I’ve lost all sense of time, but earlier “today” we left Michigan and moved to South Korea. Our trip was largely successful (thanks to our superior travel skills and a bit of luck); we’re both here and alive, and our nearly 300 pounds of luggage found its way over, too!

“This morning” I called Northwest to double-check on luggage allowances and it was a good thing I did; Our already-packed bags (two bags of which were a hair over 70 lbs) would have cost us nearly $800 in excess fees! Luckily, we figured out a way to game the system by breaking everything down into four 50-pound checked bags, two generously sized carry-ons, and 2 very large “small” personal items. Yeah, today we were those people you hate with the gagillion bags taking up all the overhead bin space and generally begin annoying. But, the upshot was that we didn’t have to pay a dime in luggage fees, which on top of our employer-provided airfare and hotel stay, made it a pretty cost-effective travel day.

The flight to Tokyo was long and somewhate uncomfortable (we were still flying Coach, after all), but the plane was underbooked so we were able to grab an empty row for ourselves to satisfy both my aisle-loving style and Katie’s affinity for the views provided by a window seat. Needless to say, I usually lose the argument and end up in a middle seat, so having a whole row was nice (full disclosure: it was a shortened row with only two seats).

The airport outside Tokyo will have to stand as our only Japanese experience thus far, and it was pretty standard except for the toilets, which came fully-equipped with a large array of buttons, one of which just played the sound of a flusing toilet without flusing the toilet.

Our plane from Tokyo to Incheon-Seoul was fancy with the seat-back TV screens and everything, but sadly the flight was too short to watch any movies (although I was able to catch a few bits of “Kung Fu Panda” between winks on the first flight). The Incheon airport is very new, very nice, and very large. And when we arrived (around 9:45 pm), very empty. One minor hitch we encountered was not begin able to find our driver, who was supposed to be picking us up just after we got out of Customs. After spending about 30 minutes trying to obtain the correct coinage and fussing with the payphones, it was revealed that we weren’t expected until the following day. To her credit, our Korean recruiter acted very swiftly in arranging a driver to pick us up immediately and a nice room at a guest house nearby. All at no cost to us, of course.

So, here I am sitting on our stiff-as-a-board bed borrowing somebody’s internet connection at our guest house in South Korea. It’s pretty wild that we’re actually here and it’s all really happening; we had been anticipating this for quite some time, and now that we have arrived, it’s a bit surreal. I haven’t really had any sleep for a few days now, so I’m going to do that now. We have a driver coming tomorrow to take us to our apartment (which is ready for move-in, so I’m told) and to the school to finally meet our employer. It looks like tomorrow might be even more exciting than “today” was.