How To Survive a Long Haul in Steerage: My Tricks To Making Economy Slightly Less Terrible

Part 1 of my Go To Thailand series, with a recipe for Mango Sticky Rice.

Listen to me read this to you above.

I’ve got my competitive nature mostly in check, I root for other people’s success with verve, but something about a long-haul flight in economy class brings out my type-A. I want to have the best set-up, be the most prepared to be the most comfortable. I agonize about seat selection, changing seat choices regularly to increase the chance of getting the holy grail: a whole row to myself. But even if I’m not so lucky, and in a packed plane, I’ve figured out a few tricks that really help pass the time.

My face upon the realization that I have the full row to myself from Seattle to Seoul. Is that smugness or disbelief? Combo?

Here's my advice about the tiny little thirteen cubic feet that are all yours for the next 10-16 hours:

You live here now. This is your apartment. Your very, very tiny apartment. It’s worth it if you can pay just a little bit extra to board early to give you time to move in properly. If you plan things very well, you can keep the space beneath the seat in front of you nearly free. Save this area for your shoes, maybe your water bottle, and nothing else if you can possibly help it. The seat pouch in front of you should hopefully fit everything you need: Your Little Pack, (see below,) Phone, and your tablet and/or book and/or magazine. Ideally only one of these.

The secret to this is to reduce your expectations for productivity. You’re not going to work, leave your laptop in the overhead. You’re not going to play cards, read multiple books or magazines, do tarot readings for your fellow passengers, or learn a language. Your job, while you live in this wee apartment, is to pass time. To sleep, if you can. The fewer transitions, the fewer moments of “what should I do now?” the better. You are a zen monk. You are a hibernating frog. You are slowing your metabolism, your heartrate, and your brain function. Or at least imagining you can do that. (See: drugs. Below.)

Aisle or Window: Anything under 7 hours? Give me the window. I can tuck into there, maybe get up once, but mostly just curl up and nap against the window. But if it is over 7? If it’s an apartment situation? I want to be able to get up and go to the bathroom, to get stuff from the overhead in the off-chance I need something from my carry-on and take walkabouts every few hours. For long hauls, always the aisle.

My Little Pack:

Eye mask

Hand Cream

Lip Balm

Hand Sanitizer

Tissue

Drugs/Sleeping Pills of choice

Aromatherapy Roller

Also musts:

Noise Canceling Bluetooth Headphones

Slippers

Water bottle

Scarf - this one has been all over the world with me. It packs down to nothing, is soft and luxurious, and comes in the yummiest colors.

Maybes:

1 book or magazine. Be realistic. Do you read at home? I do and I still never read on planes.

If you can:

An adapter to hook your Bluetooth headphones into the seatback entertainment system like This. The ones the airline gives you are tangly and low quality.

Defend your territory early: You’re in an apartment, the person next to you is your neighbor, and you know what they say, “Good fences make good neighbors.” If you’ve done things correctly, this poor sap has the middle seat in a long-haul, so it’s best to start from a place of compassion. But if they try to put that arm rest up, it’s a firm no. (Honestly, who even does this?) Don’t get me wrong, that armrest is rightfully theirs to use, (yours is the outside one,) but they do not get to opt to lift it so they can roomy themselves into your apartment. Nip it in the bud so you’re not spending the whole flight trying to work yourself up to saying something, or hoping they only meant to put it up for a minute. Your seat is your castle!

What do you binge at home? This is the most useful question. If you can sit and watch Succession, or Housewives, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer for five hours on your couch, you can do it on your long haul, maybe push it to seven, and look at that you’ve eaten up over half your flight. If you get really into something in the months before your trip, put it on ice, download it to your device of choice, and watch the whole season. I watched all three of the original Bourne movies on my last flight on the inflight entertainment system…comforting, nostalgic, like network TV on the rainy Saturdays of my childhood. That was six of my 11 hours. Woot!

Drugs: If you feel confident about your body’s response to drugs, by all means, take them. For me, THC makes time go slower and that is definitely not the point. Not to mention the fact that I am way too risk-averse to land in a foreign country with drugs that might be illegal and veer towards paranoia with weed. (At the moment, cannabis is legal in Thailand, but not to import, so they would probably just confiscate it. But what if your plane was rerouted to Singapore? Fear of foreign prisons plus drug induced paranoia? No thank you.) Pharmaceuticals? Not my thing. They make me inexplicably sad. But they may be your thing. The point is to make time disappear, not to make time miserable, so if you know you go off into the sweet goodnight with a little helper, go for it.

Alcohol - To drink or not to drink: All best practices say don’t. All the moisture is already leaving your body like a high-speed raisin. It messes with the precious sleep you are going to miss. Whatever. I’ve never turned down the beverage cart. I find a little glass of mediocre wine to be a lovely and relaxing diversion. We’re not after perfection here.

Brush your teeth: There is this school of thought that you do what you usually do before bed to cue your body that it’s time to sleep. Turn the screens off, wind down, brush your teeth…I’m not convinced that this has ever helped me. What I do know is that they usually give you a little packet of “comfort items” on long-haul flights. I prefer my own slippers and eye mask, but they are on to something with the toothbrush. If you don’t take a little teeth brushing break, somehow when you get off the plane your mouth tastes like something died there and your teeth have “little socks on them” as my mom says. So, during one of your transition moments, maybe when you’re trying to get to sleep, take a walkabout and brush your teeth.

