The cylinder

Do you ever wonder how this shit works? I mean you get inside this long metal cylinder looking thing and you sit there for at least 10 hours, although it feels much longer. And then, one minute you're at the airport in San Francisco and the next minute you're in Taiwan. I mean how does this shit work? How did you just travel 10,000 miles in roughly 12 hours? If you looked on a map, you would say, "Damn, one minute I was here and now I'm there." I guess this thing is called an airplane but I'll never really understand it.