Day 12 is Monday, June 4. It is our last morning in Korea. Mistie and I woke up around 6:45 a.m. and got ready. Around 8 a.m., we walked to Dunkin Donuts with my mom and Gina for breakfast. I had a couple of munchkins, 1/2 a bagel sandwich and got another iced caramel latte. My mom told me she slept great all night.
Dunkin Donuts had some cute donuts. The donuts below in pink box were smaller than the size of your palm. If I thought I would get those back without getting smashed, I would have purchased them. My kids would have loved donuts from Korea.
It was nice to eat somewhere familiar for our last breakfast. No rice.
We did not have to check out of our hotel until 12 p.m. so we walked around for a while. We decided to go to Lotte Mart. My mom hadn't been yet. I purchased some pink rain boots with frogs for my daughter. I think everyone purchased a couple of small things. We were trying to get rid of our wons.
This is a pharmacy. It was nothing like CVS or Walgreens. I wanted to go into it, but I didn't have my coupon book with me. :)
Gunsan is the fifth largest city in Korea. I thought it would be much smaller. There were still a lot of tall buildings and large crosswalks. Not nearly as many people as there were in Seoul.
After shopping, we went back to our hotel to check out. While Mistie and I were in the lobby waiting and man said, "I just saw you at Lotte Mart!!!" He rode the shuttle with us to the airport.
When we got to the Seoul airport, we were on the hunt for the Harley Davidson shop. I don't think any of us had purchased much for our husbands. Mistie's husband and Gina's husband own street bikes, so we all wanted to get a Korea Harley Davidson shirt for our husbands. Gina finally found the shop. Their t-shirts were expensive, but we were all happy to finally have something besides toothpicks to give to our husbands.
We had to wait a while to check in. When it was time, there was some nervousness about the weight of our luggage (and when I saw "our" I mean Gina's luggage). It seemed to be twice her weight. Mistie's suitcase was fine. Gina checked her suitcase and found out it was 14 lbs. over the limit. She took some stuff out and put some in my mom's suitcase. She put the rest of her stuff into an extra backpack. My luggage and my mom's were under the weight requirement.
When I got up to the check-in counter, the nice United lady told me I would have to my passport stamped at the immigration office. She kept my boarding pass while I went to the immigration office to get it stamped. It was no problem, but just one more thing you have to do when you lose your passport. Wear it as a necklace when you travel people!!!
After we check-in, we had time to eat
lunch. There was a restaurant called Global Chow Buffet in the
airport. Hopefully everyone would find something they liked at the
buffet. I was fascinated by the napkins, so I took a picture of them. There's nothing really fascinating about them except they were so small. Everything was small. The bowls rice. The drinking glasses. We are used to Sonic Rt. 44 drinks in America. The glasses at Global Chow Buffet were juice size. Three drinks and you needed to refill your glass. The napkins were so small that you could probably only wipe your mouth twice before you'd need another one.
The buffet was amazing! They had many toppings for your steamed rice.
Several different types of salads.
Spring rolls - our favorite at our table.
Sushi. My mom was the only one who tried it. She will try anything. She said it was okay.
All the fixins for noodle soup. I thought it would taste like the kind of noodle soup we our first night in Gunsan. It didn't have as much flavor, but it was good.
One of my favorites, besides the spring rolls was the zucchini. It was cooked with a little bit of sesame oil. Delicious. I tried a new fruit too. When I had gone through the buffet, I had seen the fruit in a bowl. In the picture below, it's round reddish hairy looking thing at the top of my plate. I had wondered what it was, but was too much of chicken to pick it up. When my mom had gotten her sushi, she brought one back on her plate. She tried it first. It totally grossed me out just looking at it. She said it was citrus-y.
I thought, "Okay, it can't be that bad." I broke it open and juices spilled onto my plate. Gag. It looked like an eyeball. It felt like an eyeball. I almost couldn't do it just because of that.
I broke open the white "fruit" and there was a seed/pit inside. I ate the fruit and it wasn't bad. It tasted a lot like an orange. Our waitress told us the fruit was a rambutan. I have never seen anything like it in America.
We finished our lunch and shopped a little bit more in the airport. Not at the all the stores we saw though. Gina went into Tiffanys, but we didn't go into any of the others.
While we were shopping, a parade came through the airport. There were beautifully dressed men and women. I thought maybe it was a wedding. Leaving the airport the day before we saw many cars decorated with paper flowers. Daniel had told us for people who had just gotten married. We asked a worker what it was the parade was for. She told it was the King's Parade. They do it twice a day in the airport and we were very lucky to get to see it. Aren't they beautiful?
We got on our last subway to get to the our gate. I don't think Gina was too sad it was our last ride.
