Seoul, Korea: Day 1

Just before leaving Taipei, a gate announcement was made: our boarding time was delayed to 2:30pm, but we would depart as scheduled, and that the airline apologized for the delay. Our original boarding time was 2:15pm, and I'm pretty sure there's no way an American airline would bother to announce, let alone apologize, for a 15 minute delay. In the end we boarded at 2:25pm anyway.

We arrived in Seoul on time with all our luggage intact. D nearly forgot his warmup jacket on the airplane, but he remembered in the terminal and ran back to get it. When he got there, the flight attendants had already discovered it and tagged it by seat number; he showed them his boarding pass to get it back.

Everything in Korea seems to be supremely organized. The airport is clean and easy to navigate, we cleared customs quickly as there were many queues, and when we got out there was a big screen telling us where to get our luggage, by carousel number. After exiting the airport, we headed for the KAL limousine bus ticket counter, where we bought two tickets for about $11 apiece, to travel 80 minutes to our hotel, the Westin Chosun Seoul. There were probably 20 different bus stands, all numbered. Once we got into the right line, a baggage handler came by to tag our bags, and then later, a woman in a hotel uniform came by to check us off of her reservations list. There was basically no danger of us feeling lost at all.

The bus itself was super nice too; large leather chairs, tons of legroom, and a big screen TV at the front, playing Korean soap operas.

The view from the back of the bus:


The ride was nearly 80 minutes long, but it went by really quickly, and we arrived at our hotel around 8:30pm.

Apparently the hotel representative at the airport had automatically checked us in as soon as she found us, so as soon as we arrived, the bellhop whisked us and our luggage to the front desk to pick up our keys, and then we were immediately escorted to our rooms. Speaking of which, the keys worked by proximity sensor, so there was never any fiddling with the locks. Awesome.

We took about an hour to shower, change, and examine our rooms (great view of Seoul Plaza) and then asked the concierge for a dinner recommendation. She said it was pretty late for most restaurants, but she finally pointed us to Arirang, just across the street. I managed to trip over the curb on the way there and twisted my foot, which was unfortunate as we had quite a bit of sightseeing planned for the next day, but I decided not to worry about it for the time being.

Arirang served Korean BBQ; sliced beef and marinated beef, which of course came with tons of side dishes. The marinated beef and the side dishes were good, but the sliced beef was not very good at all; very fatty and hard to chew. The price wasn't exactly the cheapest, either, but I guess we couldn't be too picky at nearly 10pm.