Awaiting the flight

Right now I’m sitting on the floor next to an electrical outlet in terminal 5, the international terminal of Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I’ve often seen people doing this, using the airport to charge up their cell phone or their laptop. Now it’s me too! Up ‘til the last couple of hours the trip has been as usual, but the minute I headed off to terminal 5 I started to get excited. First, it was difficult to find. I had to ask directions twice and the signs were confusing, plus I started to see more foreigners and less Americans. In fact, right on the train platform I was outnumbered and unable to listen in on conversations. Met 3 Koreans on the platform, 4 actually, as they had their 10 month old with them…her first rip to Korea! One spoke English well and taught me “Thank-you” (Kam sam mi da) and Hello (An yung haseyo) along with a versatile word “pi”, which means something like “mayo” in Chinese- little, nothing, ,etc. a diminutive negative.
Fell asleep for a little while in the huge waiting area that was slowly becoming populated. I was still awake when a huge sky blue 747 floated down onto the runway. I have always been impressed with the size of these planes. They are so large they appear to be moving so slowly as it is not possible for them to be flying. Anyway, it was KAL’s distinctive sky blue color so I figured it must be our plane and that it would taxi up to our gate before long. How many KAL 747’s can there be in and out of Chicago? Sure enough, it showed up in about ten minutes and disgorged it’s passengers. We’re about 25 minutes from boarding and the crowd has grown considerably. Pretty cool all in all.