Hello Cheongju! (Manda's version of the trip)

This was one of our first views of Choengju.

We finally made it to our destination! Said destination being Cheongju, Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea. It was a very, very long trip, but we're glad to say that we did make it back in one piece.

First things first, we made it to the Philly airport around 2:30am or so (on very little sleep), which meant we had forever to wait. Luckily for us, the airline had a way to make us be patient and wait. By that I mean that we waited around for an hour for the person from United Airlines to check us in until probably 3:30am. Then we finally waded through security with no issues and waited for the plane. We did manage to grab a quick breakfast before the 6 hour flight, which was great because the trip did not include a whole lot of food in general. So breakfast was an egg and cheese sandwich and a smoothie. 

Then we boarded the first flight, which was okay, but not my favorite thing ever. Sleep was kind of an off and on thing all day, but nothing major so we were already getting tired.  The flight was pretty non-remarkable though, which is fine. Though Zach just reminded me that there was a pretty white and black kitty across the aisle from us in a carrier. It was so good, it didn't even make a peep. 

At that point we had made it to San Francisco and had little time to spare since our layover was only for an hour and twenty minutes. We had just enough time to grab something to eat (which we didn't even have time to eat all of our sandwiches!) and get to the terminal before it was time to start boarding. In that time we also had calls and texting to do, plus I was able to just make it to suspend our phone accounts so I won't be billed for 3 months and we can still use them in South Korea by picking up free wifi. So we fit all that into the tiny bit of time and then we boarded the plane.

Did I mention that the plane is huge? 

As weird as it is, I actually enjoyed the longer flight more than the smaller one (mostly). The lack of leg room was already bad and the guy in front of me leaned back his seat so I stuck my legs into the aisle as much as possible. I guess there's only so much you can do when you pack approximately 300 people onto a plane though. 

Really long flights are interesting in my perspective though. I feel like you absolutely hate it and the time drags in the first 3 or so hours, but then you reach the point where you're just like, "well, I'm here, might as well just suffer with everyone else" and then it isn't as bad. Then you just watch the crappy movies (we got to watch The Avengers though, so that was pretty nice), eat the kind of crappy meals (first it was chicken and rice or beef bolgogi and rice, then it was either a turkey sandwich or noodles and potstickers; they even gave us a late night snack!), and learn little things about the people around you just by being in close proximity. 

You can see Zach in the picture above (on the right side with the plaid/stripey stuff going on), to his right was this short woman with an accent I didn't recognize. She had brought her own slippers and had a stuffed moose that she cuddled with. She was nice. Then you can see the guy across the aisle from me in the white shirt. He was alternately on his iPhone or his Mac and did some reading on a few powerpoint presentations, so I'm thinking he was a student. One of the papers he was reading was about Buddhism and Chinese writing or something. The rest was in Korean so I had no idea. 

I think we both catnapped off and on, but it was very hard to sleep for longer periods because the lack of leg room makes your knees and legs ache. I got up pretty frequently, especially later on, because sitting there not being able to get comfortable can drive you crazy. All things considered, not a bad flight.

Just flying over Japan, no big deal.

So I finally took the picture above near the end of the flight as we were going over Japan. That was pretty neat and the mountains were gorgeous. 

I wish I had taken some pictures at the airport in Incheon, but I didn't as I was mostly just trying to get on the wifi to send emails to people to let them know we made it (okay, and I checked in on Foursquare, I will admit it). Then we shuffled through immigration and downstairs to gather our luggage. After that we just turned in our information to customs and went through were we met a man who helped us buy a bus ticket to Cheongju and waited until we left. Zach ran back into the airport while we were waiting to get a bottle of water as we both needed it, and it was 1,000 won, which is about $ 0.88 USD, which isn't bad. 

You need one of these to hop on a bus. 

The bus ride was interesting, we went through Incheon and then Seoul, watching the buildings and signs. There are so many buildings and so many businesses in buildings everywhere. On the way through that area I saw a Papa John's, a Dominoes, and tons and tons of other businesses. There was also this really neat children's library that was round and kind of made me think of the Death Star from Star Wars. The architecture around here is really neat though, lots of big artsy buildings and art and generally interesting things. 

This was just as we got on the bus, shortly after leaving the airport.

At this point, I have to say that things were less interesting for me, because I fell asleep. After being awake and traveling for more than 24 hours (we're clocking closer to 30 hours at this point in the trip), it just caught up with me and it was time to sleep for a few. We both fell asleep off and on while we were on the bus and and about 2 and a half hours after we boarded the bus we were off and at the bus station in Cheongju. 

We weren't sure what was happening at that point as we thought that we would be meeting the director at the bus station. Instead we met Christina who is a part time teacher at the school. She was very nice and got us where we needed to go, after a little confusion. 

Cheongju welcomed us with a rainbow!

Just in case you needed to know where you were.

Finally, after the short drive we made it to the school and found out that we're going to be living upstairs, above the school. We're on the 3rd floor of the building, which is kind of neat. As far as location, we're located on the southern side of Cheongju (I think) near the outskirts, which has its advantages and disadvantages. 

We had a quick dinner at a local restaurant and had pork and the other usual Korean fare, which we will get into more later on. We also met the current foreign teachers that live here, they will be leaving in a week to head back to the states after being here for 2 years. I am really hoping that they will be able to show us the ropes before we go so we aren't flailing quite as much. We are actually shadowing them today (it's 9:30am here, so almost time for classes to start). Since we have had so much morning downtime we've been listening to dogs bark and I've been doing some bird watching (there are some noisy black and white birds outside that I've been watching).

After that we fell into blissful sleep after an exhausting day. Once we were told how to turn on the air conditioner it was even better. It's apparently been hot and wet here, so I guess we'll get used to that. In fact, we're expecting this early next week...

This is Bolaven apparently, which will hit us on Monday.

I will update this again soon (and add what I probably missed), for now it's time to start the day's adventure though and hope we make it through in one piece. ^-^