People I am at Incheon International airport in Seoul and my mom and I are waiting for our flight to Beijing. It's 4:00pm at home, but here it is 8:05am the next day. I'm already confused and I keep asking mom, Wait...It's Monday? To further complicate things, Beijing is one hour "earlier" than Seoul coming in at 17 hours later than California.
Our flight here was fine. Singapore Airlines has tons of movies and tv shows to watch on demand and all seats have their own tv set. I watched Angels & Demons, Night at the Museum, The Hangover and Star Trek. After all that, there was still like four hours to kill.
Our flight basically raced the sunset and so it was light outside until we landed here in Seoul yesterday evening around 7pm. We went through customs and got our bags and found my brother and his fiancee waiting for us at the gate, which was awesome. It was also a little bit surreal.
We made our way to his car (this airport is HUGE by the way) and headed towards his house. This airport, much like the International one in Barcelona and Charles De Gaulle in Paris, is located about forty minutes outside of town. So it was a bit of a drive. Cody's house is located right near Namsan Tower. He lives on a very windy one lane street near a couple of embassy houses in a somewhat international part of town.
It was late, we were exhausted and there was nothing I wanted more than to clock out.
My brother has an interesting way of stressing me the fuck out about The Unknown that we might face. You know, don't look at anyone, don't take any airport taxis unless you want to be fully ripped off, don't sign up for any tours with people on the street, careful with that laptop - if it starts to smell like its on fire, you should probably turn it off, etc etc. I went to bed feeling significantly stressed out. But I eventually let it go. Hey, we're here. I think we'll figure it all out.
As we started thinking about it, we realized that our flight (the one I'm waiting for now) was going to leave at 8am. Since my brother goes to work very early, we planned to catch an airport bus which my brother would drop us off for....at 5am. Which meant this morning we woke up at 4:30. Miraculously, I haven't hit the wall yet. Getting up at 4:30 felt like getting up to my alarm for work. No biggie.
The bus came right as Cody dropped us off, which was lucky since it was still raining.
We've mosied around the airport and now we're hanging around waiting for the flight. I think we are both ready to get the sight seeing part of our trip underway and Beijing will be the perfect place to start. Our hotel there, Hotel Kapok, has free internet access, so I'll write more once I get my Tourist on.
Love from Asia.
PS. I haven't taken any photos yet as any moment we've been outside of the airport has been dark or raining. I'll post some from Beijing soon.
