Well we’ve been in Cambodia for around 5 days, but we’ve been out of the U.S. for about 8 days. We had probably the longest layover ever in Chicago. It was 10 hours, but for 6 of those hours we were not allowed to check in or go through security, in other words it was 6 hours of sitting around not doing much of anything. Then we had a 15 hour flight to South Korea. The flight wasn’t bad, I got to watch X-Men Apocalypse which I’d never seen, so that was nice. Other than that I slept, that was nice too.
When we got to South Korea it was around 3am. We explored a little bit of the airport, it was pretty cool actually. A group of people went through security and later found out that they were not able to come back out into South Korea. The rest of us decided to spend part of our layover in Seoul. I went with 3 other people. We left the airport around 6:30am on a train towards the city. It took us about an hour to get there, but the train ride alone was worth it. It was early enough that we got to see the sunrise, and it was absolutely beautiful. When we actually got to Seoul we had a plan to go see the North Seoul Tower, but we were having trouble finding any maps that could help us get there. Despite that we set out in the general direction of the tower with high hopes. On our way we decided to stop and get some food. Where we ate was just a little hole in the wall place, but it was awesome. I got shrimp fried rice, and our meals came with a little dish of other stuff. What we think it was was crab, pickled radish, some kind of boiled egg, and cabbage in some sort of sauce. The fried rice was delicious, the eggs were pretty good, the crab was great, the pickled radish was edible, but the cabbage was right out. I did get to try one of my friend’s dumplings, and they were the best dumplings I’ve ever had. 10/10 recommend getting authentic Asian food.
Anyways, after that we continued walking in the general direction of the Tower, quickly realizing that despite seeing the top of it we had absolutely no idea how to actually get to it, so we stopped trying. Instead, we took some random turns and explored some of the back streets of Seoul, it was kind of sketchy, but really cool. We wound up walking through a market that wasn’t open yet, also really cool. After a little while we came to a street that was a little more touristy, so we stopped in a coffee shop to look up what was around us that we could go see. One of the girls with us saw that there was a Cat Cafe pretty close, so we started towards the subway. I was a little nervous to take a subway somewhere, after all we were in a city we’d never been in before, where we didn’t speak the language, and didn’t really know where we were at. Regardless we pressed on and eventually found out what stop we were at and where we needed to go and got on the subway. When we got off we tried to find the Cat Cafe with absolutely no luck, but we seemed to be in a pretty big shopping area that was pretty tourist friendly. While were getting even more lost we ran into another group and joined up with them. After asking a few locals where the cafe was we set off, once again. Eventually we found it, but it didn’t open until 12:00. After we found that out a little over half of the group wanted to head back to the airport. We only had to be back at the airport at 3:00 so some of us wanted to stay, we decided we would at least go to the Cat Cafe for a while for the girl who suggested it in the first place. So the rest of the group headed back and we walked around the area for about 30 minutes until the cafe opened. The cafe was actually pretty cool. It was just a small coffee shop with a ton of cats running around, just like the name suggested. We stayed for about 45 minutes and then headed back because we weren’t positive about how to get back to the train that would take us to the airport. Eventually we got back and went through security. It was nice because they had an area for us to take showers for free, so of course we did that.
A quick sum up of what happened between then and getting into the city of Phnom Penh. We showered, ate, walked to our gate, walked around, got candy, went back to the gate, hung out, got water, hung out, stretched, got on our flight, flew, got to Cambodia, “We’re in Cambodia!,” got our visas, got our bags, boom we are officially in our first World Race country of Cambodia. It was night when we got there, but we were lucky to be one of the teams staying in Phnom Penh, so our host was there to pick us up. The other teams stayed in a hostel for the night. Anyways, that’s all I got in me to write for now, so hopefully in the next few days I’ll be able to pump out a blog post about everything so far.
If you are one of the amazing people who are praying for me while I’m on this trip then please pray for me to be real. It’s so easy to hide who I am and how I’m doing in order to fit in and keep the peace, but I’ll never grow and never be known that way. I’ll never feel truly loved and I’ll never be able to fully love if I’m not fully real and fully known, so please pray for me, thank you.
