Guam, the run down

Okay, so Guam, cliff-notes style

Friday evening:
Matt and Andrew kindly covered my last 2 classes of the day so I could rush to Incheon to catch my 9:30 flight, it was delayed, but having that cushion time was about a million times better than missing the flight.

Everyone's excited:







We landed around 3:30am in Guam, which is an hour ahead of Seoul. We paid an overpriced fare for a taxi from the airport to the hotel ($20 for 1.5KM, really?) and then checked in, passed out for a few hours.



On Saturday, we woke up at 7:30 to go hike Tarzan Falls, which looks like this:




Unfortunately my camera went for a bit of a swim, but later on, miraculously recovered from the perils of near-death and is currently working. A strange combination of accidentally turning it on and off wet, then putting it in the freezer, then leaving it out to warm up (and who knows what other mystical gods were looking out for me) produced a normally-working camera! Huzzah! I wasn't ready to move onto camera #5 in this 10-month span, anyway.


We didn't have a rental yet, so we relied on the kindness of strangers to get around. One guy, Camden, is an officer in the Navy, who is stationed in Hawai'i, but keeps getting sent around to do training, so his wife and kids are in Hawai'i, but he was kind enough to drive us from the meeting spot to the hike spot and then we bought him dinner as a thank you at this awesome restaurant, Jeff's Pirate Cove.

Our hotel was beach-front, so we swam and played for the rest of that day.

Sunday, we met up with another person we met on the hike, Alex, who is former Army and now a student at the U of Guam. He took us around part of the island in our newly acquired rental car, and we went to Talafofo Falls park, which was a bit touristy, but it had a sort of exhibit of a Japanese WWII soldier who hid in a cave for 28 years because he was afraid he was going to get killed and thought the war was still going on.
The part I didn't understand was in all the photos and written things, they referred to him as a "Hero" and I don't really understand what's so heroic about hiding in a cave for 28 years because you're afraid of dying. Aren't the Japanese supposed to be big fans of suppuku?
I digress.

Then we went spelunkin!










Oh yeah, there are wild pigs.





We also drove around the island a bit and saw some great views like this:





I like to play with the color options on my camera. That one was Bill's idea.





Monday, we went to Denny's for a greasy diner breakfast ahhaha
I've never been so happy for hashbrowns and sunny side up eggs :)



Then we wandered around, met up with Alex again and went snorkeling!





This is where we went snorkeling







This is me made into a mermaid:








On Tuesday, we had to check out at noon, so we spent most of the day driving around the island seeing the spots we hadn't.













Ashley, at Two Lover's Point- She works at my school









Dave- works for the same company, but at a school about 15 minutes away in Jamsil.







Bill, jumping into a swimming hole








The ocean from the swimming hole








a pretty picture of Jess






A Memorial for fallen soldiers from Guam that were in the Vietnam War




View from the memorial





We left Guam around 3AM on Wednesday morning, arrived in Incheon at 7:43 made it through immigration and customs in less than 20 minutes, hopped on the slowest Airport Limo Bus EVER, sprinted from the Apgujeong stop to school and had 15 minutes to spare before classes started.
And our flight was 20 minutes early.
We would've been earlier if we hadn't had the world's slowest bus driver. Who goes under the speed limit when there's no traffic?


Things I liked about Guam:

1. It was warm!
2. There was clean air
3. People said, "Excuse me", "Thank you", "You're welcome", etc.
4. I didn't get stared at
5. The people were ridiculously friendly
6. did I mention the air was clean?
7. did I mention the people were friendly?
8. Not getting purposely bumped into
9. The good food and salads.
10. Good drivers



I think I left Cat alone too long though because he's been awfully needy and whiny the past few days.