We went through security. When I put my backpack on the belt and walked through, they pulled my backpack to the side. A TSA lady opened the backpack, got my cosmetic travel bag out, and pulled out some small foldable scissors. She knew exactly what she was looking for. My mouth dropped open. I had forgotten to put them in my checked luggage. I had brought them to make the gift bags for all the students we were meeting. I had just put them in my travel bag without even thinking. They told me I wasn't allowed to have them on the plane and confiscated them. I know - it doesn't seem like a big deal. However, they weren't my scissors. They belong to the officer. He got them when he was 17 years old when he went to boot camp. He's kept them for that long. In fact, I'm not really even allowed to have them or use them. He's afraid I'll lose or break them. I couldn't believe I had gotten them taken away. I was actually a little more nervous to tell him I had lost then than to tell him about my passport.
We tried to spend the last of our wons. I kept a few wons as "souvenirs". Mistie had purchased a bottled water and Vitamin water for the plane ride. However, when we went though the line to board the plane there was a second baggage check. They took her drinks away. Not a big deal, it's not like it was a pair sentimental foldable scissors that are over 20 years old.
We were all very excited because we were sitting in row 49 just below the television screens. There was not a row in front of us so we had extra leg room. This made a huge difference in our comfort on the flight home. Plus, the flight home was only nine and a half hours long as opposed to the 12 hour flight to Korea.
Between all the movies and television shows, a screen would pop up that would tell us how far we had traveled, the temperature, how high we were, and how much further we had to go. It was pretty neat to see the progress. The dotted line depicted how far we had to go.
We watched Journey 2: Journey to Mystery Island, The Office, There's a Rhino in my House, This Means War, One for the Money, and Adele at the Prince Albert Hall.
At the beginning of the movies, Gina turned to me and told me she had a problem with her earphones. She couldn't hear the video. They weren't plugged in. I think my mom did that on the flight over. Maybe they are actually blood-related.
For lunch we had our choice of beef bulgogi or chicken and noodles. I choose the bulgogi. My mom actually got her choice this time.
This flight home is a piece of cake. I didn't sleep at all because I was trying to reset my internal clock. It's very strange to fly from Dallas, Texas to Seoul, Korea, traveling for 24 hours without it ever being nighttime. It did make it a little easier to not sleep on the flight home. We traveled over 4,900 miles on the way to San Francisco and arrived at 11 a.m. (Monday morning) California time.
When we arrived in San Francisco, my mom went to meet Angela, the other girl who was adopted the same time as Gina and me. Angela lives in San Francisco so my mom was excited to get to visit her. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 2 p.m. for Dallas. However, it had been raining all day in San Francisco and all the flights starting at 6:30 a.m. were delayed because of it. We were delayed two hours and left at 4 p.m. Those two hour seemed longer than the nine and half hours flight to San Francisco. I think the jet lag was already catching up to us.
Just before we were going to board the plane I called Andy. I told him we were rain delayed. He said, "Do you want me to tell you a surprise?" I said, "Is there a new motorcycle in the garage?!" He laughed and said, "There is a new motorcycle sitting in the garage!!!" I knew he had been looking but I didn't know he found one and had purchased it. As he laughed, I blurted out, "Oh well then this is perfect time to tell you I lost your army scissors!!!" He immediately groaned, "OHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! You should have folded them up!" "I did, and they still took them!", I replied. He was not mad at me, but it bothered him more that I lost his scissors than my passport.
Gina and my mom were in one row. Gina was by the window. Mistie and I were in the middle row. Gina was trying to get some sleep, but her window shade (which pulled downward) kept falling. She had to stuff paper into the shade to keep it from falling. It worked about 3/4 of the time.
We arrived in Dallas, Texas around 10 p.m. We were all exhausted!! Somehow, Mistie still look cute after all that traveling.
We piled all our junk into my mom's van and headed to Oklahoma. We dropped Gina off around 1:30 a.m. about 45 minutes from her house. Glenn and her two kids picked her up. My mom and Mistie dropped me off at 2:30 a.m. My mom took Mistie home and then made it home a little after 3 a.m.
When I got home, the officer woke up to helped me get all my stuff in. He told me the kids wanted to be woken up when I got home no matter the time. My son requested to be sprayed with water to help him get up. My daughter requested to be woken up with kisses. I obliged them both.
They woke up and I gave them their presents. My son opened his wooden samurai sword and loved it. My daughter loved her tae kwon do socks and rain boots. I told them a little bit about my trip and we had to make them go back to bed at 3:45 a.m. They were very excited I was home. The officer and I stayed up until 5 a.m. talking. It was good to be home. There's no place like home (even if the officer woke me up at 9 a.m. the next morning to run errands all morning with the family.)
I had to take a nap from 1-5:30 p.m. It took me at least a week and half to get over the jet lag. I had no trouble adjusting in Korea, but back home. I went to sleep every night and slept all night. I woke up pretty easily - well as easily as I ever did, but I had to take a nap every afternoon. I'm sure my mom had another great night sleep. :)
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