We had an easy flight to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk from Seoul. I had a window seat, so had a nice view of the Yellow Sea around the airport at Incheon and downtown Seoul (see photo)
View of Seoul from my window seat on the way to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Seoul has, to my eye, a remarkably high population density, with rows and rows of high-rise apartments on either side of the river flowing through the city. If you just stay at the hotel out by the airport, you don't gain an appreciation of how many people are really living there. That's part of why I'm looking forward to going into downtown on our return trip!
In any case, we had an easy flight across two time zones headed east. However, three pieces of our baggage did not arrive (one of Jody's personal bags, one of Ben's personal bags, and one bag of field gear).
Fortunately, we learned from Misty Nikula's experience in 2006 to not pack all of our eggs in one basket, as it were [I actually took a chance on this and got lucky, with only one large bag packed that made it through, if a bit roughed up]. We also learned from previous experience to have a detailed inventory of the contents of all of our checked bags. So we have a pretty good idea of what's missing. Hopefully the three missing bags (out of 22 total) will arrive on the next Asiana flight on Monday. But if the bags do not show up, we should have enough time to replace all the missing items.
Until then, we wait. We had about one hour of gear inventorying to do on Saturday at the Sakhalin Regional Museum, where our equipment was stored for the past year. We needed to check to make sure none of the tents had mildewed over the winter; make sure there were no mouse nests in our hip boots; and pull out the hand-held radios (for short-range communications) to charge the batteries (see photo).
One of the more mundane aspects of preparing for fieldwork is making sure that all of our radio batteries and fully charged and operational.
But now that that's done, we don't really have anything to work on. So we wait some more. Today (Sunday) is a "day off" of sorts. There will be a little bit of sight-seeing to do, like visiting the Bazaar or having pictures taken in front of the large statue of Vladimir Ilyaitch [son of Ilya] Lenin (see photo)
Erik Gjesfeld (UW Archaeology graduate student) takes a photo of Douglas Querl (UW undergraduate student) in front of Lenin’s statue, Lenin Square, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia.
But it's raining today, and looks like it might do the same most of the day. So we will probably mostly just sit around the apartment reading, journaling, and playing Blokus (imagine an interactive, competitive version of Tetris).
---Dr. E