Traveling to Korea!

The day has finally come (and passed) for us to travel to Korea and start our ESL Honeymoon Adventure for real real (not for play play).  I've dreamed of this moment for months now, and I'm really happy it is finally here.  The night before we got a scant more than 2 hours of sleep before waking up at 12am to take showers and make our final preparations for the long LONG flight.  We arrived at Philly international around 3am after being picked up by a driving service.  It was hard to stay awake in the car, but once we got to the airport I was absolutely giddy.  Much to Amanda annoyance.

I thought she was going to beat me

We checked in, however there was no one there to greet us at the United Airlines counter, so we waited and waited and waited what seemed like forever (although was really about 30 minutes) and got our tickets.  We walked to airport security which I must say looks really freaking futuristic and daunting.  They really hide the fact they are looking at your junk really well.  After that it was just the waiting game, and wait we certainly did.

Ignore my nostril

The first flight was....very uneventful to be honest.  I fell asleep and there was a very business looking Indian gentlemen sitting next to us.  We upgraded to the better economy seats so there was actually a bit of room to stretch a bit.  The only cool part of the flight was the fact that there was a kitty cat in the row next to us.  Which made me miss our kitties very very much, but its okay because they are in a good loving home.

The San Francisco Airport was extremely busy and we did not have a lot of time between flights so we ran to grab some food and grab a quick gift for our school director.  The flight from San Fran was...interesting.  We got to see four different movies, The Avengers, Mirror Mirror, One Thousand Words, and some other movie I couldn't be bothered to care about.  I was excited since I enjoyed the Avengers, and Mirror Mirror was pretty good actually, but by the time One Thousand Words rolled around I was so sick of being on the flight I was kinda like fuck it!  The 12 hours did really drag, but after about halfway through the flight you become comfortable numb to it other then your legs aching like crazy.  Sadly for the 12 hour flight we were cramped into seats that were barely wider than my already wide frame.  What was worse is the people seated in front of us both leaned their seats back as far as they could go so Manda and I literally could not move our legs unless we got up.
I have never been good with travel but the flights actually weren't that bad.  It was just hard hitting the 24 hours awake mark before we even landed in Korea.  Going through customs and getting our bags was very quick surprisingly and after meeting our contact we were off on our way to Cheongju.

On the bus to Cheongju outside the airport

The bus ride was interesting while Koreans drive on the right side of the road the buses drive like the drivers are insane.  The driver we had served between lanes randomly and beeped at people he cut off.  I admit I was only awake for about 1/3rd of the ride since we had been up for a total of about 30 hours by that point.
The architecture around Seoul was really cool, all of the tall buildings shared similar design and theme making the city very nice to look at.  There were also some strange buildings to spice things up like the Children's Library as shown below.

The weird dome building is the library

By the time we hit the bus station in Cheongju we were dead out despite all of my efforts to keep myself awake.  After we got our bags from the bus we just kind of stood off to the side wallowing in our own awkward.   We were alone, 7000+ miles from home and did not speak a single word of Korean.  Despite what we had been told 90% of the signs (that I saw) were solely in Korean, and we had no idea what to do. While Manda guarded the suitcases I went looking in the bus terminal.  Sadly I don't have any pictures but it was just like a mini-mall/flea market, I didn't find any information booth so I went back out and luckily a teacher from our school was there waiting for us!
She introduced her self as Christine which I found out later was the girl who interviewed me!  After loading our stuff up into the car we headed on out to the school!  We are actually in a long alley out in the more rural part of the city, but still within walking distance of a lot of very cool things.  We ate some food with Christine and turned in for the night.  Only to be woken up a bit later by one of the couple we are replacing is named Rachael.  We had a very brief chat with her before crashing for the night.  I will leave you with the parting picture for now.

Sleepy Manda on the bus