Seoul

We arrived in Seoul, South Korea safe and sound today. My flight landed around noon and I said a temporary goodbye to my colleagues to wait for Matt and Dean. Their flight arrived at 2:00 and I met them as they came through customs. Dean was as cute as he could be when he saw me and said "mamma" out loud. He's very much into calling Matt "daddy" as well, and no matter how many times I hear either name it melts my heart.

We caught a bus from the airport to the Westin hotel in downtown Seoul, which took about an hour. The bus was clean and inexpensive at around $14 per person. We were able to check into the hotel from the airport, so once we arrived we could go straight to our room.

Seoul is an hour ahead of Shenzhen, and the afternoon seemed to slip away from us quickly. Fortunately I didn't have any work mtgs (it is Sunday after all). We wanted to find a traditional Korean restaurant for dinner, but we settled on eating at a Tony Romas next door to the hotel instead since it was so convenient. Funny, this is my first time eating at one of these. A sign and picture outside the door showed Tony and his original restaurant in Miami, FL. The food was awesome. Matt had ribs and I ate a cheeseburger. Both were cooked just right to please our western palettes.

The weather is pretty cool here and we didn't want Dean outside for long. In fact, Matt called me in a panic this morning because Dean woke up in the middle of the night Saturday running a temperature as high as 103. It was better in the morning, under 100, but we went back and forth regarding whether or not he should travel. I have no idea whether health care is better in Korea or China, but thankfully we have good global insurance coverage in both (ironically, the one place in the world where we are considered uninsured is USA). Matt decided to bring him on the trip since he seemed fine this morning, but he's going to look into taking him to an urgent care clinic in the morning just to make sure there isn't anything going on that we can't see, like an ear infection.

Time to try to get the little guy in bed and sound asleep so Matt and I can get some rest tonight. It's 8:30 and he's giggling and rolling around on the bed in our hotel room. If he were a little older I might teach him something bad by encouraging him to jump on the bed. It's so fun in fluffy hotel beds!