::A Geek in Korea::

We didn’t have the best of flights for our return to Korea. I blame this on Chicago, O’Hare airport. The connection airplane flying to Chicago was supposed to take a total of 49 minutes. We were held, according to our pilots, for no reason, and were delayed on the runway, nearly doubling our travel time. We we were getting off the plane, we saw runway baggage handlers just carelessly tossing luggage onto the ground. We had a bag of fragile stuff that made it onto the baggage cart without getting mangled, but the bags we transferred were just thrown down and put onto a waiting trolley. 

Luckily we made it to Chicago with lots of time for our transfer, although the terrible signs and directions to get to our terminal made it difficult to find the gate. One of the security guards we had going through a checkpoint was so lazy and or on a power high, she wouldn’t even turn her head to check our boarding pass. We had to hold it up for her to see, as she was busy leaning against the luggage scanning X-ray machine. If we weren’t short on time trying to get from point A to point B, the treatment of some of the security guards would have been complaint worthy as well.

The plane trip was only supposed to take fourteen and a half hours, but took an extra two. We would periodically check the information provided by the flight and the "time to destination" just never seemed to be correct. Eventually, the thing stopped reporting all together and we just had to guess how much longer we had on the plane. I couldn’t sleep at the beginning of the flight, which would have been the best time to offset jet lag. Later in the flight, after we were served our meals, I watched movies and played my Nintendo DS for a few hours to kill time. I felt trapped in the middle seat, and wasn’t ever comfortable enough to take anything more than a very brief nap, if I slept at all. In the whole 16 hour ordeal, I maybe slept for a total of 1 hour.

The fun didn’t stop there. While waiting for our luggage to arrive, there was a man that crawled out of the baggage handling center with a white board attached to a suitcase. He wrote the names of the people that wouldn’t be able to get their luggage because it was missing. I chuckled and thought, "Man, that sucked when they lost my luggage. Glad my name isn’t on there this time…." except it was. For the second consecutive flight out of Chicago O’Hare, they have lost the same bag of mine. It’s like a lottery, except bad. It arrives in a few days, and might be a blessing in disguise. I don’t think either of us had the energy to carry the thing if it had arrived on time, and now it gets delivered to our apartment free of charge.

Not only did they lose my bag, they also destroyed my wife’s bag. Handle completely snapped in half when we tried to get it off the carousel. Flying to America this same bag had another part snapped off and we got a $25 dollar voucher for our next flight. This time the damage was much more severe. We went back to the lost and found and they told us that we could get a replacement bag outside of customs. We headed there and they said they didn’t have a bag as big as ours to replace what they had damaged. We got the largest thing they had, and just rearranged everything we could to make it work.

By this time, I was much like the walking dead. I hadn’t slept, had tons of stress, and was ready to stab someone in the eye if they even looked at me funny. We got our tickets for Daejeon, then waited for the bus to arrive. I picked up a cheeseburger from McDonald’s while whistling the "Super Size Me" movie theme song in my head. I ate my burger and immediately regretted my choice. On the bus I was in such intestinal agony I had to loosen my pants and hope there wouldn’t be any delays until I got into a bathroom. It felt like Ronald himself had given me a kick to the stomach. I’m having problems with bathrooms and buses far to often these days.

Anyway, we made it back to the apartment, and I made it back to the bathroom just in time. We spent the evening unpacking and putting things away. Since this is a new apartment, I don’t know where most of our stuff goes anyway. After we picked up some stuff for our breakfast, I collapsed on the bed. I slept for three hours until 2 AM, then was off and on for the rest of the morning, Eventually I got up and made breakfast just to be out of bed.

No sleep for either of us today, as we both go back to work. I’m trying to stay awake at my first day of of class at my new school. All I can tell about this new school is that there is some sort of system at work that I am either too new or too sleepy to understand. There are tons of Korean teachers, tons of classes, and tons of different schedules and papers to fill out for each class. I taught a morning class that was full of bored middle school kids. All they did was "repeat after me" style exercises for two hours. This is after two hours of classes with a Korean teacher. I have three more classes today, and I know just enough to get me through a day. It seems "lots of homework" is the standard.