Arrival in Korea

Wow. Well, we’re here! We made it. The flight was impossibly long. I really can’t sleep on planes. I even took a few Tylenol PMs and it did nothing. We had taken off from SFO almost an hour late because of some sort of mechanical issue. Nothing like starting out an 11.5 hour flight with an hour of sitting on the tarmac. I guess I'm spoiled by JetBlue and was a bit shocked an put out to see that we didn't all have our own TVs to watch on the seatback in front of us. A flight that long and you're going to force the whole plane to watch Jennifer Lopez in The Backup Plan?

When we finally made it to ICN, we had to wait an hour for our bags, apparently there was a broken belt on the carousel thingy. Which was still marginally better than sitting on the plane. We finally got our luggage, declared nothing in Customs and because we were late, decided to head out to see if our van driver was still actually waiting for us, instead of standing in line to exchange some cash for won. He was, and he found us quickly. The humidity outside the airport was intense, like NJ on the worst days of August.

The ride from the hotel was longer than I expected, but my sense of time by that point had been seriously warmped. Seoul looks a lot like California to me, particularly the Hollywood Hills area. At one point on the ride to the hotel, we could've been on the Jersey Turnpike. Not a compliment perhaps, but just stating fact.

Our hotel is nice, the room is kind of like being in a condo.

My biggest complaint is that there is no wireless in the room. I thought there was going to be. There's wireless in the lobby and in the "resident's lounge" but it's not the same. So much for my shiny new iPad. Additionally, the netbook we borrowed from my dad because it was so compact doesn't have an ethernet port, so the in-room wired connection we do have to the internet is useless right now. I realize these should not be important things since we are really just here to pick up our son, but I'm really kind of freaking out a bit. Wade said he would fix the problem while we were out today. I really wanted to post pictures of our trip as we went along. Especially tomorrow when we get Sean!

We were so exhausted by this point that we grabbed some sandwiches from the store downstairs (after using our ATM card for some won) and were in bed by 8:30pm Seoul time. This money situation here is a problem for me. I'm not good at math to begin with and seeing so many fucking zeros after everything makes me freak out. One US dollar is like 1175 won. So I just stand there like a deer in the headlights. The sandwiches we got were something like 16,000 won, which is about $13 and change. But I handed him a bill for 10,000 won and he sat there waiting for the rest of it, and I was like, uhhhh.... what?? And Wade nudged me and was like, you need another one. I hate feeling like this. Anyone who is mean to foreigners or tourists has clearly never been out of the country.

I'm typing this as a draft in Word since, as we discussed, I currently have no fucking internet. There's nothing on TV either, unless I have an urge to watch Al Jezera for some reason, which I do not. Wade is still sleeping, and I just watched the sun come up. The laptop says it's 5:35pm, which means it's 6:35am here, on Tuesday. Too bad I can't give you last night's winning lottery numbers, since I'm living in the future now.

Anyway, our city tour is at 9:00am or 9:30am, depending on which piece of paper we are led to believe. The alarm should go off in 20 minutes or so, so maybe I'll just make some tea and watch the sun reflect off the windows and the hillsides and contemplate how few quiet mornings I probably have left to me.