Thursday, June 5, 2014

Crazy Weekend in Korea: Backstory

The plan was to leave after work on Friday, spend a couple of nights in Korea doing sight-seeing, and then fly back Sunday afternoon... Things didn't go by the plan.

Here is our story!

So, we are in Japan on visitor's visas, which are only valid for 90 days. This means we need to leave Japan and re-enter the country to renew our visa. We also need to do this before Anna is too pregnant to fly on an airplane. Since I can't really take any time off of work, this means we need to make a short hop out and back during the weekend.

We picked this weekend (the 6th-8th of June) because Anna is only 34 weeks pregnant. She didn't want to go through the hassle of getting papers from her Japanese clinic. The US airlines let you fly up to 36 weeks without any special documents, so we figured (wrongly, as it turns out (it's 32 weeks for Asiana Airlines)) that it was the same here.

Korea is really convenient for two main reasons.
  1. It's nearby. Only 1.5 hour flight away. This is the closest country that we could find.
  2. It has a major airport. Incheon International is huge, brand new, and cheap to fly into and out of.
We considered taking the ferry, but it was too much hassle to figure out how it works, the ferry takes nearly all night to get there, and it arrives in a rather out-of-the-way location. We didn't want to figure out how to use the public transit system, and we wanted to be a bit closer to Seoul (though, in the end, we didn't end up getting to do any sight-seeing anyway!) so we chose the airplane.

The flights worked out in such a way that I was going to need to take a half day off of work to get to the airport on time. Then, a week before the flight, my work informed me that they wanted me to work on Saturday. I shot back that I needed to renew my visa, and other arrangements were made. This turned out to have some rather interesting consequences.

Anna bought the tickets a month or so ago. Then the day arrived, and we departed...
I've broken this story into four sections to make it easier to write and post. I'll be putting them up on the days on which they occurred, but it's being written a few days afterword. This might make the temporal tenses a bit confusing, but oh well.

On to The Trip Itself!

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