We spent most of today travelling so it won’t be a long blog today. Everything went to plan, so I don’t even have a story where we narrowly averted some kind of disaster. We left out hotel in Taipei at 8:30 and arrived at our new hotel in Seoul at 5 PM having lost an hour through a timezone change. International flights into Seoul come in to Incheon Airport which is about 40 km from our hotel, but the traffic is fairly manic so it took well over an hour to get here. The room is smallish, but well appointed and has good views.
I, like many people of my generation learned about Korea through the television series MASH, which was about a fictional mobile hospital in the Korean War. On the way into the city we passed Gimpo Airport which was often referred to in the show as the US Airforce base where supplies and personnel where brought to Korea. The hills outside of Seoul also look like the same landscape used for the show. It certainly brought back some memories of a great chapter in American television.
Once settled in our room we took a walk around the local area. The autumn colours are just coming out and as we explored the streets and alleyways, we found that this area is quite touristy and there are lots of places to eat as well as lots of fashion outlets.
Being in Korea though there was only one option – Korean Barbecue!. We initially had a place in mind, but it had a queue… and I’m sure most of you know I don’t enjoy queueing for any reason, so we found a local place nearby that was mainly filled with local people. It was very good!
One of the early challenges we had in Taipei was that a lot of shops don’t actually take credit cards. So this time we made sure we found an ATM to get some cash out so we could then go sort out the second most important thing, our Metro Card. Although the Seoul metro seems to use the same technology, you cannot of course use the same card. So I now have another card to add to my collection.
We went to the train station, bought and added value to the card and tested it by catching a train the 2 stops that got us closer to the hotel. There is quite a steep hill between that metro station and the hotel, so we weren’t sure we wanted to do that every day. I do however think that the metro is certainly the way to get around, based on the awful traffic we saw today (Saturday).
We’re off on a walking tour tomorrow, so I’ll have much more to tell tomorrow night.
Until tomorrow!
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