Day 224: Airport Ordeals

Today was a great day at work - TEST DAY! All I have to do is give out the monthly tests to all my students and just sit and chill while they write them. It's easy as pie. And this morning in preschool we had a birthday party *and* the weekly sing-a-long! So that means that for all of today I only had 2 classes of actual teaching! Sweet! I'm sooooooo excited for my trip to Hong Kong and can't wait to go. Tomorrow morning I'll be on that plane bound for China (well, a Special Administrative Region of it) and I'm so thrilled!

I had packed my bags last night and brought my suitcase to work today. Tonight's plan was to leave right from work and take a bus out to Airport Island to meet up with Ailish. She's on the same flight as me to Hong Kong, and since the roads are expected to be absolutely clogged with holiday traffic tomorrow we thought it would be a good idea to get out to the airport the night before, get a room, and then that way we don't have to deal with all that transport crap on Saturday morning. This idea sounded wonderful in theory and on paper, but in reality it didn't turn out so rosy...

After having the ultimate feeling of JAIL-BREAK! after work tonight I grabbed my luggage and caught a cab to the bus stop. There I waited for my airport bus which came shortly and whisked me off to Incheon International Airport out on Airport Island. Ailish and I were meeting up at the terminal for around 9pm and would then go and find a place to stay for the night. I arrived at Incheon to find the airport looking like a ghost town. The terminal was practically abandoned - you could've shot a cannon through the immense glass and steel structure and not hit a soul. Rather eerie actually....

I got some BK dinner and waited for Ailish to arrive...and waited....and waited... 10pm came round and she still wasn't there. Hmmmm....what's up? I gave her a ring on her cell and she was running late - complications with busses and shit like that. But she was on her way! And so I waited....and waited...and waited... It was now 11pm and still no Ailish. I absolutely love airports but hanging out alone in an empty giant terminal by yourself for two hours gets real old real fast. She finally arrived just after 11pm and was very apologetic...once again the 'reliability' of Korean bus routes came through. Ugh.

I was soooo exhausted and just wanting to go to sleep... The cab driver that Ailish took to the airport informed her that there were NO HOTELS or anywhere to stay on Airport Island at all - fuck!! You mean we came all this way out here for nothing? There must be someplace we can stay! Most major airports in the world have a hotel either right attached to the airport or there's a cluster nearby... We looked around and found out there's a Transit Hotel in the airport. Thank God! We tried to get there but couldn't seem to find an open door...okay what's going on here? We were then told by a security guy that access to it doesn't open up til 1:30am... Okay considering this Transit Hotel advertises itself as 24 hours this all seems kinda strange... Whatever...

So all we could do was just camp out and kill time. We went and got some snacks, found a place to crash for a while, and sat and chatted and caught up. And talk a lot about how awesome this trip was going to be! *Finally* 1:30am came round and it was time to go and find this Transit Hotel. At this hour there were actually people milling about in the terminal (why now and not anyone at all earlier, god knows). So we tried to get access but were again denied access. WHY THE FUCK NOW!???

Turns out that we need a boarding pass to get in there, and that the gates/airline service desks don't open til 6am. Oh fuck! We were so mad!! We were totally given wrong information!! At this time I was completely exhausted and getting crankier by the second. Scotty really needed to find a place to sleep, and on a bench in the airport was not gonna cut it. We decided to go and try to find a cabbie anyways and just ask him to take us to the nearest minbok/yagwan (cheap motels) and pay for it no matter how far away it was. We just really, really needed a place to sleep...anywhere will do...

We found a cabbie and he actually informed us that he knew of some cheapish places to stay that were right on the island! Sweet! We asked how far this was and he told us only about 10 minutes or so. We then asked how much the ride was going to be and he told us he'd use the meter. Awesome - it'll be cheap! We hopped in the cab and sure enough in 10 minutes we were outside this motel located in the New Airport Town just down the highway from the terminal. Well we thought we were finally in the clear but alas the saga was not over yet....

The cabbie told us that the fare was 20,000 Won!!! NO WAY!!! For this price you can normally ride for over half an hour in the city on that rate. 20,000 Won for barely ten minutes? We were NOT going to pay for that! This guy was trying to rip us off! Ailish speaks a bit of Korean so she and the cabbie got into this screaming fight over the fare. He had promised to use the meter but then lied to us and just made up a fare on the spot. Well this went on for a few minutes until Ailish just threw 10,000 Won at him and we stormed out of the cab. He continued to yell at us as we walked into the hotel but I didn't give a shit at this point. I just wanted a bed!

We checked into the pricey 60,000 Won hotel (OUCH!) and crashed into bed. It was 2am and we had to get up in a mere five hours to head back to that airport. God, what a rough start to our trip! I sure hope that this isn't a sign of how the trip is going to go...