August 26th-27th

Welcome back to everybody who still reads this.
I said I was going to stop this blog, but Pie Kok is the biggest nagging son of a bitch ever, so I'm gonna continue ;)
I started writing this at september 2nd, so I'm gonna write in past tense.

Today was the day I could finally return to Korea. So after having a great farewell party with my friends, which includes receiving a ninja costume (don't ask...) I set off to the airport of Schiphol Amsterdam. After some minor troubles at the Central Train Station in Antwerp I got on the Thalys and at 15.27 arrived 54 minutes later at Amsterdam, going through security... Or did I? I got inside before my luggage was even opened and before I had to undress before all the security with their white gloves, ready to do a full body search (Security guards can be scary >_<). Nah just kidding, but somehow I got in without having to go through any baggage search. I didn't mind and was too tired to actually care. Going to the local store to spend my last euros (on some nice Belgian truffels. Nomnomnom ^^), I finally met Ula again!! I had to miss her for over a year, but it ended there with a great hug ^^. Now you'd think you're going to be able to read a happy end story, but you couldn't be more wrong. After that all the troubles started.

After waiting 2 hours, we were getting our bags ready to board the plane, but as there was something wrong with the power-control-unit they wanted to fix it before getting the plane in the air... As I was in the Netherlands I didn't expect to get inside the plane the next few hours and I was right. They said us to wait for 2 more hours. 3 hours later, we were getting quite tired of not knowing what happened so we went up to the desk to ask for more information. Apparently by then the plane had already been cancelled, they just didn't tell everyone yet, since they hadn't prepared the hotel reservations I guess, but told us 3 to go to this information desk, since that's where they would send everyone else in a couple of minutes. We were quite 'happy', because if we had been stuck behind all the korean people at the airport, we would have been waiting for like midnight... When we got at the information desk, we got a number, so we could wait at the waiting room, so we wouldn't have to stand all the time, so that was nice. Except for the fact that the queue didn't really budge at all and that they actually didn't do anything to help us at the information desk, but tell us to go somewhere else, but by this time all the korean people had already gone past us, so in the end we did have to wait until midnight...

They prepared hotel reservations for everybody, rebooked the flight, free dinner, breakfast and lunch and free calling vouchers, so we could call whoever we wanted to let them know of the late arrival (We had 2x5 minutes per person). After getting to the hotel, we had to use 1 voucher to contact the airport to ask the details of the rebooked flight. Ow wait, they were for contacting family, or was it? Sigh. Apparently KLM was so nice to put me and ula and her friend Martinas on a different flight, mine being at 6.30 am and theirs at 18.20, so again a big mess. Luckily breakfast was served at 4am, so we could just get in time to eat something and arrive at the airport in time to start complaining about the flights. Arriving at the airport they at first told us there was nothing they could do since both flights were totally overbooked as it is. I was able to convince her to change flights in the end though. She put us all on the 8.20 flight to Paris, where we had to wait a couple of hours and transfer to a direct flight to Seoul.

Arriving in Seoul on August 28th at 8am-ish, after a successful flight, we contacted our unis. I got the message that I had to arrive on monday then, since I missed the bus (which was 2 days later) and Ula and Martinas had to wait for their pickup taxi. Which again made us wait more for hours and hours, since 1 of the passengers didn't show up. In the end I got lucky here, since I could just take his place in the taxi and get a free ride to Seoul. The taxi driver was really confused about me being there and even if we tried to explain in our best Korean, we gave up and excepted the free ride. Arriving there, they settled all their uni stuff, which went okay and I left my baggage with Martinas. So after a big sleepy sigh of relieve we went for something to eat, forgetting about our troubles with some nice Korean meal <3 ^^.