The first challenge was finding the gate at the airport since the screen was flipping back and forth between English and Japanese faster than I could read through it. So I wandered around until I came to a Delta gate where there was activity, and asked one of the gate attendants to figure it out… no worries, it was the next gate over!

On the plane, I sat next to two Korean women who were in Japan to shop..they did not stop chatting and laughing in apparent glee as they paged through perfume catalogs the whole flight…even so, I managed to catch a little shut eye.

Once in Korea, I followed the crowd to customs and stood in line with the masses. The girl right behind me was a US college student who spent a year abroad in Daegu, which was awesome since she gave me the low-down on the best way to Daegu from the airport. Following her advice, I made my way to the bus transportation area and figured out how to buy a ticket for Daegu. I then spent the next harrowing minutes (the last bus left in 10 minutes) a little panicked, trying to figure out which of the 10 buses parked along the road was the one to Daegu…

I made it onto the bus and slept fitfully for the 3 hour journey. The bus driver made two quick stops, but I was not sure if I could get off or not, since nobody spoke English, so I just stayed on the bus, even as others ran into the store to get a beverage or a snack.  Keep in mind it was approximately 3:00 am for me…so I was not too swift for sure.

We arrived in Daegu and I retrieved my bag and hailed a cab. I had an address and a phone number, but the cabbie spent 5 minutes debating the location of the hotel with his pals, even though he had a GPS in his car. Eventually we depart and he literally drove around in circles, muttering in Korean (no english). He finally follows his GPS critically yelling at it (I think) and stopping to look at the address again and again, and eventually pulls up, and goes into an all night store to ask for directions. I am sitting in the cab, waiting, when I look and notice that we are parked right in front of the hotel! I guess what threw him was that the hotel had an English name (Motel Castle). We then try to figure out how much to pay him…”$10.00″ ..well I wasn’t sure of the exchange rate exactly, but we worked it out and I went into the hotel.

Once in my room, I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get the lights turned on…everything was remote-controlled and, of course, I can’t read Korean..but no matter what button I pressed, NOTHING (keep in mind it was about 4:00 in the morning for me, and I was operating on about 2 hours of fitful sleep)! In the end, I figured out that there was a fan in the room that worked, but all that really did was circulate boiling air around…even so, I collapsed in the humidity and woke around 7:00am.

I was finally able to get someone up to the room to show me how the buttons all worked. I learned that you needed to insert your key into a magic slot to allow things like the AC and lights to work. Who knew?

I was directed to a little Korean place for breakfast, Korean style…a beef and veg broth with kimchee on the side…as hungry as I was, I devoured it. I took a shower and now I am headed out to meet up with Mike, get my coaches credential and take in the day.