Wednesday morning

I'm waiting for Brian to finish getting ready so that we can head out and look for a Starbucks and breakfast (we're STARVING - only airplane food for the last 36 hours), so I thought I'd post a few more details about our trip.

Both our flights were on time and completely uneventful yesterday. Just about as uneventful as hours and hours on a plane can be! Brian was so proud because I chose the Korean meal BiBimBap and seaweed soup to eat on the plane instead of the American choice. To be honest, I only chose it because I wasn't that hungry and knew it wouldn't kill me if I didn't like it. The BiBimBap was okay - it is cold ground beef, noodles, some seaweed stuff, and other noodles that I'm not quite sure of. You miss the cold ingredients with hot steamed sticky rice and then add soybean paste and sesame oil. Sounds interesting, doesn't it. Seaweed soup tasted about like you think it will - like water pulled from the ocean that has had fish swimming around in it for days. Unfortunately for us, seaweed soup (along with soybean paste soup) is listed as one of Rory's favorite meals. I'm going to have to do something about that! The second meal was American and pretty good, although they did include a crab salad that I did not even touch. Dessert was a rice flan that was very different, but good.

When we arrived at the airport, we stood in line for almost 30 minutes waiting to go through immigration. There were several young men ahead of us in line who were straight out of bootcamp and being stationed in Korea. They were none to happy about it and just seemed so young. They asked us several questions about how to do things here, but we were clueless, of course. After immigration, we went through customs and then to have our money exchanged - both fairly painless. Then we headed out of the airport to look for the KAL Limousine buses. They were actually pretty easy. It costs $14 per ticket for our ride to the Hotel Renaissance. From there, we were dumped onto the sidewalk and had to find a taxi. Several people were very helpful, but it was FREEZING outside, and we had a ton of luggage. SWS (the Korean agency and where we're staying) was actually very close and we could have walked if we had any idea where we were going, but the taxi was nice. The driver didn't speak a word to us the entire time - I'm pretty sure he did not speak English, and the flash cards that our agency sent us with the Korean and English directions certainly helped. I say it was close enough to walk, but I'm not sure I'd recommend walking anywhere or you will seriously get run over! There are so many people and cars here that it is just unbelievable. Believe me, they do not believe in "pedestrian's right of way."

We both slept really well for about 4 hours last night, and then tossed and turned for the next 3-4 hours. We were both up at 5:30. Honestly, the excitement over meeting Rory was not really on my mind. Trying to sleep and think about where we could possibly get some American food took precedence. Now that we're up and lucid, though, I'm definitely starting to feel butterflies. We're having trouble getting the laptop (and video program) to work with the computer here in the room so it doesn't look like we'll be able to share videos, but there will be pictures for sure just as soon as we can get back and get them posted.

Next time I post, we'll have seen Rory!