land by train.
This trip was different. I had a daytime flight, and the skies over North America were almost completely clear. I could therefore peek out of the window of my plane and see the landscape below. And with the help of the in-flight entertainment system, upon which I could view a map showing the flight path of the plane, I could identify some of the features of the geography that was passing below me.
Though I could not precisely identify very many of the features of Northern Ontario (this part of my home province has an enormous number of lakes and rivers, so many of them that they they are very difficult to identify from the air), I thought I caught a glimpse of Hudson's bay when the plane flew between the northern Manitoban mining outposts of Thompson and Churchill. Then, I saw the Great Slave Lake, one of the series of large lakes (Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, Lake Winnipeg, and the five Great Lakes) located on the border of the igneous Canadian Shield and the sedimentary Interior Plains. Shortly thereafter, I flew over the MacKenzie River, and I observed that the Yukon Territory is completely different of the Northwest Territories, as the former is a mountainous and rugged territory while the latter is mostly flat and covered with lakes. Then, I spotted the city of Fairbanks, in Alaska, and a short while later, I saw the Alaskan coastline and the ocean near the Bering Strait. It didn't take long, after that, for the plane to arrive over Asia. Russia's eastern coastline passed below me, and I observed that the Kamchatka Peninsula (with which I am familiar because I often played "Risk" in my younger days) is as mountainous as Alaska and the Yukon. After flying a short distance over the Pacific Ocean, Japan appeared below. The plane landed a short while later.
Later that day, I boarded a second flight for Busan. Though night had fallen, the Japanese and Korean coastlines were clearly visible, as they looked like long brightly lit ribbons, contrasting dramatically with the dark Pacific Ocean. As the plane approached Busan, I was struck by the number of boats that were floating near the coast, not far from the city's port. After a short taxi ride from Gimhae airport to my home, I found my apartment as I had left it. Only this time, I knew exactly where I was relative to the places that are most familiar to me.
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