Walkabouts: There was a funny story about former Seahawks Quarterback Russell Wilson, whose charisma is somewhere in uncanny valley territory, keeping his team awake on a flight while they were all trying to sleep doing “high knees up and down the aisles.” I laugh every time I’m on a plane thinking about this. Please, don’t be like Russ, especially not in steerage, where the aisles are so narrow it’s impossible not to knock into sleeping people’s elbows just taking an essential trip to the loo. However, getting up and walking until you find space (sometimes the front of the economy cabin, sometimes at the back,) where you can stand and lightly stretch, is a must. It’s fun, you get to see what other people are watching, check out their sleeping positions, and be generally snoopy. Plus, you get your blood flowing which is particularly essential when you reach one of those critical moments, (and you will,) where all you can think about is getting off the damn plane even though you have hours to go. I think of this as taking a vacation from my tiny apartment.

Audiobooks/Podcasts: This is my sharpest long-haul weapon. Make sure you have them pre-downloaded onto your device, (a good thing to do at the airport while you’re waiting to board.) You are there, still like a frog, eyemask on, headphones on, binging an entire season of a single-story podcast like Serial, or a great Tana French mystery, and hours and hours have gone by. It’s not sleep, but it’s definitely rest. And if you are ready to really put the gas on trying to get some actual sleep, put on a sleep podcast. A long one. My favorite is Sleep and Sorcery, or Lights Out Library, or you could listen to the one I record just for you, Recipe for Sleep.

Ugh. The neck pillow: Do you need one? Probably. Are they all mostly terrible? Yes. I have spent lots of money on lots of neck pillows and I have never been in love, but I did just purchase my favorite, and cheapest, (when does that happen?) at the Seoul airport. I’ve had an expensive memory foam one, one that latches around my neck, (which only made me hugely claustrophobic,) and countless other neck donuts, but this super chill bead filled worm thing managed to do its job, (keeping my head from lolling about,) and nothing more. Four stars in a horrible category.

You’ve almost made it. Now what?

Once the seatbelt light is on it’s hard to start packing up your apartment to move out, so I like to put things together about 45 minutes before landing time, and then put a podcast or audiobook on to pass not only the last bit of the flight, but the epic amount of time it often takes to get off the plane. This part can be the most excruciating, so busy yourself! Plus, once that light comes off, if I’m ready to grab my stuff from the overhead and go, I’m in the best position to make my passive-aggressive counter-asshole maneuver: standing in the aisle, just behind my seat row, blocking anyone in the seats behind me who is trying to push ahead and not let people out. I let everyone out before I go. The middle seat next to me. The aisle across from me. Anyone ahead who’s been waiting for a chance to get their bag down. It’s like when traffic is bumper to bumper, and some jerk is passing everyone outside the lanes and a taxi driver pulls halfway into the non-lane so the guy can’t pass. That’s me. A rage-angel of fairness and order. I don’t know what comes over me, I just can’t help myself.

Thailand specific:

Alright you’ve flown across the world, you’re tired and wired and all akimbo, what do you do? If you’ve still got any gas in the tank after you check in to your accommodations, it’s time to find Mango Sticky Rice, the treat I yearn for most of all the delicious things in Thailand, and ubiquitous in even the tiniest street food markets. Here is the recipe, if you are only able to take an imaginary trip to Thailand and want to taste all the flavors.

MANGO STICKY RICE

Sticky rice colored with Pandan leaves, and the one in the background with Butterfly Pea Flowers. I am not that adept at cutting mango, our Thai teachers did those. But even if your mango slicing is sloppy, it will still taste delicious.

Printable Recipe Here

Are you surprised that Mango Sticky Rice is the food that I dream of when I return home from Thailand? Me too. But it’s the first thing I want to eat when I get there and the last thing I want to eat before I leave. Maybe it’s the care that goes into the sticky rice, or the freshness of the mango that is inarguably more delicious in Thailand than where I live. But after making it in my amazing Chiang Mai cooking class, (more on that in a future post) I figured it’s worth a spin to try to make it at home. I find any excuse to go to Uwajimaya, my local Asian grocery store, a good one, so that’s where I found my sticky rice which can also be called “sweet rice”, (although it isn’t sweet until you make it so,) or glutinous rice. And although crispy mung beans aren’t always served with Mango Sticky Rice, sometimes it’s just topped with sesame seeds, to me this separates good from great Mango Sticky Rice.

The rice is rinsed, soaked overnight, then steamed, so a little more effortful than throwing it in the rice cooker, but so worth it in the end. Give it a try, and let me know how you do!

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

1.5 cup sticky rice

1 can coconut milk

1.5 Tbsp Palm Sugar (or brown sugar)

¼ tsp salt

1 ripe mango

Sesame seeds for topping

Crispy mung beans for topping

(optional: a few butterfly pea flowers)

1. Rinse sticky rice very well under cold water until the water runs clear. Soak in cold water in the fridge overnight.

2. Drain the rice well, and then steam in a bamboo steamer, or in a fine mesh sieve set in a deep saucepan over simmering water. (The sieve should not touch the water.) Cover with a clean kitchen towel and then the lid to help seal the steam in. Steam the rice for 40-50 minutes, or until tender.

Steaming the very pretty sticky rice in a bamboo steamer lined with cheesecloth.

3. Meanwhile, in a separate small saucepan, heat the coconut milk, sugar, and salt. At this point you can add butterfly pea flowers if you’d like to make your rice a fetching purpley-blue.

4. Once your sugar has dissolved, and the coconut milk has reduced by 1/3, add all but a quarter cup of the coconut milk to a large bowl, removing the butterfly pea flowers. Return the quarter cup of coconut milk to the saucepan, and simmer to thicken a little more.

5. Add the cooked rice to the coconut milk mix, stir together.

6. Mold around a quarter cup of rice onto a plate and served with sliced mango, and top with your thickened coconut cream, sesame seeds, and crispy mung beans.