I got home from work and relaxed a little. Our flight wasn't until 7pm and I didn't have to pick up Alyssa until around 4:30pm. She lives in Tampa and was flying there and back with me! Once my dad dropped us off at the airport, we were alone. It wasn't my first time flying by myself, but it was definitely the first time flying out of the U.S. and halfway across the world by myself. Honestly though? I wasn't in the least bit anxious! I was too excited to feel worried. The only thing I was nervous about was whether our first flight would be delayed or not as we only had a two hour layover in LAX and there was no transportation to take us to the international terminal. First stop: check-in. It went smoothly! We were flying American Airlines so there was a bunch of online check-in booths. It was my first time checking in without speaking to a person. Fast, easy and stress-free! Security went pretty smoothly as well and soon we were on our way to the gate. Upon checking-in, we saw that our flight was 20 minutes delayed. We didn't stress about it. Once we were at our gate and sitting down for a while though, we saw the time kept getting pushed back. Also, we had assumed that the thing we had printed at check-in was our boarding passes but realized right before boarding time that they didn't say boarding pass on them so Alyssa took our printed passes up to the counter and we exchanged them for our actual boarding passes. Because we were so late in doing so, we ended up getting the very last row of seats, right in front of the bathrooms and my chair wouldn't lean back at all. We were in for an uncomfortable journey! By the time our flight actually took off, we were running an hour late. We were extremely anxious the whole time as our next flight was international and it would be hard to get on another if we missed it. We had asked a flight attendant whether he could let us off first with other people on connecting flights but he was very reluctant with no real conviction about it. Thankfully, we were sat next to a very nice LA local who pulled up his map and showed us which terminal we were at and how to get to the Thomas Bradley International Airport. The flight itself was very uncomfortable. It was 5hrs to LAX and I was falling asleep. The leg room was a joke too. I'd never flown AA before. I saw some really cool cities lit up from the plane though. Maybe it's the civil engineer in me, but my favourite thing to do on a plane is look at the way the city is laid out and how everything connects. It's a different and unique experience between daytime and nighttime, both just as cool. Upon descending, the flight attendant made an announcement to allow those with connecting flights off first. As we were about to land, the pilot suddenly shifted gears and we were ascending again. It was quite scary, I've never seen that happen before! The guy next to us said he probably missed the landing and had to do that. We ended up getting a nice tour of downtown L.A. from up high as the plane circled around and came back. Our pilot finally made an announcement saying that there was actually another plane on the runway and that was why we had to take off again. Wow, that could have been really bad! I am thankful we had such a responsive pilot who reacted immediately and that we also had enough fuel as taxi lift off takes up the most fuel on a trip apparently. At the time, all we could do was get more anxious as the whole ordeal was delaying us another 15 minutes. Even though an announcement was made, once we actually started departing, they just let everyone off the plane at the same time and since we were all the way at the back, we were the last ones to depart. Of course! It was like everything was working against us at that moment. We booked it all the way to the international terminal, my calves were screaming at me! But we made it and had plenty of time to go to the bathroom in turns and freshen up. Thank goodness because our KoreanAir flight was right on time! But we made it, and we were on our way to KOREA!