On the way home yesterday we stopped at the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville where Flight 93 had crashed. It’s really interesting to see how an event could change a town of 240 people in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing but some farms and a few houses where it crashed, and there’s a temporary memorial while a larger one is planned to be built. It’s just a chain link fence where you can attach things, and a lot of people showing up to check it out.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 11 highlights:
The flight home was no less of an adventure. United had us on an Air Canada flight through Vancouver, and the flight times changed to only leave us 55 minutes to go through customs where we had to pick up our bags and re-check them. We talked the guy at check-in into slapping some priority tags on our bags, and that was the only thing that saved us. The Air Canada flight was perfect – each set had a big touch screen with On Demand content, and a 110 outlet to plug things in as well as a USB power outlet. The only thing missing was a way to display your iPod on the screen, but I can live with that. The 10 hour flight went really quick.
Our first flight was delayed like 20 minutes, and we ended up only having about 40 minutes for customs and getting on a plane to take off. We got off the plane, ran to customs and the line was still pretty short. While we were in line, we saw our bags come up first on the belt. Once we got past the agent, we grabbed the bags, dumped them on the other belt, and got the friendly Canadians to let us in front of the security line. It was now 12:15 for a flight taking off at 12:30 and not looking good. Of course the gate was the furthest one from security, and we ran through the airport to get to it. Once we got there, the doors were closed and people were just sitting around. We thought we had missed the flight, and I knocked on the glass to get the agent’s attention, and he came out and told me the flight was delayed. 5 minutes later we were getting on with everyone else, though we were a little sweatier.
The next flight to Dulles was the inaugural direct flight, and it was empty. We made the most of empty rows, because there’s not going to be much of that anymore.
A quick layover in Dulles got us back to Philly. Our bags never made it on the second plane, but we didn’t care as long as we had made our flight. They showed up at our house the next night with no problems.
The only issue left for us was to be able to fall asleep and get back on US time. I didn’t fall alseep until almost 4:30am that night though, so going into work the next day hurt. Coming home on Thursday and just working one day before the weekend is the way to go.
(Roll over the images for descriptions, click on them to see them larger, hit play for a slideshow)
Day 10 highlights:
We had a mid-day flight back to Korea, so day 10 was wrap up for obsessive shopping. Ramon got the address for a semi-hidden Japan only Bape store, so we jumped in a cab to Harajuku and he picked up some shoes. I had to do a return trip to pick up a few more small things at Tokyu Hands, and the last step was getting it all into our bags for the flight back.
We made some pit stops at some other stores in Shinjuku, packed our bags, and waited for the bus.
I had been complaining I hadn’t gotten to eat at any sushi train places, and as my luck had it there was one in the Narita airport. There was no wasabi on my plate, but a tube of green powder so I started putting it in my soy sauce. It wasn’t spicy but it was tasty, and then the waitress saw me and said " No! No! Green tea!" Then she brought me some wasabi and it was all good.
We checked in at United and I tried to use my meager status to get at least one Economy Plus seat. We had the best gate agent, and she was clicking away on the keys and after a long wait in silence she said I don’t have Economy Plus for you because you are in business class. After telling Tara she could have the seat, a bunch more click clacking followed with "Good news – I have two business class seats for you and I’ve found some better seats for your friends." Shitya, what a great finisher to a great trip. We were actually bummed it was a 2.5 hour flight because it was so comfortable and Tara and I were both trying to ge through the end of season 1 of Heroes. We put back some glasses of champagne before takeoff and asked to send some to Ramon and Wendy. They wouldn’t send it to them, but they let them come up to hang out with us to drink which was cool. It’s a night and day difference of flying when you’re outside of the US…
We landed back in Korea and took the bus to Suwon, where Wendy’s mom was waiting with a great dinner, and her dad ready to drink. They invited two friends from the building to come practice their English. One of them was Hannah who was about 80 pounds, and she showed up half way into a bottle of scotch. Instead of sipping it, she started pounding shot after shot and turned bright red. Every now and then she would say things like "I love you. Sorry sorry sorry. I’m drunken." Once dinner was done, Wendy’s parent’s fired up their singing skills and turned it into karaoke night. Wendy’s dad barely speaks English, but he speaks it perfectly well when he’s singing it, check the video. It was the best way to finish our trip, they were such great people and so hospitable to us.
January 4, 2009 3:56 pm | 
