The Wandering Salesman

This was so traumatic I don’t even know where to start.

I was in Korea this week. Booked into the Westin Chosun, Seoul. All pretty standard stuff. You know, the normal Asian trip.

Anyway, for those of you who haven’t been to Seoul, the Koreans have built a new airport. It’s a cracker. Regularly competes with Hong Kong and Singapore and according to Skytrax, Incheon has won best airport in the world for the past 6-years running.

Although I am a bit dubious about the fact that the majority of people who vote for these types of awards are always drunk British expats.

Or something like that.

I flew to Seoul on UA via Tokyo. Yes, I could have flown direct on either Asiana or SQ, but to be honest, I needed to crank up my UA miles so booked a full Y fare out of Singapore and then applied 5,000 miles each way to upgrade from Y to J. I rarely book refundable Y tickets, but I’m glad I did as there are no penalties to change dates (which I ended up doing) and when it comes to upgrades on United, nothing beats a full Y fare in terms of priority and upgrade processing. And 5000 miles to upgrade each way – that’s a steal.

Besides, the Asiana flight was a red-eye out of Singapore and the SQ flights were too expensive, so choosing UA was easy.

United run a 777 out of SIN to NRT (the old configuration) so the business class seats are the ones I have sat on for the past 10-years. The new UA cabin configuration and seating can’t come soon enough if you ask me, but as most seasoned travellers will tell you, the worst J cabin and seat is always better than the best Y environment. Anytime. Hands down.

Instead of using the UA Red Carpet Club when I arrived in Narita, I purposely sought out the ANA lounge, which in my opinion, is way better that the RCC. It’s not as packed, the food and wine is better and the place has a better atmosphere.

I had a couple of productive days in Seoul. Hadn’t stayed at the Westin for years and it was good to be back. I do have a couple of gripes though.

I don’t get why leading hotel brands like the Westin want to rape and pillage you for internet connectivity in the room (ie US$17 for 24-hrs) yet they will provide free wi-fi all throughout the lobby, the bar and every single restaurant. It shits me. It really does.

I begrudgingly paid it for the first 24-hours but I thought, stuff this, I’m not paying it again when I am checking out first thing in the morning. So I sat in the lobby the morning of my departure for 3-4 hours and downloaded as much as I could.

The other thing that got up my frock was the fact that the Westin charged me to use the gym. Now I need to clarify something. The gym, like in a lot of leading hotels, is outsourced to a third party. You don’t have to be a guest to belong. In fact, the joint was full of pricks who were obviously not house guests. As far as gyms go though, it’s a pretty good one, I’ll have to admit.

The hotel will happily let you sweat all over their LifeStyle equipment and push weights around all day for nothing. But as soon as you set foot into the “wet” area (ie sauna, spa, plunge pool etc), they ping you. And it’s not cheap. At least the arseholes should let you know before you come into the joint.

So, meetings over, client spoken with and happy and it was time to head back to the airport. Three quick days.

Incheon Airport is 50km away from downtown Seoul. Which means it’s a hoof. And the only practical way to get there is by a thing called a limousine bus. In my case, I caught the KAL (Korean Airlines) limo bus. It stops at all the hotels and is relatively cheap (ie $15,000 Korean Won, which is around US$12 one-way).

You couldn’t complain though. They’re very comfortable. Large business class type seats (hence the name), plasma screen to watch (except that everything is in Korean) and once you hit the highway out to the airport, very smooth. The trip takes about an hour.

My flight was at noon, so I left the hotel at 9am. “Plenty of time”, I said to myself. The hotel concierge agreed with me when I enquired as to what time I should leave.

I had been conscientious that morning and gone to the gym. I drank a heap of water as is usual. Then again at breakfast, more water. I wasn’t in a huge rush, but I was moving at  a decent pace, given that I had gone to the gym at 7am, worked out for an hour, gone back to my room, quickly showered and packed and then had breakfast, all in time to catch the 8.55am bus from outside the hotel.

While I was waiting for the bus, I decided to “hit the head” before I hit the road. “Good idea”, I said to myself. Then as I walked down to the bus pick up point, my bladder sent another signal to my brain that said I should go again.

“Bugger me”, I thought. Maybe this peeing twice in an hour is a sign of old age. But I told myself it was better to be safe than sorry, so I ran to the mens room yet again. “Much better”, I told myself as I walked to the bus stop, hopefully for the last time.

We’re about 25 minutes into the trip when my overworked yet mono function brain sent a signal to my bladder that it was in fact, time again for an empty. I thought, “Shit, what am I going to do?”. “Stuff it” I said, I can hang on. It’s probably only a half hour more at most.

