Friday, May 1, 2009

Recap and Reality

First of all, I feel so much more content after coming back to Korea. It was so nice to be able to get away and do something different. It was also especially nice to be away from our school and the kids for a few days. The trip was truly refreshing, and that's what a vacation is suppose to be, right?

Upon arriving back in Korea, we are right at our 3 months to go mark! I think we are going to go on and talk to the director of our school in the next week or so about how he wants us to go about booking our flights home. We're not exactly sure what day will be our last day of teaching because our contract was suppose to be from Aug 11-Aug 10. However, there are 10 "vacation days" in our contract that have not all been used up, and we were told that whatever we did not use would just allow us to finish up that much earlier. Everything will depend on what our director tells us about the specific dates, but we are thinking that we should be back in the states no later than August 11th!

I know you all are probably curious about our trip, and like I said before, it was great! We had a few minor hold ups. Before we ever left Korea, I tried to take a produce knife on the plane. I put my laptop bag through the scanner, and a man looked at me and said in his broken English, "Do you have a knife in your bag?" I laughed and said, "No." He then pointed to the computer screen, where there was a big knife in my bag. It still had not clicked in my mind that I had really brought a knife, tucked away in the bottom of my bag, to the airport. So, I said, "That's not my bag!" He then pointed to the red bag which had made it's way in front of me and says, "Isn't that your bag?" Immediately, I turned to Chris with a fearful look on my face, and he says, "What's wrong?" I go, "There's a knife in my bag, the one I take to school to cut apples with." I was so sure that they were gonna pull me in a room and interrogate me about why I would be trying to sneak a knife onto an airplane, but instead they just threw it away....thank goodness! We finally made it onto the plane, and the weather was suppose to be bad! We were prepared for a bumpy ride, but it started out just as smooth as any other plane ride. We had a little snack on the plane. It was kimchi gimbap. I don't particularly like this Korean dish, but I opted to eat it because I was really hungry. We didn't know how long it would take to get to our hotel once we got to Japan, and I didn't want to starve. Trust me, that would have been a much better option then what was to come...if only I had of known. After we ate, Chris took a little cat nap for about 20 minutes, and then we ran into some turbulence. The plane ride was almost over, but the last 15-20 minutes got kinda rough. It wasn't bad but just took your stomach away. I've been on worse rides before, but for some reason I started feeling really queasy. Chris had his barf bag out just waiting for me to throw up. However, I managed to get through it without a horribly embarrassing incident. We then navigated through the city and to our hotel, which ended up taking a couple of hours because the airport is an hour and a half train ride outside of the city. I had a horrible headache the entire time, but it wasn't until I got in the hotel room and laid down that I realized how bad it really was. Once I laid down, I could not get back up. I slept for a good 3 hours before moving, and then it started... I was running back and forth to the bathroom vomiting all night long. It was awful! I just knew that I was gonna be sick and ruin our entire trip. Chris managed to find me some really overpriced headache medicine, and I sipped on carbonated water (yuck...I hate all things carbonated). After about 8 hours, I was ready to go. I still didn't feel great, but I felt good enough to start our adventures! Good grief, I have the worst luck ever. I still don't know what caused the sudden illness, but we just assumed that I was food poisoned on the plane. Let's just say that Korean food on an airplane mixed with a little turbulence makes a deadly combination!!!


We managed to see a whole lot while we were in Tokyo, thanks to a lot of planning ahead. We started out by visiting Odaiba (the picture from the previous post). This was probably my favorite part of the trip because it was absolutely beautiful. Odaiba is a man made island that sits in Tokyo Bay. The views of the famous Rainbow Bridge were perfect, and the weather was great. We spent most of our first day just walking around and enjoying the scenery. There was a replica of the Statue of Liberty, a great beach with a public picnic area behind the beach and so many really neat Star Track looking buildings. The trip involved a lot of transport because we wanted to see as many different areas as possible. We tried to be creative in our travel to make the transport time as fun as the rest of it. We ended up traveling by plane, boat, bus, water bus, subway, train, rope way and cable car. WHEW... No wonder we were exhausted at the end of each day! One day, we traveled 2 hours outside of the city (via the famous Bullet Train/Romance Car) to the mountainous village town, Hakone. Hakone is where most people go to see the best views of Mt. Fuji. It was such a quaint and sweet area of Japan, and we enjoyed the nature outside of the city. I forget how much I miss the beauty of the color green, which I don't see much in Korea. We visited the Tokyo Tower one evening, which looks very similar to the Eiffel in Paris. We also went up in a few of the sky scrapper observatories to see the city from the sky. We tried to eat moderately during the day because it's extremely expensive to eat out, and you get very small portions. However, at night we splurged and ate some really nice meals. Chris and I both love food, and we especially love sushi. So, we were not going to let money keep us from eating well in Japan. One night we ate in a sky restaurant on the 59th floor of the Sunshine City Building. This place was beautiful! I tried to snap a couple of pictures, but I honestly felt like it was a little tacky to be the typical tourist snapping pictures in such a beautiful place. I guess some times you just have to savor and enjoy the moment and not worry about capturing the photograph. Chris often tells me this!!! Anyway, we did take a lot of pictures. I thought the easiest way to share them would be to combined them into a slide show. I will warn you, it is close to 11 minutes long(it says 13 minutes but it's not really), and there's music...So, you may want to wait to watch it if you are in a hurry!


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