Day 1, Thursday Evening.

After spending a good hour fabricating a fake ID for bronx (peter), and
packing for 3 days in under 10 mins, I arrived at the office to find that I
was the only one, besides wayne, that was on time. No problem, its only 8,
plenty of time to make a 9:45 flight in San Francisco. (the propsed meeting
time was 8pm)

8:15 - getting a little worried, bob and hank both went home to pack (in
berkeley) and neither are here yet.
8:30 - I call bob and ask him if he's interested in going to atlanta anytime
soon. He says he's outside the office, cool. Meanwhile wayne calls hank
who is "almost there".
8:50 - Hank arrives, we all pile in the car.
9:00 - John calls from the airport "where are you guys.... they are boarding
the plane" "uh...we'll be there in 15 mins"
9:10 - I call bronx, who is at the airport already waiting for us. A little
background info on the bronx situation:
  Basically another co-worker of ours, mikey was going to go to the concert,
but couldn't make it at the last minute. Thinking that the ticket and
flight would go to waste, I thought it would be a great idea to just make
someone an ID with mikey's name on it and they could use his tickets.
Basically from before, flying on southwest all the time, I was able to use
my UCLA student ID as a picture ID, so surely a simple gamers.com or
firingsquad id would get bronx on the plane.. Well, I made the ID, we all
made it to the airport on time, and when we get to the gate, the guy says
"you need a government issued ID... "uhhhh...." With "last call" going on
in the background and no amount of fast talking getting us anywhere, bronx
decides that he can pass on the trip. :( Although we'll still see bronx
next weekend at the LA concert, it still sucks that he couldn't go along to
atlanta. I promise many pictures from the concert, and we all go our
separate ways.
9:45 - we all board the flight and start the trip. Basically I spent the
first 15 mins thinking about how stupid I was for making bronx go through
all the trouble to getting to SFO and then him not being able to get on the
plane... a little background on this concert we're going to:
  Basically one day I saw on the FinKL forum that FinKL was going to play a
concert in Atlanta. After much research and calling around, I found it was
true, and despite the steep prices to get there, bob, wayne, hank, mikey,
john and myself decided it was worth it, since, "they don't come to the US
very often, we should go". (plus we had some inside info that we'd be
staying in the same hotel with them heh) Having an experienced kpop stalker
with us, we would surely be able to meet FinKL. 2 weeks later, after buying
all our tickets and such, we learned that FinKL would be playing a concert
in LA....yah. A week after that we learn that Ju Hyun and Jin won't be
attending the Atlanta concert, and that Lee Jyun Hyun and Hush will be going
instead. This basically sucks, one because FinKL isnt FinKL without all
the members, and two, because I don't care for LJH. Plus Jin is bob's
favorite FinKL member... Oh well, I order up the Hush cd and we all decide
to go anyway. (the hush cd showed up today at the office, mixed feelings on
how good it is so far.)

Day 3 The Return.

Well, I'm on the plane back to the bay area, one flight earlier than
planned. (we had to get out of atlanta)

Upon arriving in atlanta on friday, the plan was to rent our car, go get
some food, and go sleep at our hotel. Problem 1 - no rental reservation
Problem 2 - wayne forgot the nagging detail of "the name our our hotel"
After b.s.ing around and generally being pissed off for an hour as wayne
called for directions and john rented us a car, we went to go get our Ford
Taurus wagon. We then headed out to the hotel. The check in was
uneventful, and no finkl in sight. We passed out until around 6, got
directions to the concert from the front desk and headed out. Once we got
to the finkl concert, it was pretty clear we were in the right place, after
all this was the most asians we had seen all trip thus far. After handing
over our tickets, and getting some US census spam, we entered the
auditorium. There were a lot of seats. The staff meber seating us told us
to sit somewhere in "this" section in korean, so we had little to reply
with. We sat down somewhat close to the front, maybe 8th row or so on the
left of the stage, then before the show started, john and I snuck up a few
more rows into the "first class section". We were all set for the
"concert".

FinKL came out first, singing xxx (FinKL 2.5 - 2) sans Ju Hyun and Jin, as
rumored. There were also some backup dancers but as far as I could tell,
they were local. After "performing" the song hyolee and yuri talked to the
crowd for awhile, talked with the organizers for awhile (a common theme in
asian concerts it seems) Hyolee and yuri were wearing costumes from their
last concert, from earlier this year. It was pretty weird to see them in
person.

It was time for the next song, only Hyolee and Yuri went to the side of the
stage instead of the center, and Forever Love started playing. "cool" i
thought as the stage lights came on, but who came out to perform? 4 Junior
high school girls. "hmm...ok interesting, maybe they practiced and are
putting on a show for 1/2 of FinKL". The performance was not so strong, but
hey, we got to listen to FinKL music at full blast, thats a good
concelation, right? hmm.. FinKL then came out and talked with the junior
high schoolers and the concert people again. "To my price" starts playing,
and to our suprise, .5FinKL isn't performing, but 4 High schoolers. Ok,
this one was not so great. After the obligatory talking session, FinKL said
bye, and left the stage.

The next act was some local people (the temp backup dancers?) performed a
Lee Jyun Hyun song. I'm no big fan of LJH, so I didnt' really know what was
going on, but the rest of the audience apparently was having quite a good
time with this one. Then LJH came out, and the crowd went crazy, everyone
came up and rushed the stage, crowding around. At this point we all started
to wonder why everyone else wasn't as big of a FinKL fan as we were. Could
it be possible that we were the only people that flew cross country for this
concert? uh... Could it be possible that we were the only people that came
from more than 5 miles to see this concert? errr....

LJH performed two songs, then out came Song Dae Kwon. He sang a bunch of
songs, to his credit, live, and quite well. Although he sang music that
people 3 times our age must be crazy about, all we could do was sit and
watch/listen while he sang about 8 songs. Wayne asked one of the ushers if
FinKL was coming back out, she said yes. "cool, one more chance that this
could be a salvageable outting" Well FinKL came out again, but just to chat
some more, and basically that was it.

We left the concert with some pictures, and some vows, "to tell everyone who
asked, that this was an awesome concert, and a great idea." oh.

On the way back we got dinner at Dave & Busters, and earned ourselves 7 shot
glasses from plying games. We then headed back to the hotel with plans on
trying to fly out on saturday, a day early. Upon hearing that it would cost
us each 75 more bucks to fly out next day, we decided....
Day 3 cont

it was worth it. Yet when we called back to make the change, the flight
change fee went from 75 dollars to about 900 dollars per person.

The rest of the trip boiled down to plying a lot of cards, watching a lot of
TV, sleeping, and testing out atlanta's fine cuisine. We also got invited
to some asian frat dance, despite telling them we were "from out of town".
John also managed to get us pulled over for driving down the wrong side of
the street.

We flew out this morning on the first flight out of atlanta, and here i am,
awaiting my in flight meal, trying to make our trip sound somewhat
rewarding. At the very lest it was relaxing, and we got to "see" FinKL,
well, half of finkl anyway. Looks like my food is here, and the FinKL live
concert cd is almost done, so I go ahead and end it now.