Travelling back to the US was a marathon. It started with the fact that we couldn’t fly home from Busan, we needed to leave out of the airport in Seoul. So we woke up at 6 AM and started with a 5 hour drive to Seoul. That being said, the drive was nice, mostly because the Korean countryside is really beautiful. After the flight, we had a bit of a break in the Seoul airport.
Jordan, Jeff, Maria and I actually had a weird encounter in the airport. We spotted an empty Gucci paper bag sitting on top (but not inside) of a trash can. We joked briefly about taking it to bring home and pass off a knockoff as a real Gucci bag. After joking about it for a bit, we sat down to keep chatting. After about 10 minutes, a really angry American man came by to yell at us for being too lazy to put our trash inside the trash can. We tried to explain that the bag was never actually ours, but he was having none of it, and stalked away. It was definitely something.
We then embarked on our 14 hour flight to Dallas, which was grueling. Luckily I slept through most of it, and was only awake to watch La La Land and Deadpool (two movies I had been meaning to watch for a while).
The Dallas airport was the real issue. We wound up delayed for 10 hours in Dallas. Our flight was at 7pm, but we only left the airport at 5am. Perhaps fortunately, I was still mostly on Korean time, so I wound up wandering the airport till the early hours of the morning, feeling mostly like it was the afternoon. I rode the Skylink around the airport, talked with a guy who was just on vacation in Central America, and ate peanut M&Ms. At this point, I’d still not had a lot of sleep, but I still wasn’t quite tired, so the adventures in Dallas continued, only a little sleep deprived.
Finally we caught a flight to Philly (we got into a plane off the waitlist, thank goodness). When I got home, I tried to stay up but ended up falling asleep at 2pm and sleeping until the next day. It was incredibly satisfying, and a fitting end to two weeks of intense traveling, learning, and fun.