February 20 and 21 - First day in Seoul

WOOO made it to Seoul in one piece as of 18:30, February 20. The plane ride from San Francisco to Incheon via Singapore Air was brutal on my bum, but the pain was lessened by the super sweet info-tainment system in the headrests. I watched a few (4) newly released movies, including In Time, with the ever-beautiful Justin Timberlake, Tower Heist, The Three Musketeers, and Another Movie Whose Name I Cannot Remember. I was also able to brush up a little on my Korean vocabulary with some pretty neat language learning software.


The food on the flight was awesome, too, as far as airplane food is concerned. During the 13-hour flight, I had the opportunity to eat some Korean-style fried beef with rice and a dose of Korean chicken-something-or-other. Typical of Korean dishes, both meals included rice and some veggies to accompany the meat.


After coming off the plane, I had no idea where to go, so I just sorta followed everyone ahead of me. We all eventually made our way to a passport checkpoint. The airport personel took our photographs and fingerprints and stamped our passports and such. Next came baggage claim. I got my bags. Getting through customs was silly. I just handed a piece of paper that effectively said, "I don't have anything to claim," to a customs agent, and I walked out. No one even thought to look at the bag of almonds cleverly hidden away inside my luggage.


As I exited customs, I was greeted by a couple score of Korean nationals holding signs that were meant for everyone but me. I felt a little bit awkward being the only white guy in a completely alien nation with no one there to greet me. I just walked myself to the bathroom while onlookers onlooked at me expectantly, thinking or hoping that I might share a name with what was written on their welcome card. But "O well."


When his plane landed, I met up with Tim, another exchange student from UT. The local time was now passt 22:30, so taking a taxi was our only option. One cab driver made an aggressive offer to take us wherever we needed to go, and, without any real reason not to, we accepted. I asked the driver how much our trip to Seoul would cost, and he said something about ₩50,000, sweet deal. We headed out. A few kilometers outside the airport, I noticed that the driver hadn't started a meter. I had been warned about this by friends and guidebooks while I was still in the U.S. Taxi drivers will give foreigners rides, not use the meter, and then charge the passengers obscene amounts of money for the service. I decided that maybe because I had been speaking with him in Korean, he respected the rare effort of an American learning his language, and there was a possibility that he was just going to charge me a flat rate to get to Seoul. Wrong. we made it to hotel and he demanded ₩150,000. I told him that was way too expensive, and he spat some BS about paying the toll out of Incheon, a whopping ₩7,700. I grudgingly payed the man his money, just happy to be at my hotel.


Tim and I had to search for the entrance for a bit. It was hidden off the main road in an alley, but it had a friendly, green, glowing sign. "세종 여관 Hotel Sejong Inn," it read. We briefly spoke with the young man at the front desk and showed him our room voucher. He introduced us to the public area with a coffee pot, water dispenser, and computer, and led us to our room on the second floor. The room is tiny, but for $25 a night, I can't complain. There are two twin beds, a small desk/table thing, and a couple chairs. Occupied by two people and two sets of luggage, each with enough supplies for a week and a half, the room became very crowded very quickly.







No worries, I was tired as hell. The time was now roughly 00:30. I had been awake packing/travelling for over 24 hours now. After a much needed brushing of the teeth, lights went out.                                      

*8 hours later*

I woke up around 08:15 feeling great. I can't say I completely beat jet lag, but that was a damn good nap. I was excited to start my first day in Seoul. Let's begin with a peek out the window of my hotel room. 

Well, that's cool. I'm sensitive to sunlight anyways. I decided to skip the complementary breakfast of toast downstairs and stepped into the bathroom to take a shower.

 

That's cool. I don't like shower curtains anyways.

So now I have to go into detail about this bathroom.

No shower curtains no biggy. I'll just take a shower sitting down. Yes, it's a little awkward, trying not to splash water on the toilet paper (or the rest of the room, while washing yourself, but hey, Koreans do this stuff all the time obviously.)

Now the best part.

Did you see that drain in the middle of the floor? This isn't a just-in-case-of-flooding drain. This is the drain to the tub. Yeah. The tub isn't connected to the floor. The water leaves the tub and has to flow over the floor and down that drain. Super cool, AMIRITE? So now most of the floor is covered in water, and the property value of the single towel rack just went up 3500%. But "Thank you," Sejong Inn, for providing a pair of shower slippers. I would never have dry feet with out them.

Can't really take a picture of this part, but the floors are heated. That's the best part about the room, actually. Feet are feeling cold? Nope, heated floors. That's all I have to say about that.

After my shower, I'm feeling so fresh and so clean clean...  Sorry, English majors, I'm switching tense.

