Finding Our Way to Seoul

So both of us were a bit sad when we said goodnight to the boys at bedtime as we knew we wouldn't see them in the morning before our flight.  Lots of hugs and kisses for our two special men who are spending the week with grandma and grandpa.  We finished up our packing and celebrated our upcoming trip with a toast.  Mike decided it would be a good idea to try to stay up all night so he could sleep on the plane.  Well, that pretty much backfired...more on that later.  So Mike did finally give into the sandman and slept for about 1.5 hours while I got about 4 hours.  Our 3:30 AM wake up call came all too early!  We left the house by 4:30 AM on this adventure to our daughter.  Of course, we arrived plenty early at the airport with all 4 huge suitcases in two plus two carryons.  Our flight on United departed Minnesota at 6:50 AM to Chicago O'Hare.

Luckily we had plenty of time to make our transfer at O'Hare because that airport is totally huge. It took us forever (plus some TSA security advice) to figure out we had to take a tram in order to get to the terminal where Korean Air's ticketing resides. When we arrived, we learned that United should have given us our boarding passes at MSP, but the Korean Airlines folks were very helpful getting us checked in and with buying a lap ticket for Lauren on the return flight.  Another issue we ran into was our luggage tags.  When we checked our bags at United, they tore the tracking slip wrong and cut off our id number.  Korean Air needed those numbers so they had to do some searching, but they were able to locate what they called our "lost bag" before our flight.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat and then waited for our flight that departed around 12:35 PM. 

Let's just say our seats were less than ideal, especially for the last minute price we paid.  We were stuck in the middle seats of the plane, which offer NO leg room since the computers for the personal entertainment systems are stored there.  Of course, the personal entertainment system made this flight somewhat tolerable (Mike watched 3 movies and I watched nearly 4).  The flight was completed booked, so everyone was squished in like sardines.  But fortunately, the service on the flight was like nothing you'd see on a US carrier - the KAL attendants were always there to serve us food or help us out.  Still, Mike's plan to sleep on the flight didn't work so well: it was just so uncomfortable with no leg room that both of us slept for maybe an hour.  We arrived in Korea at 4:00 PM Saturday (remember Korea is 14 hours ahead of us in MN). 

After going through immigration (so very easy by the way) we claimed our luggage then breezed through customs.  W e exchanged our US dollars for Won and rented a cell phone.  Since we arrived on the weekend we had to find our own way to our hotel.  Normally a driver from the agency here would pick you up, but we took the KAL "Limo" service (it's more of a bus than a limo, but with very nice seats) to our hotel, "Lotte City Hotel Mapo".  Did we mention it's monsoon season now and today was one of their rainy days?  Don't think "just a little rain" - think horrible downpours that soak you to the bone.  So we got off at our stop and had to manuever all of our bags across two busy intersections to get to our hotel.  There wasn't a dry inch left on either of us.          

The hotel is nice, but definitely not what we were hoping for when we had planned this trip out in our head.  But at least we have a place to stay, so that is all that really matters.  After checking in and getting to our rooms we put our feet up for a few minutes, unpacked and finally cleaned up after our 24 hours of traveling.  We were both so very tired and just wanted to go to bed at 7:30 PM.  But we had other plans and sleep wasn't on our schedule yet. 

Around 8:30, Mike's "Korean Big Brother", Youn Shick, arrived after a long day of teaching English at a nearby university. Robin met Youn Shick for the first time and Mike was surprised to see that he was taller than "Hyung Nim" (Korean phrase for "Big Brother") after 25 years. Shick spoke briefly with the hotel staff and then led us down to the basement where a few restaurant options presented themselves. Youn Shick treated us to an excellent meal, featuring Kalbi pork ribs cooked at your table and all the accompanying side dishes. We didn't have room to finish nearly everything but it was a great first meal for our stay. Youn Shick and Mike talked for over an hour and just barely scratched the surface catching up on decades apart. Unfortunately, we were both practically falling asleep at the table, and Youn Shick gracefully let us go back to our room with a promise to meet up on Sunday night. We were sound asleep within minutes of returning to our rooms at 10 PM.

Well, you can probably guess from this post time that we woke up around 4 AM here, rarin' to go! So our bodies aren't quite adjusted to the clock yet, but we count our 6 solid hours of sleep as a minor victory!