Day 0: Go

We leave the house at 11:15, almost an hour after our original intended departure. Got about 4 hours of sleep last night. I don't know why it is, but it's always the same right before a trip. I inevitably always find enough things that just have to get done before we leave. Now, some of those do actually need to get done... like washing the dishes (unless we want mold having a party while we're gone), but maybe not something like... doing a final load of laundry or trying on some shoes we bought (that we don't intend to take on the trip with us).

Our flight was at 1:20, so we were fine. Security took the longest I've ever encountered -- not that the security line itself took a long time (I've been in much much longer ones) -- but the time from right before walking through the metal detector to when we walked away with our stuff. First, the detector. Oh, must be my memory stick in my pocket. Nope. Paper clip on my passport? Hmmm. But I don't have anything else in my pockets. Well, tissues and alcohol swabs. It turned out to be the alcohol swabs (why I was carrying those is another story). Apparently there's a thin film of aluminum or something sealing each one.

Our bags still weren't through the x-ray machine. Last bag, my bag, was being examined for quite a while. And by several people, too. Must have been at least six TSA peeps. Each person would stare at the scanner screen with a perplexed look on his/her face for a while. My empty water bottle? Or...?? Finally, my bag came out of the x-ray machine. K speculates it had nothing to do with my bag and that maybe their machine was broken or giving them unexpected strange behavior or something.

On our way... up in the sky a little past 5am the next day Korean time. United is supposed to feed us two lunches. Having previously flown on supposedly two of the better international airlines (Singapore Airlines and Virgin Atlantic), I knew not to keep my hopes up. Food wasn't nearly as awesome, but decent. And still free, for now.




Movies... only eight (instead of 80) to choose from. They ran semi-continuously on their own individual channels. (They would all start at the same time and wait for the longest one to finish before all re-starting again.) We watched "Hancock", which surprised us with a totally unexpected plot line. Very odd.

Nearing our destination...