We're Here!

Hello! Annyeong-haseyo!

We've arrived at last! What a looooong day we had traveling to Korea. Mom and Dad got us up in the middle of the night! We were so excited, so jumped out bed right away. The airport shuttle showed up a little early (4am!) so there was a mad dash to get the last of our stuff put away and load up the van. Luckily Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) had already packed most of our stuff already.

The first leg of our journey was in a small plane from Sudbury from Toronto. Here is a picture of Mom and us getting on the plane "in the midde of the night" (actually at about 6am).

In Toronto we switched to a real big plane (Dad said it was a Boeing 777). Everyone had their own TV! We watched Madagascar 2 and High School Musical 3. And Mom prepared a luscious breakfast and lunch for the flight.

We stopped in Vancouver to switch to another plane (a 767 this time) for the last leg of our trip. In Vancouver Airport there this awesome aquarium. It is huge! Here is a photo of it. Can you see Jin and Lili in the aquarium? We looked for Nemo in the anemones but couldn't find him.

Aside from the aquarium the best part of all the airports (except Sudbury) were the moving sidewalks (Lili calls them "excalators"). After a couple of hours in Vancouver we got on the plane to Korea. Here is a photo of Lili and Dad in front of our plane.

This flight lasted a long long long time. Eleven hours! They fed us lots of food - not as good as Mom's but still not bad. Some of it was kind of spicy. Mommy and Daddy liked the free wine! There were TV's on the back of each seat and the same movies as the last flight. So Lili got to watch Madagascar 2 a bizillion times. Mom and Dad did get to see Slumdog Millionaire. We did manage to sleep a bit, some more than others. Here is a picture of Lili doing some colouring in front of her own TV.

The TVs could also show us maps of where we were. Here is a picture of a map showing the location of our plane approaching the international dateline (we were approaching tomorrow). The interesting thing is that it never got dark during our flight.



Finally we started our descent to Korea. Here is one of our first glimspes of Korea through the clouds. Still a bit brown, but spring is just around the corner.

After a not too smooth landing we were happy to have finally arrived in Korea (at about 5pm Korean local time on Wednesday March 25). Here are two different reactions to our arrival.

And here were are coming through the arrivals gate at Incheon Airport (Seoul's international airport).

We still had an hour's drive on a shuttle bus into Seoul to where we are staying. Then there was a small glitch at the Guesthouse where the doorman had no record of our reservation. Yikes! He found a room for us (it was the same room we stayed in when we were here to get Jin 6 years ago - how cool!), so despite the uncertainty about if we could stay here for more than one night we all fell into a deep sleep.....at last. The next day the great folks at SWS (who run the Guesthouse) sorted everything out. So now we have some time to look for an apartment to live in for the rest of our stay here.

Good bye and good night for now!

Love,

Jin, Lili, Deb and Derek