Saying Good-bye

I was happy with my life in Fredericton (well, not completely seeing as thought I had graduated with a Masters in October and was only working part-time at Wal-Mart folding little girls' clothes and making sure no one broke baby food on the floor that I would have to clean up.).
But I had friends I could count on and independence.
So, when the time came near for me to leave I gripped on to Fredericton with a white knuckled grasp.
But it was okay because it was my father and brother who came to send me off.
My plane left at 5am so instead of getting little sleep I worked out it was better to have no sleep at all. My friend MHL came to keep me up, stuff my sheets and, a last minute decision that I can never regret, my stuffed animal Piglet into my overflowing Canadian hockey bag, only one of two huge pieces I brought with me.
By the time my father came to take me to the airport I was weary, tired and had been crying due to the last farewell. So, little were the higher facilities of my brain functioning at this time that when I had to take out weight from my bags I attempted to stuff the bottles of ice wine and maple syrup into my carry ons.
"Ummm..." my brother's deep voice intoned above me as he looked on. "Isn't there a restriction on liquids in carry-ons"
With a grey cloud hanging over my head and deep circles under my eyes I grumbled and re-arranged again.
My father is a good man and all but he deals very awkwardly with emotions. As I stood waiting to go through security with tears welling in my eyes, and bogged down by heavy carry-ons he said only "Well, have a good trip then", as though completely oblivious to my emotion, and I'm not discounting the idea that he actually was.
But this probably turned out to be the right thing. In the end there was nothing to cling to. Would it have been different if my mother was there? If she asked if I was okay would I have wept openly and turned back?
Well, probably not because the tickets had been very expensive and I was nothing if not cheap!
The first leg of the flight was from Fredericton to Toronto. I settled on to the plane, propped my winter jacket up as a pillow and was so exhausted I went to sleep even before the plane took off and didn't bat an eyelash again until the plane was taxiing the runway in Toronto.
At the Vancouver airport the only other person at my gate when I got there was a white girl. I approached her and asked by her clearly non-Korean appearance if she was an EPIK teacher. She said yes and she ended up becoming my roommate when we got to the dormitory in Eulgui University in Seongnam for our orientation.
As we departed the plane in Incheon International Airport in Korea we had to board a train to the main terminal for immigration clearance and our luggage. As we waited on mass for the train to arrive I looked up at the ceiling.
For a moment I thought I was going mad- but no I wasn't- there were five or six huge light tiles that ran across entire ceiling above the waiting area for the train. They were all different bright colors- pink, green, yellow, blue... reminded me of Easter- and they all started to pulsate and change different colors. Now, that's the kind of reception every jetlagged traveler wants...right?
Having seen a picture of Seoul at night, I knew this was only a small taste of what Korea had to offer in terms of eye catching light displays. And to think, one EPIK teacher's mother was afraid for a her child going to Korea because she thought it was a third world country - "Do they even have electricity over there?"