Chris woke up Monday morning at 4:15am. I had the luxury of sleeping in until 4:30. The flight leaving Chicago was at 12:15pm, but when we made our reservations in late winter to adjust for a gymnastics meet, all from flights from Columbus to Chicago at a reasonable hour were all sold out. This left us with a very early flight and a four hour layover in O’Hare.
The American Airlines agent in Columbus decided to mis-tag our luggage for baggage claim in Incheon. Too bad our final destination is Ho Chi Minh City some 2000 miles away. The Korean Airlines agent in Chicago printed new luggage tags with the proper destination and we hope they found there way onto our four bags before they left the states. If not, we’ll be wearing these clothes for a third day.
The Korean Air flight attendants have uniforms straight out of the fifties. Satin and polyester blouses. Hair in a bun and ribbon. High heels. Starched scarves and collars. Their business class, which we aren’t riding, is called “Morning Calm Club.” In coach, I dined on Seaweed Soup and Bibimbap. The few Caucasians on the flight we given assembly instructions on how to mix the dish from the neatly partitioned ingredients on the plate. It came with Gochujang (Korean Hot Pepper Paste) that came in a little toothpaste-like squeeze container. The flight attendant warned me not use very much. I ignored her advice. The Kimchee was spicier. Chris had the “beef,” a typical Western airline dish. Marissa had the Bibimbap, because she avoids meat unless it is in McNugget form.
Marissa is enjoying the novelty of the seat-back LCD screens. I watched Rachel Getting Married and went the other direction with Happy-Go-Lucky. Don’t know if there could be two anymore different movies.
We are currently in the Seoul/Incheon airport hoping our bags are being transferred for us to the next stop. Not willing to exit the security area and check baggage claim.
I have been awake, officially for 24 hours and one minute. Six to go. (Hours, that is)
One by one, we are crossing off items for our trip to Vietnam.
We now have an English translation of the last letter from Marissa’s birthmother and we are in the process of having our letter back to her, announcing our travel plans, translated into Vietnamese. We don’t know yet where Marissa’s brother lives, so hopefully we can adjust our plans.
We’ve made airline reservations for the flights over and back. We are travelling through Chicago and Seoul and it’ll be about a day in travel time each way.
We will be applying for visas to enter Vietnam this week, but we first had to have passport pictures taken for the application. Rather than pay $15 each for a couple of polaroids, I took pictures against a off-white wall and did the photoshop thing. This (obviously a higher-res version), printed on 4″x6″ will yield six 5-cent 2″x2″ visa photos.
Chris took two pictures of me because she said I looked like a terrorist in the first one. I should have photoshopped a haircut for myself. At least I cropped out the numbers she had me hold up to my chest when the picture was taken. :-)
In the first letter she sent to us, Marissa’s birthmother let us know that she had another child, Ri, fifteen years older than our daughter. For the first few years when he lived at home, he would read the letters we sent in Vietnamese and help her write letters back.
We learned a several years ago that he had moved from Danang to Hanoi and had since met a young woman. The last letter from August indicated that they were going to get married. And today we received another letter, which although we have yet to have translated into English, obviously contains many photographs of the ceremony.
Ri and his bride
We hope to meet Marissa’s brother and his wife in March.
Our Disneyworld trip in December was a “backup” vacation for us. We had planned to spend three weeks in Asia with girls visiting their birthplaces but it seemed, even as we were planning it, that perhaps not all of our girls were emotionally ready for the experience. So we made the switch to the happiest place on earth.
The girls had a good time, but we did realize that even just a week of constantly being on the go is a bit much. So we are splitting the 2009 trip to Asia in two. During Spring break we are taking Marissa, our almost 11-year-old, to Danang, Vietnam. The younger two are staying at home with grandma.
When we adopted Marissa a decade ago, we had no opportunity to meet her birth mother but since her address was on the paperwork, we wrote her when we got home. That is, after a year of mulling it over.
Marissa’s birth mother Hoi was grateful to hear from us. We were pleased too. With the help of a bilingual friend, we have exchanged a handful of letters and photos each year since. She was thrilled when we wrote to her last year telling her we were coming and she was disappointed to hear when we had to cancel.
So we are finalizing our itinerary and getting visas. This will be the first time Marissa will be out of the country since the age of 3 months. I don’t thing she’ll fit on the tray table this time.
It will be an experience for all three of us.