Traveling to Seoul

On the morning of Tuesday the 18th at 4 am, my journey to South Korea began. Having finally obtained my work visa the week before (a long and somewhat arduous process consistently made more difficult by the registrar at JHU), I was told to report to Korea on Wednesday the 19th. My 7:45 am flight from Philly took me to Atlanta, and from there it was a 15 hour flight to Seoul.

The flight to Seoul was truly indescribable. For those of you who are lucky enough to have never made such a flight, allow me to explain it for you. First of all, and something I did not realize ahead of time, on a 1 pm flight heading west, the sun never sets for the entire length of the flight. Therefore, the flight staff basically make a simulated night where they shut all the windows and turn the lights off so that everone has time to sleep. Everyone's seat has a personal entertainmnet system which has movies and games. I probably watched 4 or 5 movies on the flight.

However, after a few hours, not even your own personal entertainment system can keep your mind off the fact that your butt feels like it's going to fall off. You pretty much lose all sense of time, especially after waking up from naps that could have lasted anywhere from five minutes to an hour. The last two hours were particularly painful. The second period of "night" ended about forty minutes before we landed, and those last 40 minutes were among the worst.

Immediately upon disembarking, everyone on the plane must hand in a medical self-evaluation and have their temperature taken before being allowed to enter the airport. Incheon was an extremely clean and efficient airport, and luckily very well-labeled with English. Two coworkers who I met in Atlanta and I went through visa processing and customs together, and managed to buy bus tickets to the City Air Terminal. From the CAT, we simply had to take cabs to our hotels. The only problem was that everyone was going to different hotels, and no one spoke Korean. Luckily for me, another instructor named Jenn who was at CAT can speak Korean and turned out to be going to the same hotel as me.

By this time, it was around 7:30 pm local time (6:30 am back home), and I was completely wiped out from all the traveling. Jenn's aunt, who is a Korean native, took us to a restaurant nearby and got us dinner. I was asleep by 9:30, which was a welcome relief after the day and a half or so of flying and sleep deprivation. I had the national medical examination to look forward to the next morning.

Coming up next: Seoul Medical Center and Beginning to Explore the City