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Well, here is the first entry from our trip to Korea! We started out early, because it takes about 2 hours to get to Narita from where we are (ugh) and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time since it was Golden Week, and therefore everyone was traveling. Turns out, we got there a bit earlier than we needed to, but it gave us some time to comment on how awful Narita actually is (we had to go to the information desk to find where our check-in counter was) and exchange some of our yen to Korean won!
Going over, the plane ride from Tokyo is shorter than our 2 hour trip to the airport from my apartment, which I found both awful and hilarious. It was still light when we got there, so the first thing I noticed was how many mountains were around the area - I had no idea South Korea was so mountainous! We decided to take the train instead of taking the airport bus, because the metro was a lot cheaper, but it was hard to figure out what we were doing at first because we kept having to buy single-pass tickets
at the station due to not having a handy reloadable card like we have here in Japan. Also, we were exhausted, so I fell asleep on the train ride into Seoul Station.
Once there, we realized that we couldn't transfer to the line we needed on the same ticket because we had to swipe in/out - it's basically like the Narita Express here, where it drops you in a station and you are sort of stranded. We were starving, so we went outside to try and find food but came up empty, so we settled on McDonald's. The most anti-climactic first meal in South Korea ever, haha, but we hadn't really eaten anything but conbini snacks the whole day, so we needed sustenance.
After that, we found the line we needed and got ourselves to the stop that our hostel instructions had given us. Of course, once there, we got lost and it was dark so our frame of reference wasn't great. EVENTUALLY, through great toil, we found our hostel, which was nice and the employee who checked us in was great, gave us maps and tons of directions and advice, and then took us to our room,
which was in the annex a street away and down from the main hostel building.
We pretty much just crashed at this point, but not before going to the 7-11 to compare it with Japan. We discovered that you can buy silkworm pupa (I tried to get Michele to try them, but we both decided we would vomit if we opened the can) and also that things are very cheap, which we already sort of knew but was fun anyway. In Korea, we were surviving off of people being able to speak English or mime prices and instructions at us, since we know NO Korean and basically can't even read the signs.
(I'll say that knowing Japanese was pretty fun, because I could read the station names they had in kanji, and it was helping my kanji recognition because I knew what sound the Japanese was trying to mimic.)
We wanted to get up early and it was already around 9:30 or 10, so we hit the sack and set our alarms to EARLY BIRD TRAVELING TIME the next morning!
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