Up Early for Our Next Leg

Our flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Seoul is at 9:00am which means leaving the hotel at 5:30. We have organised transport and for a light breakfast to be ready for us to take with us. The trip to the airport takes around half the time it took on arrival. A quick check-in leaves us plenty of time to kill so Richard finds a place to sleep. This flight is less impressive than the first with no individual entertainment so the in-flight movie, after a documentary about a golf course photographer (fascinating << sarcasm), was one of the Marvel things that all look the same, made no sense, and couldn't keep me awake. At least it's only five and a half hours.

Incheon Airport is huge, so big in fact that we are piled on to a train to get from the concourse to the arrivals terminal. Walking through the terminal we are greeted with mass plantings of orchids in pots. My mum would love them. Although the queue for immigration looks long they have a lot of people processing and we are through in 20 minutes. When we find the luggage carousel we must be the last on our flight to get there. Our bags are sitting on the floor next to the carousel all alone. That's a first.

Now to find a train. I should have put my pedometer on. We must have walked at least a couple of kilometres to the station. We choose the all-stops over the express as it runs every 10 minutes. Our ticket will take us straight through to the station nearest our hotel. A trip of about an hour gets us in to Seoul Station where we need to find the line for Myeong-dong. This station is massive. We go up four long sets of escalators to reach Line 4 and walk what seems like miles as well.

Our hotel is only a short distance from the station but we manage to exit the exact opposite exit, across the road and in the opposite direction, even though I knew which exit to look for (insert eyeroll). We see our room and gulp. They had a very, very good photographer for the online shots. Ok, we are here for four nights and we will make the most of it but first dinner.

We walked past about a dozen small eateries to reach the hotel so head out to check them out. They all have their signage in Korean only so it is a case of look in the door and see what appeals. We choose the third place and take our cue to remove our shoes from the others left in the doorway. After three months of using Duolingo and listening to a Korean language podcast I get a chance to use one of the three words I have successfully learned, and greet the two women and man peering at us curiously. Richard expresses his priority immediately, "beer?". I don't know the word for beer yet. We receive nods all 'round and proceed to a table.

We point to an item on the menu and using hand gestures establish that we only want one to share. They bring out a tray of side dishes and then set up the table cooker. We have an amazing meal of beef with around 15 side dishes.Read more