We made it! And it’s not a journey we want to make again anytime soon. Everything went well, so no real complaints, but it was a very long day of travel. We had to be at the MTC at 4:30 a.m. to catch the shuttle to the airport, then waited for a couple of hours for our flight to Seattle. Another wait, then a flight to Seoul. The Koreans are very particular about how things are done. They want you to line up just so, checked the paperwork ever so carefully and were fairly regimented in all things. The airport there is very clean and they have the cool toilets! They didn’t really have many places to eat and what they did have was closed. By this time, we were getting pretty tired, and not really looking forward to another 4 hour flight. We slept a bit on the next flight and had a decent (Korean) meal on the plane. Eventually, we landed and waited around for a very long time to get our luggage. We were all pretty bleary eyed by this point. The tender mercy was that we didn’t even have to go through customs! We just got our bags and headed outside to wait for our driver. I was worried about carrying a year’s supply of meds and how they would react to that, but we didn’t even stop and get checked at all. Weird!! There were two vans who picked us up and Jairus, our manager, came along. So good of him, considering it’s past midnight by now! The luggage rode in one van and the people rode in another and off we went. It was nice and humid and very warm, but the van’s AC kept us insulated from it. We were dropped off at our hotel, which had a nice lobby….the room wasn’t quite as nice, but who cared! It was a bed!!! We had no trouble falling asleep that night, then got up early to go to church .

We are going to an Ex-pat congregation, so there are a lot of really interesting people from all over. We met a business man who is American and owns some call centers. His wife is Filipino and has been a model. We met another man who is from New Zealand and used to play Rugby, but now he is a producer of videos and does all kinds of interesting things. It should be enriching, but we won’t get to know very many locals in this ward. As you can see from the pictures, Quezon City is very crowded, with some nice buildings and a lot of poverty. A strange combination.