Our Grand Adventure: Our journey to the Land of the Morning Calm

Well, I am excited to report that we have survived our first few days as helpless foreigners! Luckily, our travel days were seamless. Jacob's mom drove us to the airport at an ungodly hour, and, by some small miracle we checked-in with no overweight baggage! We decided to sit and wait outside of security for Jacob's dad to come say goodbye and instead my brother Troy surprised me!

The first leg of our flight from PDX to SFO was great! I spent the duration of the flight sleeping (yes, with my mouth wide opening and head rolling around) in between two strangers. So glad I brushed my teeth. The earplugs Jacob got from Santa Claus were a godsend because he even managed to get some shut eye.

The second leg of our flight was even better than the first. We bought Economy Plus seats that offered a few extra inches of leg room. Everyone can laugh, no I didn't need the space, but my tall husband loved it! I gave him the aisle seat and I took the middle seat not knowing the window seat was empty. I took full advantage and used all three seats as a bed and slept three quarters of the 12 hour flight!

When we arrived at the airport we ran around trying to find the right bus to take us to Wonju (our new home), and that was our first adventure! With two 50lbs bags and two carry-ons in tow, we set off to find the ticket office to buy bus tickets. One gentleman stopped and asked if we wanted a taxi ride for 250,000 won per person (around $240 USD) and I, in my infinite wisdom, politely declined. The taxi guy proceeded to give us wrong directions to the bus we needed and we immediately went to an information booth to get accurate information.

We finally got to the ticket office where I bought 2 bus tickets for the 5:30pm bus to Wonju. The time was 5:15 and I was supposed to call the lady in Wonju who was meeting us at the bus terminal in Wonju. We downloaded the Vonage app that was supposed to let us make phone calls to anywhere in the world through wifi. Wrong. It didn't work. I went running back to the nice man at the info booth where I shouted that I needed to make a phone call. He pointed me to a courtesy phone. I dialed the number, and of course it was not a valid number. I then dialed 4 variations of the number hoping it would work. It didn't. I went running back the information booth guy and asked him if the number I was dialing was a Korean phone number (it was 5:20), apparently it was. I went full damsel-in-distress on him and hurriedly explained that I had to call the lady so she knew that we were on our way and our bus was leaving in ten minutes. After a few minutes of trying to figure out what to do, he (finally) offered to dial the number on his personal phone. Success! The lady answered and I told her we were on our way and proceeded to rush her off the phone so we could find the right bus before it left.

It took us five more minutes to walk across the street to get to our bus (each with 115lbs of luggage) I was pushing, pulling, and carrying more than my body weight people! We handed our tickets over and get our luggage down to the cargo area where we left our suitcases and then realized no one would load them for us, dumb Americans. After my big, strong husband loaded the luggage we were in our seats and ready to go at exactly 5:30pm. Our bus ride was three hours long and we sat right in front of a very, very fragrant elderly Korean man that put the cherry on top of our extremely long travel day.When we arrived in Wonju we met Nika, the director of the school that hired us and Angela, our Korean co-teacher. Both were very sweet. After they dropped us off at our apartment it finally hit us. We were in a foreign country with no toilet paper for using the restroom, no towels for showering, no food, no Korean money, and a very hard bed. The only thing we could do was sleep and worry about everything in the morning. LET THE ADVENTURE BEGIN!