South Korea - Day 1

Background Info:

I thought I would start this post with a little background information as it will make more of this story make sense. Seoul, South Korea is about a 2 hour flight from the city that I am living in in China (Hangzhou). So why might you ask did it take us about 13 hours to reach Seoul from Hangzhou. Due to the fact that we were travelling during the National Day holiday in China the price of any form of travel either gets very expensive or there are no tickets available as the entire countries population of 1.3 Billion people attempt to go home to see their families. The cheapest airfare that we could find took us from Shanghai to Beijing and from Beijing to Seoul. Alright onto Day 1

Day 1

Day 1 started with waking up at about 4:45am to ride my bike over to another guys apartment. From his apartment all 6 of us got on a city bus at around 5:20am. I was really expecting that the city bus would be empty and it would be an easy ride to the long distance bus station. But of course, this is China, and the the bus was absolutely packed (not a United States packed in which there are no open seats) but a China packed in which there isn't an inch of space and even the driver is uncomfortable due to the amount of people. It was about a 20 minute "cozy" ride to the other bus station in which we all transferred to the long distance bus that would take us to the Shanghai domestic airport. I don't recall much of that bus ride as I slept for close to the entire 2 hours. Once we arrived at the Shanghai airport at about 9am (our flight didn't take off until 1:15) we realized we probably could have got a "bit" of a later bus. We killed some time with a nice breakfast at McDonalds and then we spent about 3 hours hanging out in the terminal waiting for a flight.

Since it was October 1st China was having their 60th anniversary of the Communist Party which included a massive parade in Beijing. Every TV in the airport was broadcasting the parade. If the first picture that comes to your mind is of a nice parade like the Rose Parade in the US then you are mistaken. It was four hours of China showings its miliatary strengh with every kind of weapon, vehicle, plane, and soldier imaginable. We watched the parade for a few minutes but quickly grew bored of seeing the same tank over and over again on the screen.

Becuase of the parade all the airspace over Beijing was shutdown for several hours which of course delayed our flight for about 2 hours and we got to spend those 2 hours sitting on the plane instead of in the terminal for some reason....The flight to Beijing was uneventful but upon arrival into Beijing you immediately realize how huge the airport is, it is absolutely massive and it is designed to look like a dragon. By the time that we were ready to depart from Beijing it was already about 7:30 pm, so we had be travelling for about 14 hours and only made it about two and a half hours from Hangzhou....

We landed in Seoul and were immediately shocked by what we saw when we got off the plane. The airport was immaculate, it was so clean, I would have rather eaten dinner off the floor in the Seoul airport then in a good portion of the restaurants in China. People actually took their children into the bathroom to pee, not the usual Chinese way of having them pee on the floor in the airport. Who would have thought! From the airport we grabbed another bus to downtown Seoul, which is about an hour away. To recap the days travel: 3 buses, 2 airplanes, a bike, and on foot. Kinda a lot for only going a few hours across the ocean....

We made our way off the bus and eventually found our hostel which conviently had no sign. We were greeted by our eccentric, no... make that crazy hostel owner, Mr. See. He was all wound up and quickly took all of us to a bar at where he introducded to the Korean alcohol Soju. The Soju reminds me a bit of Saki, the strangest part of the bar experience in Korea has to be instead of serving you the typical peanuts they serve dried squid. At first no one was having any of it but as the Soju kept flowing and with that Korean beer too, the squid started to mysteriously dissapear. Leaving the bar we went wandering around the streets near our hostel in search of something to eat. For some reason that I do not know the Korea people love friend chicken, there are fried chicken shops on about every street corner. We found a good looking one that had outdoor tables and we sat down. Our waitress brought us a menu which conviently did not contain a signal word of English and if you have seen the Korean written language there is no way to even guess what the heck anything is.

We attempted asking her if she spoke any English, that was a big negative. So for some odd reason we asked her in Chinese if she speaks Chinese...and low and behold she responds and starts speaking in really good Chinese and we were able to get the menu translated to a level that we could sorta understand. Along with the chicken we got some huge glasses of Korea beer, these glasses would make the double gulp cups at 7-11 seem small.

At about 2 am we decided to call it a night as we had now been up close to 24hours. But we knew one thing, and that one thing was that we already loved Korea. From the few hours that we were there it was easy to tell that it was going to be a really really fun trip.