The Flight

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What can you say about a thirteen-and-a-half hour flight? It was long, really, really long. Comfy but long. Our attempts to sleep failed. As we found out, sleeping upright is difficult and somewhat uncomfortable. In total I got around 2 hours and Rachel got a little more. It wasn't all bad though. We had televisions embedded in the seat in front of ours with many movies (lots of new ones), music and TV shows. The service on Korea Air was great. The stewardesses were very helpful. All in all though there isn't much to write about... we flew... from Canada to South Korea, that's it. Oh, it was raining when we arrived...

The real fun began when we got to Incheon International. We arrived at 3:00 am local time, a little later than expected because of headwinds or some such thing. The place was pretty much deserted except for the people from our plane, most of who conveniently got into cabs and went on their way. Rachel and I on the other hand had to wait until 6:30 am to grab a bus to Cheongju. At this point we had been up most of the night and really just wanted to sleep. Unfortunately there are no beds in the airport, weird i know... Anyways, at 6:00 am we were supposed to meet up with someone sent by our recruitment company. By 6:15 we were freaking out a bit since, he or she had yet to meet us, and the bus would leave the airport at 6:30. We decided to buy our tickets in the event that this person didn't show. At 6:20 we received a page from the airport that we had to go to the nearest information booth. We rushed over, half asleep... so probably more like zombies chasing the smartest man in the world. We met up with a short little Korea man dressed in a black suit who spoke absolutely no English. He rushed us over to the ticket counter while I was trying to explain to him that we had already purchased tickets. After literally waving them in his face he finally seemed to understand. We quickly changed direction and started heading for the terminal, which was luckily very close. At first he tried to get us on a bus to Chungju, not Cheongju. Again, we had to wave our hands in his face for him to realize that it was the wrong bus. Once he finally understood, we quickly put our luggage onto the bus and climbed aboard. We were the last on, awesome!

So, as I mentioned earlier it was raining. It was also very, very, very humid. Not that bad since it was still early in the morning and cool out. However, with a full bus it quickly got very hot, and on top of that the bus driver needed the heat on the front windshield to see. Being at the front of the bus, we soon started sweating profusely. What we thought would be a 1 ½ hour drive quickly became 3. It seems we were either going through rush-hour traffic, construction or an accident the entire way. When we arrived in Cheongju, our director, Mr. Lee, met us at the bus station and quickly whisked us away in his tiny but oh so nice Audi. We thought we would be going straight to our apartment, but we were very much disappointed. Instead, he drove us to the school to meet everyone. In a sleep deprived daze we met all of our new fellow teachers as well as the pair that we would be replacing. Everyone was very, very nice, and really helpful. But we’ll talk more on them later. After about an hour or so, Mr. Lee finally brought us to our new place, which, at the time, was completely unfurnished. For those of you that visited Rachel and I in Toronto, our new place was relatively the same size, maybe a little larger. Awesome! Everything is covered in some kind of linoleum; even the wallpaper has some plastic in it... The walls are not insulated... it seems they just wallpapered over the brick. At this point Rachel and I had been up far too long. I think our director could tell, so he quickly got on the phone and ordered us a bed, which came about 30 minutes later. After that he let us get some sleep and told us that he would be back around 7:00 pm to take us out for dinner, Yay! SLEEP!! FINALLY!

More to come... that was just the trip. We’ll fill everyone in as I get time to write more. 😱

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Photos

Our bed
Yes the mattress is as hard as it looks. Luckily we got a couple of foam pads!