Air ticket madness

It was a zoo yesterday trying to get the plane tickets to Seoul's Incheon International Airport. Direct flights are all either pretty expensive or fully booked -- precisely on the date that I need to get there by. A day later or a day before is a huge difference -- lots of available seats and a $200 price difference. Go figure. (This is a chance for me to blame the school kids for messing everything up, so I will take that chance. Damn kids.)

One of the scenarios that came up was leaving over a week early and spending a week with relatives in Hong Kong before taking the short flight to Seoul from there. That would've been ideal, if not for the possibility that the South Korean customs officials might not let a Canadian in on a teaching visa after such a stay in Hong Kong. Too bad, because that would've been ideal (since I was planning to make a trip to Hong Kong at some point anyway).

Since it'd be quite a commute from Seoul to the orientation venue in the southwestern part of South Korea (a shuttle will be provided) and because of any possible travel delays, I really want to land in Seoul before the evening, which isn't really possible via direct flights. And from the prices of those direct flights, it doesn't seem like that would be a good way to go either.

We hatched plenty of scenarios (one of which had me going from Vancouver to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Singapore to Seoul), and finally found one that would work -- Vancouver to Shanghai to Seoul, for just under $600 on a smaller airline. That would be a lot better. The downside is that I'll arrive at night in Seoul and will do an overnighter, but I'd rather be early than late. I can always sleep on the plane and then take a nap at the airport terminal until the first shuttle to the orientation venue arrives in the morning.

However, now there's the issue of the visa. I was told that the head office in Seoul will send me some documents to take to the consulate in "two to four weeks." It's now past four weeks, and I haven't heard a peep yet. I zapped off an e-mail to my recruiter to see what's up, and they said that the last time they asked, the Seoul office didn't get my documents yet, and that they "should" have gotten them by now. I'm quite anxious about that, as you can expect, since it's now about a month to my departure from Canada.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.