(first published on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 2:17am)
We're finally here... After 6 months of waiting, it feels so surreal to actually be in a foreign country. But we made it! :D So here's our story thus far...
Our itinerary was composed of 3 flights. One from LAX to San Fran which should have taken only an hour... more on that in a minute... The second was from San Fran to Seoul, then the third from Seoul to Pusan. Amazingly the only flight that gave us trouble was the domestic flight from LAX to SFO. We boarded about an hour late due to weather... "That's fine" I thought, "We'll still have at least 20 minutes to catch our connecting flight"... So we board the plane and everything is fine, until we start to descend. After getting about half way to the runway, the pilot pulls straight back up into the air and completely misses the airport. "Well that's kind of weird"... After circling the airport for about 15 minutes the pilot comes onto the intercom and announces "Well ladies and gentleman, we're experiencing some mechanical problems, and we'll let you know what's going on as soon as we understand more".... This statement marked the beginning of my 45 minutes of panic... I got to sit there with white knuckles, looking at John every minute or so to see if I could get any reassurance from him (he was sitting across the aisle with 2 ppl between us). Finally the pilot comes back on the air and tells us that they are having problems with the landing gear, and after burning off some fuel for the past hour he is going to attempt a landing. He sees no problems with the landing gear at this point, but for safety's sake we had to run through the entire emergency evacuation plan. This is the point where I peed my pants... haha jk. After making a low pass for the tower to check our gear, the pilot finally starts to descend to land. About a minute before impact we were told to bend over, grab our ankles while all of the flight attendants screamed "BRACE BRACE BRACE"... quite disconcerting. Turned out the gear was just fine, but the whole landing process was SO frightening... moral of the story: NEVER FLY UNITED!!! haha.
The flight from SFO to Seoul was actually kind of enjoyable. Singapore airlines was really great, got to watch about 5 movies on my own personal screen, and a couple TV shows. And the flight from Seoul to Pusan was only 40 minutes, quick and easy. Once we landed in Pusan we were picked up by the VP of our school, piled our years worth of luggage into his tiny car, and headed toward the school in which we'll be working. We had a mini orientation with the teacher who we will be replacing, but I don't remember a single thing simply because we hadn't slept in 24 hours... So we'll see how Monday goes.. :P
We're in the heart of Pusan now, and did a bit of exploring today. It is so weird to come from a melting pot of ethnicities to such a homogeneous culture. We've gotten a few odd looks, but we stick out like sore thumbs, so that's to be expected. It's uncomfortable to walk around and not know what any of the signs mean, or what anyof the food is... but we found a pizza hut and a coffee bean,so we won't starve to death. It was really hard to communicate with the waitress though, so that will take some getting used to.
Other than the slight homesickness, and the feeling of total incompetency, things are going well thus far. It's only day one... so hopefully we can acclimate :)
