Having never left the safety of the North American continent, I had no idea what to expect from my first travels abroad. LAX was no big deal. It was just a really big, really crazy for 10pm airport that looked like any other. Incheon airport in Seoul, South Korea was a whole different ball game. The smells were different first off. I couldn’t identify what foods they were but I knew that at this early hour of the morning they were not what I wanted to eat. Secondly the whole airport was spotlessly white. While I was trying to sleep, a little woman came by and cleaned. I have never seen anyone clean at the airport before. Just when I thought I couldn’t handle all the different and strange smells, foods, and languages, I found my respite, a Starbucks. Nothing says comfort like an iced mocha in that familiar mermaid cup. Now I had the courage to explore and even perform my first currency exchange. I was very proud of myself.
Between learning about the history of the Korean peninsula and performing crafts at the several cultural stations in the airport, wandering through all the upscale stores, and using the free internet at the web station the hours flew by and before I knew it, it was time to board the plane to Nepal. If this is what international travel was going to be like, I was ready to go anywhere!
Then we landed in Nepal. I’m not a seasoned world traveler as I might have mentioned before. The one thing I’m used to though is small, regional airports. (Thank you AZO.) So, when they wheeled the stairs up to the side of the plane and we deplaned I was only slightly fazed. Here I am in a major city of a foreign country and it feels like I’m in southwest Michigan.
Oh, but it is not southwest Michigan. There are men walking around in combat gear and carrying automatic weapons. The airport is also completely without power. There are no announcements over the loudspeakers, there are no televisions playing CNN, in fact the only sounds are the tourists like me that are all now getting in line to get our visas. It is also very hot. For some reason I was thinking I was going to be cold the whole time we were here, but I’ve been in the country all of 15 minutes and I’m sweating profusely.
The visa line was long, but not too long. It gave me time to ponder what I would do if they rejected me, wonder why so many people didn’t have the required little photos, and listen to the tales of the other tourists who were there on some packaged adventure. Then I was standing in front of the mildly grumpy looking man demanding my passport and papers. I got a little apprehensive as he thumbed through my blank passport and intermittently looked at my picture and then me. Finally he pulled out this large, postage stamp looking thing and placed it in my now not completely empty passport and signed it. Yippee! Now on to customs.
I had been warned that this could be dicey. These people where going to dig through my all my bags, attempt to take things that weren’t theirs, and possibly require me to pay them to allow all my stuff in. I steeled myself as I approached the bag drop. The man at the kiosk looked up at me and my three very large bags, looked behind me, and then waved me through. I didn’t even have to stop walking. That was the most anticlimactic part of the whole trip.
As I went to head out of the airport the hilarity of my adventure struck me. I was getting ready to try and find a person that I had never met. In my mind there would be multiple blonde, American looking, early twenty-somethings standing outside the door and I was going to have to guess which one was Ashley. Yeah, about that. There was one American looking person standing outside the airport. Fortunately she was my American looking person.
Phew, I made it.
