Our 9-hour flight to Seoul seemed to fly by in business class! I changed out of the jeans I was wearing and into the pajama pants they give you to be comfier during the flight. We were greeted with a beverage when we first sat down and enjoyed a small snack after take off before it was lights out. As soon as I laid the seat down, I was out! I only woke up to use the restroom and the next thing I knew the flight attendant was waking me up for breakfast, meaning there was only two hours left. Grant and I both chose the omelet with some collard greens, tomato, and sausage along with some fruit and a smoothie. It was kind of sad this was our last business class flight for the trip, but was definitely worth the experience! 

Landing in Seoul, we had to stop by and fill out a health declaration form and get our temperature scanned before heading into customs. This was our first real COVID check besides just checking our vaccine card, which the surprising thing though is Seoul never checked our vaccine card. We breezed through customs and grabbed our luggage before determining the best transportation to take to the Airbnb. Our Airbnb host said to take the airport bus to the apartment as it is the most convenient. They have quite the “Airport Limousine (bus)” set up in Seoul. There were probably over 20 different bus lines to take and they were nice coach buses. Our first note of South Korea was the mask culture. We looked up on the internet that they just ended the indoor mask requirement and now only required them on public transportation. Grant read in an article that 2/3 of Koreans are not happy about the lift and will continue to wear a mask indoors (and many outdoors still as we saw) for the foreseeable future. The other thing we noted before our hour and a half bus ride was how everyone waited in a single file line at the bus stop. We noticed this everywhere throughout the week in the city at bus stops and in the metro – Korean culture was very orderly.

As the bus driver only spoke in Korean, it was hard to note which stop was actually ours. We got off one too early and had to figure out where we were located on the street. We quickly found out how busy the streets were on a Friday night at 7:30pm. Our apartment was in the “Gangnam” district of the city (remember the song “Gangnam Style?”) which we learned was one of the trendier parts of the city full of lots of nightlife. With our bulky backpacks, we meandered the street trying to figure out how to distinguish our building since we couldn’t remotely read the Korean letters. Thankfully it was just a few minutes down the road from where we were and we at least got to acquaint ourselves a bit to what was around us.

Once we found the building, we made our way up to the 19th floor and into the room. We dropped our bags off in the room and figured out a close restaurant to grab dinner, which ended up being a local ramen place. Our waiter gave us some tea and when he realized we only spoke English, had his coworker come and take our order. Since it was only in Korean, we tried using the Google Translate app that didn’t work too well and so we ended up just pointing to one and hoping for the best. And turned out to be some really good ramen! Better than the ramen we had in Cape Town (go figure). After dinner we went straight to bed to get some rest after a long travel day!