I've got Seoul...

So, I'm in Seoul. I ended up in Seoul for 11 hours because that is the layover I got when I bought my ticket from LAX to Bangkok lo these many months ago. You'd think with the amount of pre-planning and researching I do, actually for a job as well as just for myself, I might have noticed that Seoul gets winter. Like, actual winter. With cold. A 63 year old museum docent pointed out that it was minus ten Celsius today. I don't have any cold weather gear. It's freaking summer where I'm going! Oops.

These are emergency gas masks behind glass in the subway station.

I wandered around Seoul for a few hours, trying desperately to find things to do that were inside and heated. I went to the Korean War Museum, which was impressive, particularly when the above docent told me about his life, which was amazing. I went to the Korean National Museum, which was mostly boring paintings and Stone Age artifacts, which are very interesting to archaeologists and basically nobody else. And I spent a lot of time on the subway. It started out pretty enjoyable, but I've gotten more and more tired as the cold seeped into my bones, so now I'm content to sit here on the comfortable reclining rest chair in Incheon, waiting for my flight.

I'm going to go get some hot water in a minute, and make some pre-packaged udon soup that I brought all the way from Trader Joe's. Other than that, how do I feel about embarking on the biggest gosh darn trip I've embarked on so far? Do I miss my friends? Do I miss Justin? What are my plans? It's all murkily obscured behind COLD and SLEEP and COLD and HUNGRY and COLD. There's apprehension and so forth, but mostly I'm just reduced to grunting and pointing.

Jet lag, thy name is rapid time zone shift.

Stylish bathroom stalls in Seoul Incheon Airport