Korea/Cambodia

Kristina, Peggy, and myself left LAX when it was dark and arrived in Korea when it was dark. I am utterly tired. It is now… who knows what time… Korea is about a 17 hour difference. The flight was LONG, 13.5 hours to be exact. It felt like forever and a year! But us three ladies got through it, and of course had some fun too!
The flight surprisingly had good food! My neck hurt for sure after sleeping a majority of the flight. I was thankful Kristina was a masseuse specifically at this moment in life. As soon as we got off the flight we freshened up in the bathroom, which was way sweet and modern—just as the airport. Then we all headed out to tour the city of Seoul during our 12 hour layover in Korea. We took a bus tour which included numerous stops to visit along the way:

This is one of their largest modern museums in the country.
The War Memorial of Korea Below

(Kris and I got married in a traditional Korean Wedding Hall)
For the most part Seoul is a pretty westernized city with many similarities to downtown LA in some ways. This particular day was around 40-50 degrees , Kristina and I kept warm with these amazing heat packs Peggy got and lots of layers. Many people rode motorcycles to get around the busy city.It was interesting to see completely commercialized areas from the street, but just beyond the façade of tall buildings were hill sides of poor villages. After a couple stops we proceeded back to the airport. Apparently when we bought our bus tickets at the airport we misunderstood. We thought our tickets were round trip—not the case when we showed the bus driver our tickets. We had waited 25 minutes in the cold to discover this unfortunately. Luckily there was a bank right by the bus stop to exchange our money for Won, because at this point in our trip we payed for everything with USD or by credit card. Though we didn’t spend too much time in Korea we got a good feel for it. We’ll be back for another layover on our way home. I took over 250 pictures today! I know…

Every flight I have to fill visa forms, and other paper work, I almost have my passport number memorized. Korea is my first official visa stamp, which leads me to my second – Cambodia. It was a short quick flight from Korea to Phnom Phen, Cambodia. We were all exhausted from our day trip and slept a majority of the 5.5 hour flight.
We arrived in Phnom Phen (Cambodia’s largest city since the 1800’s) around 10PM their time, and met our guide Kousal. He was very nice, spoke English, and was quite knowledgeable about Cambodia. It took us about 20 minutes from the airport to our hotel during which Kousal explained some history of Cambodia, which he was very proud of... The streets were quite different from anything I have ever observed. Obviously extremely poor in some areas. Most everyone rode some sort of a motorcycle to get around, or trucks with free standing people in the bed. I thought there were a lot of motorcycles in Korea, Cambodia was no comparison! insert pic> The population is just around 2 million people—very small. Kousal says most people don’t drive or go out after 10pm. That seemed to be the case as I looked around at the desolated half standing buildings and various fruit stands scattered about. The towns were dark and eerie. I wouldn’t say I didn’t feel safe (don’t worry mom) but I was definitely uneasy about being in Cambodia for too long. Our hotel was quite nice. I didn’t feel any more comfortable once the news revealed Bhutto was assassinated earlier that day. I was just getting paranoid. Regardless, we were all SO glad to finally take a shower and not have to catch our sleep on a plane! Peggy and Kris are OUT! Which I should be too… our flight to Thailand tomorrow is an early one, but thank goodness the flight is only about an hour!