But the signals (and subsequent pain) started becoming more urgent.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been really very good at holding it. I don’t reckon any guy is. Fuck me how women do it. We can be flying from Singapore to the West Coast USA and my wife will say to me, gee, I need to go pee, and 12-hours later, she reminds me again. What, I say, haven’t you gone yet? Nope, she says, waiting for the seatbelt light to go out…

Anyway, the pain is building. I feel like I’m about to burst. I look around and see that there are 2 middle aged Japanese women about 3 rows behind me, a European guy across the aisle and a Korean woman a few rows in front. All in all, 5 passengers total. I started running every scenario in my head.

We were humming along a major highway in a bus, with a driver who only spoke Korean, so me asking him “Please, Mr. Bus Driver, I’m a useless male and drank too much water this morning, would you mind pulling over so I can relieve myself?

My Korean was as bad as his English. How the hell would I even attempt to communicate this to him.

Nope, pulling over wasn’t going to work.

And besides, we had passed a couple of cop cars on the side of the highway with their radar guns out. Heaven knows what would have happened if they caught a white guy peeing on the side of the road, while the Japanese women giggled and took pictures, the European bloke called me an arsehole in German and the Korean woman was calling her local church and asking for a priest.

Or something like this.

The pain now was unbearable. Like nothing I have experienced. It was now 9.37am. I tried crossing my legs, playing games on my BlackBerry, whistling the Collingwood Football Club song. It was all useless. I’m pretty sure at this point that I felt my eyelids flood with urine.

At the front of the bus, to the right, was a small section where some luggage was placed (including mine). In front of that sat a small plastic bin. I casually walked up to my bag, pretending to not be in pain. I have no idea why, but I opened my bag in the hope that I might find something, anything I could use to diffuse the emergency.

Then I saw it.

A small plastic drink bottle in the bin. I grabbed it and casually walked back to my seat. I’m going to have to do it. I’m going to physically have to pee into the bottle on a moving bus, in a foreign country. With people all around.

Ok, so there were 4 others. But I digress. Back to the emergency.

Thankfully, there was no one sitting at the back of the bus. The Japanese women, in their wisdom, had already moved forward a little while ago. Maybe they could sense danger.

I grabbed the bottle and headed for the back row. I could feel the pee out of my bladder, hitting my back teeth. I was terrified that my brain was going to drain in my own urine.

“This is going to be close”, I shouted to myself.

I don’t know about you, but peeing into a small bottle opening on a moving bus, while kneeling, in excruciating pain, is not the easiest job in the world.

“Aaaaaahhhh”, the relief.

I looked up. No one was staring at me and the bus driver had not activated the hijack button, so all was well. But in my new found ecstasy, I forgot that the capacity of this bottle was less than a can of coke.

I’m on my knees, the fluid level in the bottle is getting precariously close to the top and I still have what I think is 33 litres of water inside me. God, she’s gonna blow….I yelled.

Now, women may be able to do this, but I don’t know about you men. Do you know how hard it is to stop peeing once you’ve activated the pump? Near on fucking impossible. Go try for yourself. See, I told you.

So there I was, pants around my knees, in Korea, on a bus, a grown man, peeing into a small plastic drink bottle and now faced with the crisis of having to stop peeing so as to not flood the floor. God knows how I managed it, but I did. I stopped peeing in time before the bottle overflowed.

I screwed the lid back on the bottle and thought, now what? I decided to do what most males do and let someone else deal with the problem.

I pushed my DNA sample under the seat in front of me. I didn’t quite have the courage to walk back past everyone and put the bottle of warm pee into the bin.

We arrived at the airport without further incident and I bolted once the door opened. Keep running, I told myself. Surely I had committed a felony. And besides, I still needed to drain my bladder of the 5 litres of water I still had inside me.

Do you know that the average person pees anywhere from 800ml to 2000 ml (thats 2 litres) in a 24-hour period. I actually looked this up hours later on Google, once the crisis was averted. I reckon I managed to pee at least 2 litres just that morning.

It was unbelievable. When I got to the lounge, I couldn’t bring myself to drink anything at all.

So there you have it. My trip report on Seoul.

And somewhere in Seoul, is a KAL limousine bus, with a bottle of my now stale pee in it, wedged under a seat, waiting for a curious kid to come along, feel that the bottle is full and curiously open the lid and….

Isn’t life just wonderful…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 12:20 am and is filed under Airlines, Hotels, SPG, United. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.