Seoul – Day One
This one is short, which is merciful for both you and me. My ragtag crew of crazy Ehimenians (Wendy and Melissa) met me in Matsuyama on Tuesday afternoon. Wendy and I rendezvoused at the JR Station in Matsuyama, while Melissa chose to catch up with us at the airport. (She took a taxi, which baffled us, since it’s way more expensive than the bus we took…but hey, she lives the high life when on trips, I guess.) After checking in, and discovering that Japan has much stricter guidelines than I had previously remembered, we checked our baggage and sauntered up to the international departures deck. There we went through the typical security gauntlet, with my belt getting me in trouble. I made the best of this, and after removing said belt, made a “ta-da!” style stage entrance, as though I were bursting onto a football field from behind a paper logo, which got the security guards to giggle. By the way, in retrospect, it is REALLY stupid to do anything like that – I’m lucky I had giggly guards. That’s all I can say about that.
We took off without a hitch, and a remarkably short flight, bad meal, and bumpy landing later, we were taxiing to meet one of the international gates at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport. We got inside, did the reverse customs stuff, picked up our bags, got our passports stamped, and exchanged cash. Later, in the hostel, I realized how ridiculous this amount of cash looked to my eyes. Have no fear, I documented this with some cash-money shots, a la pathetic gangsta. After checking in, being told that we must provide our own toilet paper, and subsequently being given a roll of toilet paper each (true, I swear), we checked our rooms out. Turned out that rather than the 3-person shared room with attached bathroom that we had expected, we somehow wound up with 3 individual rooms with their own attached bathrooms each. Awesomeness, though unexpected. Changed our hangout times and whatnot. Anyway, after this, we left our bags in the hostel, and struck out on our own, for the first time. We exploded onto the streets of Seoul, in all our illiterate excitement, and went hunting for food. To our dismay, it turns out that just about everything is closed after 10 pm. After buying a load of groceries, imagining that we’d cook our own food (HA!), we were caught by a kindly old lady who was hawking for a 24 cafeteria shop. And so, being hungry, we all partook of my favorite – bibimbap (which I continue to pronounce as though it’s Japanese – bibinba, no p). After this, we scurried our tired little butts back to the hostel and conked out. Sweet.
That’s all for now, folks. But I assure you that there is much, much more to come. If you get bored, go visit Jon’s blog and read his arrival experience. It’s more adventurous than ours was, and he told us the story when we met up the next day at Dongnimmun.
