Chasing the Sun

We have arrived. Our journey has ended and yet just begun. It began with a night of frantic packing to get everything together and in 4 checked bags weighing less than 50 pounds. It ended with a cab ride to our new apartments in north Jeonju, Korea. The story, however, is more complex than that. I'm still not sure how i feel about it all....somewhere in between nervous, scared, and excited. This is a strange new place. The locals don't speak English as well as we hoped and were led to believe. First plan: learn Korean.

We didn't finish packing until 2 in the morning. Less than 2 hours later we were in the car riding to the airport. Thankfully Catherine's parents put together a nice breakfast to get us on our way. We were late leaving the house (as usual) but made it with plenty of time to spare. All our hard work the night before paid off as all our bags came in under weight. One did give me a bit of a scare as it shifted from 50 to 51 but the guy from US Airways stepped on the scale to reset it and didn't hesitate to take the bag off the moment it stopped at 50.

We said our goodbyes to Catherine's family and headed through security. I got my second exposure to electronic raping.....still not a fan of the invasion of privacy. Whatever happened to needing a warrant to search someone? I digress, we boarded our nice 737 for the flight to Charlotte where we sat at the rear of the plane. Luckily we managed to get both our backpacks and carry-on bags in the upper storage. I don't think our backpacks could've made it under the seats. I sat in the middle seat and allowed Catherine the aisle seat to help with her claustrophobia. That left me between sleeping passengers for the flight as I was timing my sleep to coincide with nighttime in Korea. The guy in front of me decided he wanted to sleep as well so i got my legs pinched behind his recline the whole flight :-( That really pissed me off, I never recline on planes because the cramped quarters are bad enough to begin with! I fiddled around for a bit and finally decided to start reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli. We landed in short order and disembarked in Charlotte.

There Catherine bought us a couple bottles of water, we found our next gate, and sat down to wait. Catherine slept, her plan (suggested by her doctor) was to sleep the time difference away, while I got out her computer and read the news. I think she had the right idea! This time our plane was an Airbus 321, the first European jet I've ever flown on, a decent sized plane. This time we got bulkhead seats. I liked them as I got quite a bit of extra leg room as compared to the last leg and nobody to squish me. Strangely this flight had no in flight entertainment either....I thought they were standard on intercontinental flights. This leg I decided to get some sleep and proceeded to get about 4 hours in several small spurts. Catherine spotted the Golden Gate off in the distance and pointed it out to me! We sat next to a nice gentleman for the flight. Turns out we had the arena league football team New Orleans Voodoo on board and we were seated next to their coach. Didn't realize that till the end though, oh well.

San Francisco has a horrible airport. The design seems new and modern but lacks some basic amenities such as an easy way to get from one terminal to another. The lady at US Airways told us that there was a United shuttle a short walk away so we went there. We asked to be taken to the international terminal and she needed to know our gate. Unfortunately our tickets didn't have this information and the television screens only showed the flight for the terminal we were in....useless! She suggested we ask the nearby United attendants to look up our gate. They told us no because it was not a United flight and we were mot allowed to use their shuttle anyway. Assholes. We went back and told the lady to take us to "international" and she did this time. After getting off the shuttle we were again confused. No nearby monitor to inform is as to our gate....stupid airport! We asked the guy manning the shuttle desk and he gave us two different answers to the same question. Literally said we were in the wrong place and then told us we were right where we needed to be! We finally found our gate though.

When we got there however we were told that the flight was packed and therefore only one carry-on was allowed on board, the other would have to be checked. The kicker: the one we could take must weigh less that 7 kilos! Mine weighed nearly double that! The only way we had gotten the checked bags under weight was thru Catherine's packing skills. We, by that I mean she :), rearranged until all the heavy items were in our backpacks and carry-ons. Thank god we had expanding bags. Side note: thank you Mom for the awesome Goodwill find, we would've been screwed something fierce with my original carry-on bag! After shoving all our high weight items in bags we proceeded to hand them off to be checked. We left out our computers so we could use the Internet on our 11 hour flight. That turned out to be useless as, unlike many sources informed me, there was no Internet on our plane.

Singapore Airlines was in the process of installing it on their aircraft and ours hadn't received it yet :-( This was heartbreaking for Catherine as she had promised her mother that they would skype during the flight. Once we realized this wouldn't be possible we searched for alternatives. It turned out that the plane did have the ability to make phone calls (at an exorbitant rate) so we attempted to make a short call to Catherine's parents.

Our attempts to ease their minds failed at every turn. First we were presented with a screen requiring a country code. Having never called from outside the US we had no idea what it was. We asked the gentleman next to us and he suggested 01 or 001 but neither worked. Next we asked a flight attendant who had absolutely no idea....I guess no one ever tries to use the phones! He did find us a nice stewardess who did know the code. We plugged it in, dialed the number, and got nothing. Some statement about 'normal call clearing' and disconnecting. We tried this several times throughout the flight but were never successful. :-( Moral of the story? Never try and use an airplane phone, it's just not worth the effort!

The 777 did have some rather nifty features though. We each had a personal 10 inch screen with a large selection of movies, TV shows, learning materials, and so on. The most interesting features, to me at least, was a program called flight data or something like that. It showed you the speed, altitude, distance traveled, distance left to travel, estimated time of arrival, and a neat map showing you where the plane was located. Every time i read my book, went to sleep, or just didn't use the screen i would put this on. Such a clever little idea! I spent not a small amount of time on this screen. I watched as our plane crossed the world via Alaska and Russia, chasing the sun all the while.

Catherine dove right into the learning programs. She taught herself the Korean numbering system! I attempted to learn the days of the week and months but soon gave up because our food arrived. We were both quite hungry as we had been sustained by snacks up to this point. It was exactly what you would expect, edible but not great food. Afterwards I took a short nap (not too long because it was nearly sun up in Korea) to re-energize. When I woke I just tried to keep myself busy. I read some, tried to watch a few movies (i don't think i finished one....) and in general stay entertained.

After a marathon flight we finally got over the Korean peninsula. I watched as a most unusual sight took over. A very strangely mountainous landmass appeared. Having seen other mountainous areas from a plane i can definitely say Korea is a whole different ballgame. I saw cities and towns, plains filled with farms (rice paddies I assume), golf courses dotted everywhere, and rivers galore. I kept a lookout for Seoul but soon realized we wouldn't see it from the air :-( Our plane was coming from the east and had to circle south of Seoul to reach the Incheon airport. Unfortunately that put us on the wrong side of the plane. Guess we'll have to find another opportunity!

We were almost the last people to leave the plane. We had been seated in the rear and waited so as to collect our stuff in peace. We put our coats on (a strange sight we must have been with heavy winter coats in the middle of summer!) and walked on to a strange new world. We made it to Korea at last!