Our trip began back in Pittsburgh with a full group dinner at Korea Gardens where we were introduced to a few of the common Korean dishes. It’s a good thing we had that first dinner because I was clueless on what anything was or even how to eat them correctly. What I learned very quickly was that Koreans love hot food, both in temperature and spice. If it has any red color, it’s probably spicy (take this with a grain of salt as I have a below average tolerance). My favorite item at our first dinner was the Bulgogi, a very delicious beef barbeque. Almost every dish was accompanied with plenty of vegetables, which I traditionally don’t enjoy back home, but I liked most of them at dinner! I believe if vegetables were served cooked more often in the states, I’d be okay with them.

The rest of that Friday night was spent in Nordenberg Hall on campus, where we were all dying to pass the time before the early-am departure. It was around 2am when I finally went to sleep, only to be up and out the door by 3:45am. Some other students just never slept, but I was not brave enough. Then it was just a simple bus ride, plane ride, Skylink train ride, plane ride, and bus ride before were were at the hotel. Due to time-zones and the length of the flight, we lost all of Saturday, as we left the morning of the 4th, but we landed mid afternoon on the 5th. As for the 14 hour flight from Dallas to Incheon, the one word to sum up my experiences is “mush.” My body felt like mush from sitting and sporadically sleeping for an entire day. My brain felt like mush after watching and forgetting 4 movies on the seat-back TV. And my sense of time was certainly mush, departing early Saturday to land halfway through Sunday. This is all technically the post for the 4th, so everything after this point you’ll have to read about in “tomorrow’s” post.