Seoul Incheon Airport

We are waiting in the Seoul Korea airport for the last leg of our trip to Beijing to start the 2012 China Heritage Tour. Incheon is a very modern, fast-paced airport that caters primarily to international travelers, I guess because there are not too many other major destination points in South Korea. The flight from Atlanta to Seoul was a fourteen-hour flight over Canada, Alaska and Russia, jogging far enough westward to avoid flying over North Korea. (Remember when North Korea shot down a passenger jet because they said they thought it was spying?) Like other Asian airlines with international flights, the service is incredible and more reminiscent of what it used to be like flying in America. The attendants actually appear to enjoy their jobs, volunteer to help the elderly and those with small children and they serve meals promptly without pushing alcoholic beverages. They did offer wine with dinner but that was the only time.

In the airport, it is more of the same. A woman using a scrubbing machine on the corridors stops to rub out a smudge her machine has missed. In the bathroom another man, whose name and picture are proudly displayed on a placard as if "owning" the place, wipes down finger prints from the handles almost before they finish flushing. The Asian people, coming from all over it appears, are beautiful, young, apparently affluent (from where I'm sitting I can see Tiffany and Co., Fendi and Dior), dressed mostly western and move place to place chatting happily with their companions. We have only seen a few families like ours, e.g. Caucasian parents with Asian children, but we've seen a wide variety of other mixtures, e.g. Caucasian wife with Asian husband and bi-racial kids. When we arrive in Beijing, we'll see many more like us as 450 people are signed up for the heritage tour, the largest one ever assembled for children adopted from China.

As we sit in the airport we are practicing the phrase in Mandarin, "We are followers of Jesus and God loves orphans" in response to the question we hope Chinese national television will ask us if we are chosen for an interview. We'll get back to you on that one.