And we're here!!!

• Stacimcg's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Incheon

Trip Start Oct 02, 2011 Previous
Entry Trip End Nov 03, 2011 Next
Entry

  Incheon, Korea Rep.
Sunday, October 2, 2011

After a very long and thankfully uneventful trip (flying boring, as my friend D calls it), we arrived in Suwon. Pretty much our only challenge was luggage. Challenge #1, my husband's flights were booked through his company. There were 2 flights on 2 different airlines. One flight from Austin to DFW, and the next flight from DFW to Incheon. I thought myself really clever that I managed to book myself on the same flights and at a slightly cheaper fare than his, however since I did this through the 2 separate airline's websites, it didn't occur to me that my checked luggage would not magically change planes at our layover and would have been left endless circling the baggage claim DFW while I went onto Suwon sans belongings (and since I'm a good bit larger than the average Korean, I doubt I would have had much lucky finding replacement clothes.) Luckily the work around was to check both bags under my husband's name, and I'll be forever thankful to the baggage attendant that chased the bag down the rabbit hole to put the correct sticker on it.

The second issue was both our bags were over the 50 lb weight limit. This was resolved by frantically trashing and moving around various items out of 1 suitcase and paying the additional fee on the other bag. There was a moment on our first flight when the pilot came on and apologized for the delay and explained there were having some issues with the weight distribution. Pretty sure that was us.
 
But in the end, we arrived safely and on time, and our bags were among the first to show up on the belt (with the  guilt inducing OSHA required "HEAVY" sticker). We managed to negotiate immigration, customs, currency exchange and bus transportation from Incheon to our hotel in Suwon, where when we unpacked we found that everything was still intact (except for the 3 jars of Texas preserves we had to leave at the Austin airport baggage check to meet the weight restriction).

The flight itself, while technically uneventful, was really interesting to me since it was my first overseas flight ever.There were novelties everywhere: my own personal movie screen (I'd recommend skipping Transformers 3, way too long, but X First Class wasn't bad), be served actual food (with wine, no less), the duty free shopping (it was like Korean Air had it's own Home Shopping Network) and the real time map of the plane's flight (my favorite). As neat as all these things were, 14+ hours is still extremely long and I was very happy when we finally landed. The Korean guy sitting next to me who knocked back at least 4 glasses of whiskey and 2 beers during the trip may have been onto something.

Incheon hotels Slideshow Share

Previous Entry Next Entry