Arrival and Survival

June 21, 2007

Everything leading up to departure went pretty smoothly (other than losing my winter coat at the airport), until I get up to the gate to wait, and they announce that takeoff is going to be delayed. For an hour. This concerns me, because I only have 2 hours to change flights in Toronto, and one of them is gone. When the plane finally lands in Toronto, the pilot says there’s no gate for us to pull up to, because we were so late arriving. So we sit on the runway, in the dark, waiting for one to open up. A few times, we start to move, but a few feet later the plane stops again, and we just wait. The pilot announces the flights that people have missed, and where they’ll be staying, and when the next flight will leave to take them wherever they’re going. I just crossed my fingers and hoped that mine wasn’t one of the flights he listed, because trying to explain to a Korean person that I missed my flight would not be an easy task. Thirty minutes pass, and we finally pull up to a gate, and everyone starts to disembark, but of course I am in the very last row of the plane, so it takes quite a while for me to get out. I find an Air Canada woman and ask about if I have to stay the night. She said my flight hadn’t left yet, but that if it did leave without me to come back to her to get a hotel room. The next challenge was to get to my next flight. Which was leaving from Terminal 3 in about 20 minutes, and I was in Terminal 1. So I took off, walking as fast as I could while carrying 2 heavy backpacks. So I walk, take a train, and then walk some more to arrive at Terminal 3, and Korean Air is at the far end, so I walk some more. I finally get to the Ticket Agent and get my boarding pass, and some official looking Korean guy comes over and tells me “Your bags probably aren’t coming.” Well, that was… vague. Not coming ever? What?

But since I have about 1 minute to get to my flight, I don’t bother to ask. I am literally THE LAST person to get on the plane, and I find my seat on the huge plane, which has an upstairs and a downstairs, and (I think 13 seats across each row), but get to where I’m supposed to sit, there’s someone else in my seat. Of course. I ask a flight attendant, and she just tells me to wait, on this fold-out seat by the door. Eventually, she leads me to a seat which I’m pretty sure is in first class! There are only 7 seats across each row, and they look pretty big, and comfortable. Score!

Fast forward about 12 hours….
We land at Incheon Airport in the middle of the night (or very early morning, depending), and head down to the baggage claim area. It’s June 23, I completely missed the 22nd. Since my bags were only “probably” not coming, I decided to wait it out and see if they’d turn up. They didn’t. So I ask the customs guy what I’m supposed to do, and he directs me over to the lost and found. They attempt to ask me several question is very broken English, and finally he gives me a phone number to call the next day. But first I try to called Henna and Damon, as per her instructions, but neither of them answer their phones. Which confuses and frightens me a little. Did they forget I was coming? So I leave that area and try to find the bus that I’m supposed to catch. A guy manages to show me where it is, even though neither of us can understand the other. But as I’m waiting, I realize I don’t have a ticket. So I trundle back inside in search of some sort of ticket kiosk or something. I find an info desk and ask “Ticket? Bus? Tick-et?” and she replies, in perfectly competent English “You just pay the fare when you get on.” Ok, so back outside. There’s still a while to wait, because the flight landed at 2:30 and the bus isn’t until 5:30. Great planning on this trip… So at 5:30 the bus comes, and I hold out the money I exchanged in the airport: the fare is 8000 Won. An hour and a half later, we’re at the final stop, Cheongyangni Station, and I’m the only person left on the bus. So I’m looking for Damon, who I expect to be a woman, since Henna repeatedly called Damon “she.” So I’m understandably surprised when a Korean man comes up to me “Joshua?” I figure this is Damon, because who else would know my name? But he’s definitely not a woman. It is him, obviously, and we get a taxi to the motel I’ll be staying in. Motel Casting. Which is QUITE an interesting place. We go into the room, and I take one step into it, and he practically screams at me to take my shoes off. I didn’t think about it because in the pre-arrival information Henna sent me, it said “You will be forgiven for anything except taking your shoes off in people’s houses, “ which I assumed meant, you know, that I would be forgiven for anything except taking my shoes off, but which actually meant I would be forgiven for anything except NOT taking my shoes off. And apparently it even applies in motels. Well shit. This is a bad start. When Damon and the motel woman leave I basically just sleep for the whole next day, since it had been 2 days since I’d slept.

When I woke up, and checked out the motel – oh my. Right inside the front door is a big rack ‘o’ porn, and in my room is a shower with no curtain, and big half-used bottles of shampoo and the like, 2 sets of slippers and someone else’s hairbrush. It turns out that it’s a “love motel,” which are quite popular in Korea with young couples, because girls live with their parents until they’re married, so they often need places to go to... do things. Anyway, this is one of them.

I leave the motel and try to find a phone so I can call home. The walk down the street was interesting, to say the least. Since I’m about a foot taller than the next tallest person here, EVERYONE stares at me. And it’s sort of dirty here too. I find a payphone, and after several attempts, figure out how to call home. I had just gotten a phone card at the airport, so I figure I have lots of time to tell my parents what things are like. We’re about two minutes into our conversation when the phone card ran out of minutes (worst phone card ever!). Unfortunately, though, the last words I left my parents with were “Oh my god, there’s a gun in this phone booth!” (there really was). And since there was no convenient machine like at the airport, I couldn’t get another phone card.

So I went back to the motel to sleep more. So far, Korea = not a fan.