Day 1

PICTURES WILL BE ADDED LATER!

We had an awesome day yesterday! The morning on the other hand wasn’t too great.. We got almost no sleep in the plane (Sara got some, I didn’t get any), and I felt really sick for the last two hours of the flight. They served us breakfast in the plane 2 hours before we landed, but I couldn’t eat anything because I felt like I couldn’t keep anything inside me, and unfortunately, I was right… 1½ before we landed I had to go to the toilet because I felt way too sick…..

We arrived to Korea at around 8.30 local time, the immigration was surprisingly fast, taking us only about 15 minutes from getting to the queue to passing immigration! The woman behind the counter even chuckled at my passport picture when she first took a look at it (I’m 15 in that picture….). After immigration we went straight to pick up our bags, and suprisingly enough, it didn’t take any more than 5 minutes from when we arrived to the baggage claim area that we were ready to leave. Talk about fast service!

Then our next challenge was to find the KAL Limousine Bus desk from this huge airport 3 times the size of Helsinki-Vantaa. Good thing we had wi-fi available so it didn’t take us too long to find it. 15.000 won per person for the ride in a bus with huge, soft leather seats and air conditioning isn’t too bad, don’t you think? Upon arriving to the hotel at around 10.00 we were told that our room wasn’t ready yet, and that check-in was at 14.00, so we left our biggest bags to the hotel to store until we got our room, and headed for Myeongdong to take a look around. It’s kinda funny, that we just got to Korea, and the FIRST clothing store we went into was H&M! We walked around the place for almost two hours before our hunger and tiredness got the best of us and we decided to go back to the hotel for the last 2 hours until our room would be ready.

At exactly 14.00 when I went to ask if our room was ready, we were told that they still had to clean it up and that it would take around 15 minutes, so we got 2 free soft drink tickets to the lounge & bar at the hotel’s ground floor. Sara got herself a caramel latte or something like that and I got myself an iced green tea, both priced at around 13.000 won. After our drinks we went to pick up the keys for our room, and after getting to our room, we unpacked a bit and ordered some food to our room because we hadn’t eaten anything since the breakfast in the plane (I couldn’t eat the breakfast so I hadn’t eaten for a good 12 hours) and couldn’t bother with trying to find a cheap place around the hotel. Our meals ended up costing us around 82.000won, Sara got a New York-style cheeseburger with fries (the minced meat steak in the hamburger was HUGE) and I got a 200g grilled han-woo striploin steak with fries and salad. After we ate we had to go to bed because of the jetlag as we got barely any sleep in the plane. We slept for around 2 hours and woke up at 19.00.

After waking up we set up a date with my friend Monica at around 21.40 and went for a walk in the Namdaemun area. Most of the stores were closed though, but there were some street stalls open selling fake Louis Vuitton bags and wallets, fake Ed hardy Clothes and other cool stuff. Monica had to leave at 23.00 because the subways were closing, and we decided to take the same subway with her and go to Dongdaemun. The subways are surprisingly easy to use after you manage to get yourself a T-Money card and can figure out the signs on the walls and roof telling you where to go. When we got there, the first thing I noticed in front of Doota shopping mall was that the spotlights pointing at the mall were swarming with moths, and the ground was filled with moth carcasses when people walked over them. Not the most pleasant sight to be honest, but the mall was like nothing I’ve ever seen. The floors were huge and each floor had at least some kind of coffee shop or eatery in it. Unfortunately the top floors were closed because it was so late, so we couldn’t get to the food gallery or the roof garden. At the end of the night we went to Dunkin’ Donuts to grab a fast snack and then headed for home. It’s really hard to get a taxi around here (at least for a tourist), and the first few taxis I tried to get for us didn’t even know our hotel for some reason (not like it’s hard to find when it’s right opposite to the city hall….). After a good 10 minutes or so we finally got into a taxi, and the driver was kind enough to pull over at the start and tell us that it was a black taxi (a ”luxury” taxi with more space) and as it was past midnight already the ride would be expensive, around 20.000 won. The service from the driver was impeccable…why don’t we have service like this in Finland?! When we got to our room it was already 1.15, and Sara summarized our evening quite well with a single sentence ”it’s 1.15 in the middle of the night and we just came from shopping..!”.

That wraps up day 1, stay tuned for day 2 tomorrow!