[The Intense Summer] SEOUL/HONG KONG DAY 1 (Part 1)

7/1/2014

This flight was probably the most intense international flights I've ever been on.

We left the house early in the morning, had lunch at the Vancouver airport, headed off to Incheon on a 10-/11-hour flight, waited a few hours for our transfer flight (whilst doing some speed shopping), and finally landed in Hong Kong around 4 AM PST / 4 PM HKT.
Since the airport is still quite a distance from our hotel, I didn't really get a chance to sleep until 3 AM HKT after settling. Geez, what a day!

And so here come the photos!

In contrast to Toronto Pearson, the Vancouver airport never fails to amaze with the number of culinary selections available both inside and outside the security check area. Upon my uncle's recommendation, we had lunch at a Japanese/Chinese restaurant called "Hanami", which, by far, scored the lowest in customer service rankings in my books. The (extremely oily) food was slow and the waitresses were extremely rude and unwelcoming; I would definitely choose an alternative next time I travel internationally.

For some reason, the security check was a complete mess: the security guards had the biggest issues ever and decided to make the process extremely slow by nitpicking at every little thing, making the already lengthy line grow ever so steadily. No one pushed their baskets through the scanner either, since the guards were still taking their sweet time interrogating people even after they passed through the electronic scanner and your belongings would end up coming out much faster than you would be.
Overall, it was just a huge display of inefficiency from the staff at the international section of the Vancouver airport.

I expected the duty-free area to be more heavily decorated with red- and white-themed items as it was Canada Day, however I was disappointed to see that Vancouver lacked quite heavily in patriotism. The only displays were some Canadian flags hung inside a large gift shop as well as this window display.

This little guy wasn't part of the display, but seriously, how adorable is a sock moose?! XD

In general, the duty-free shopping area basically looked like this:

The Maple Leaf Lounge was serving lunch at the time, and though the food was exactly the same as the Domestic lounge, the vibrance (food display) as well as friendliness of the lounge staff was lacking considerably. The only person was the slightest bit welcoming was the man at the service desk upon first entering the lounge. (And though this is not the staff's fault, the Wi-Fi connection also proved to be much slower than its domestic counterpart.)

Our flight actually happened to be delayed, so we had some time to walk around the gift shops around the gate.