Sigh... It was time to go home. Unbelievably, my alarm didn't wake me up on ONLY this day, so instead of me waking Cindy up, as I usually did, she woke me up today. Less than an hour and some quick packing later, we were ready and waiting outside for our van to pick us up. It ran a little late, but surely it arrived, with Pastor Batbold, Tulga, Tseegi, Nyambaa, Tuya, and Tuul to see us off. We all said good-bye and all that stuff, and we were so sad because they couldn't come with us to the airport since they had to work. But we had to part, and so the van left.

At the airport, we were joined by Saruul, Baigalaa, Tsengee, Bulgan, and Selenge. Bulgan gave us some scout scarfs. Using the leftover Polaroids, we took an immense number of photos for them to take home. Oh, it was so sad to leave them as we passed through the door to the gates, but we waved to them for a long time before we were too far to see them anymore.

The Miat flight back to Korea was uneventful. Leon, who sat next to me, and I took some pictures of the landscape from the window and looked at the other photos he had taken with his digital camera. When the plane landed, it was sudden, because one moment I looked out the window and saw sky, and the next moment the plane hit the runway. Strange. Was I just too sleepy?

The six hours in the Incheon Airport were not wasted. Leedah, Gloria, Helen, and I went around shopping, and I bought a genuine Swiss Army Knife (a real, original Tinker). We said good-bye to Jean as she took a flight home separately, we ate some food at the restaurants, and we had our traditional team appreciation event. We didn't finish, however, because we had to board our flight home.

It was a long flight, but luckily I got to sit next to Helen again, who was a lot of fun. On the other side sat Jonny, who was a lot of fun too but was also a nut. In addition, I occasionaly had to squish next to Gloria, who wedged herself between Jonny and me because Tony HAD to take her seat in the middle aisle while we watched two disturbingly awful movies. Actually, we started to watch "Thirteen Days" (which I did want to see) but the sound was all crackly, so they switched the movie to "Someone Like You," but the sound was crackly there too. Finally they discovered the problem and the sound was fixed, but we were stuck with "Someone Like You," which was one of the absolute worst movies I had ever seen, and it was made worse because my seat moved back and forth by itself and the armrest went straight into my back the whole time.

The next movie was "The Emperor's New Groove," which I had seen and disliked. At least this time I was sitting in a different spot and the seat was better, but Helen and I almost slept through a lot of it because we had seen it already. Tony, Gloria, Jonny, and Leedah, however, had a ball at all the hollow jokes and everything. I think everybody else was dead in sleep; I barely heard a peep out of Leon, Vincent, Cindy, and Wayne since Korea. Oh well.

That's it. We made it home all right, and that was, well, that. Hopefully we'll see you all again next year!

Sigh...time to go. Here we are waiting for our van to arrive. That's me, Helen, Pastor Ricky, Jean, Charles, Gloria, and Leedah.

Noooo... We had to say goodbye. From the van we still talked, waved, and shook hands. This is Tuul, Tuya, and Tseegi.

Here Pastors Batbold and Rachel discuss some things together. I wish we had spent more time with Batbold; he was so busy this week with all the conferences and meetings.

This is just a neat picture of the outside of the Ulaanbaatar Airport. You may have noticed that I'm trying to do the Kubrick parallel lines thing.

We are at the airport, checking in our stuff, taking massive Polaroids, and saying last goodbyes. Waaaah!

This is me, Bulgan, Selenge, and Helen. You can see that I'm wearing the scout neckerchief that they got for me. Did you know that Selenge is studying Mandarin?

A picture of Baigalaa, me, and Saruul. I didn't think it was fair that they were getting all these Polaroids, so I got a picture here for myself.

I took this photo of Pastor Batbold, Jean, and Tsengee right after we had our final prayer together. Batbold prayed eloquently in Mongolian. I love that guy.

This is just a boring aerial photo of some rivers on the land. Nothing special.

And since that last photo was so awesome, here's another one to amaze you. Wow.

If that darn airplane window wasn't in the way you could have a much better view of Ulaanbaatar from the air. Now you can barely see it.

Doh! If you saw this in real life, it would have been really cool, but it didn't come out well at all. It was a cloud formation that cast neat shadows on the ground.

Okay here you can pretty much see nothing. It looked like patches of blood on the surface, but the picture is way overexposed. Why are you looking at these?

Aggrgrg...turbulence. This is Jonny being culturally sensitive by wearing a commonly worn hat to blend in with the locals. Jonny was such a nut on the planes.

All right, here's an aerial photo worth looking at. It's a picture of the many mountains of Mongolia, with shadows from the clouds. How pretty (here I go again).

Back at the Incheon Airport, we found a directory with an interesting assortment of destinations. For some reason you don't always see some of these things in airports.

Check it out! An Asiana Airline stewardess gave me a free ticket! She's smiling on the outside, but I could tell she was kind of stiff and rigid about it on the inside.

Waiting for our 6-hour layover to end, we all found productive ways to use our time.

This is a group photo that someone in the airport took for us, just before Jean left to Canada, and then Seattle.

I like this picture of our group strongly outlined against the big windows. As you can see, more Kubrick-ishness.

Look at those three sleeping: Leedah, Leon, and Vincent. Are they sleeping, or did somebody poison their drinks?

And here we have the gang of ten back at SFO: Tony, Vincent, me, Wayne, Leedah, Gloria, Cindy, Helen, Leon, and Jonny. We're back!

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