"I pray to God for an affordable car"

Lately I've been growing increasingly cavalier about packing for domestic travel. When visiting my parents, I could always count on them to have an extra bar of soap; even the most podunk of Southern rural towns has a Wal-Mart to get forgotten items. So it was somewhat impressive that I should get everything packed up at the last minute on Sunday, given that I only discovered at 9 PM that I needed to bring a suit. I swear, next time I'll plan ahead.

The flight was amazing. From the moment you sit in the terminal and listen to the Singapore Airlines agents making uber-polite announcements, the United agents next door sound like heartless bastards. I had twelve hours of being pampered, and got kim chee fried rice on the plane. All of which makes American airlines even harder to go back to.

Getting off the plane we all shuffled into health inspection, everyone trying their hardest not to cough. H1N1 paranoia is high here; masked inspectors took everyone's temperatures (though calmly in the terminal, not in hazmat suits on the plane like that one YouTube video shows). I've already been given three pamphlets about the warning signs of the flu.

In the terminal at Incheon, I saw four car commercials, conveniently subtitled in English. Hyundai and Kia apparently own this place. The most amusing showed a series of scenes where people say things like, "I pray to God for a minivan I can afford", and of course the punchline, "Thanks to Hyundai, you don't have to pray any more!" Something about claiming your company is answering people's prayers seems just a little sacrilegious.

So far, my feeble attempts at speaking Korean seem to have gone unappreciated by the locals. Maybe the airport staff are just more jaded, but no one seems impressed by my impressive vocabulary of "hello" and "thank you". Fortunately the conference staff has had student volunteers to meet me at the airport and at the bus stop.

But now I'm here in Daejeon, in a nice hotel with a great view of the city, and I'm intent to go roam around for a day, armed only with a phrasebook and a collection of tourist maps. I hear there's a free "foot spa" down the street. Rock on.