Anywho~ Tim and I leave the hotel and decide to get started using the subway. We need to get our immigrant/alien registration done sooner or later anyway. We find the nearest subway entrance, buy our T-money card. T-money cards are these nifty little cards that you can use to pay for public transportation and (I think) public phones.  You just set them down on top of the spinning entrance controllers, and money is debited from the card to pay for your subway ride. I load mine with ₩20,000, enough for about 20 subway rides within the city. We eventually find the Immigration Office, but it is very crowded, and we realize we have no idea what we're doing. We decide to just wait for next week when we can be assisted be some Korean students. Since, this little adventure is now over, we make our way back to the hotel, grabbing a delicious and inexpensive sausage-on-a-stick lunch right outside our front door.

Switching tense again~

I had planned on making this a picture-based blog from the beginning, mostly as an excuse to practice my photography, but I hadn't really taken any pictures yet, so the obvious next step was to take pictures of the city.

I loaded up my camera bag with my modest collection of lenses and my tripod and left the hotel. 

In my head, I had always imagined Seoul as an uber city, like Tokyo. Lights everywhere, busy streets, etc. And it probably is, but my daytime exploration today revealed a side of Seoul that I hadn't really expected. "Grungy" comes to mind. The weather was pleasant. Dry, 0°C, no wind. The clouds were a solid blanket of gray over the city. I never saw the sun directly. I set the white balance on my camera to "cloudy" and started taking pictures. The pictures I post in this blog are in the order in which they were taken. From here, I'll let the pictures do most of the talking. Here is the first one:

This is the alley that our hotel is in.

I really liked this red brick.

Myeong-dong is the business district in which our hotel is located

Traffic is very loosely controlled, so crossing the street in some of the more remote areas can be tricky.

Check out this cow.

T-money cards can be used in some of these payphones. They are all over the city.

Seoul is very dense, more so than Austin, Texas. Many businesses are on top of each other.

  

Everywhere you look, there are people, always going somewhere to do something. Everyone is busy.

This door just kinda caught my eye.

Crosswalk timers are usually 30 seconds on these bigger intersections.

LOLWUTGOLF ㅋㅋㅋ

Go players.

Even when the pedestrians have the signal to cross streets, motorcyclists and some other motorists will drive through. Look both ways before crossing.

I was happy to see this. Even half a world away, I'm not too far from home. ^_^

Sports massage, anyone.

[btw: This thing was spinning so fast it took me about four turns for me to read it as I was walking to it to take this picture]

L'escargot

There are so many side roads and alleyways. Like I mentioned before, this place is dense.

We found a pretty run down "super market." these advertisement posters were on a shop window.

Whenever I see an something from the states, I'll do my best to get a picture of it.

Stairway leading to the rundown super market.

Koreans seem to not worry about their bicycles the way Austinites do. I saw several mopeds parked outside of shops with keys left in the ignition.

All over Myeong-dong, boxes upon boxes of stuff are being loaded and unloaded on the side of the street.

Tires outside of a shop

So this next picture needs some explanation:

In this business district of seoul you can buy anything you want/need. Lots of small shops sell very specific kinds of merchandise. One shop sells men's clothing; another, cleaning supplies, chairs, etc.

The odd thing is that stores that sell the same specific things are clumped right next to each other. Literally across the street in some cases. And I'm not talking about two stores competing with each other, more like 5 or 6. It may just be the way things are done here, but it's kind of silly to see 5 different chair stores right next to each other, and never see a another one once you leave that area. I was so confounded by this that I finally took a picture of the damn chairs.

One of the few live animals I've seen so far, besides the seafood waiting to be eaten.

The pigeon was at the entrance to a market area with many different things to buy.

Beans, for instance.

Shoes. Kinda reminds me of Reynosa, Mexico.

Dad, this is fish bait, right?

Freaky dried fish.

Look at that selection.

Represent!!!

Had to do at least one HDR.

They got alleys in their alleys.

moAR dried fish. I desaturated the photo to better portray the fact that they're dead....

Once again, we came across 4 currency exchange stores (same company) within 50 meters of each other. I was forced to take a picture.

Dead trees supporting a live tree.

These buses are a very cheap way to get into Seoul from the airport if you're not in any hurry.

Adidas sports store.

But what really knocked me out was her cheap sunglasses.

So we kinda sorta got lost. We decided to warm up with some coffee and borrow free Wi-Fi from the  coffee shop so that we could figure out where the hell we were.

[btw: My motto for the next 6 months is "Let's get lost." I say it every time we leave the hotel.]

Ultra decadent waffles seem to be pretty popular here.

Now aware of our location, we made our way to a subway station to head home. Einstein stared at us while we waited for the train.

That's basically everything that happened on my first day in Seoul. Anything not mentioned here was probably ignored because I didn't have my camera on me when it happened. If you have questions, feel free to ask me anything in the comments.

Thanks for reading/viewing my blog. I hope I have entertained you.

Check back for more pictures of my adventures in South Korea.

~Let's get lost. 잘가