Okay, so it has happened: I’m finally in Korea, inside my tiny Goshiwon room (explanation following soon), fighting against jetlag and that unbelievable level of humidity that makes it hard to breathe even though the air conditioner does its job properly. Another 8 hours and I can buy food for myself, too 🙂
A few words about my flight: five hundred and sixty Euros worth of excess baggage!
jk, I’ll tell you what happened.
Cathay Pacific stated that I was allowed 30kg and a total of two pieces of check-in baggage – an easy job for me to include relevant clothing, some books and my frisbee! As I learned yesterday the hard way, there are two policies concerning the maximum allowed baggage. One’s imposing a limit for each allowed piece (what I thought would be the case here), the other one imposes a combined limit for ALL pieces of check-in baggage. Result: 19 kilos and a suitcase could and should have been left home, in order to prevent that embarrasing process of reordering all my belongings next to the check-in counter. To be honest, I could have taken the small fee to pay for my slight overweight – around 30€ per kg, a total of around 560€. Sorry guys, but my frisbee and the book series of Game of Thrones is staying home as a result.
Some good news: the flights themselves were pretty okay, I was delighted by the fact that there was food served for me and the on-board entertainment system did help me through the boring part of the flight (the new Ghost in the Shell is an interesting film!). After two following hours of shuttle-bus-riding across the endless patch of civilization that is the Seoul metropolitan region, I was finally greeted by the owners of the room I’ll be staying in for at least the next three months. Friendly people those two!
I’m trying to sleep now.