Day 1 started almost very unlucky, yes almost, because we almost had a car crash. We narrowly escaped the crash site. After this horrible ordeal we were able to park our car at valet parking, which was really relaxed as we could just drop of the car keys and were standing almost in front of the terminal at Schiphol. We started our trip with 3 suitcases, which would turn to 4 at the end of our trip because I had planned to buy a lot ;)
We checked in for our flight with Lufthansa and did some shopping to kill the time. We had a short flight to Frankfurt for our transfer flight to Seoul; therefore we could only shop at a small part of the airport (no McDonalds :o). Thus, we decided to have a drink at Starbucks. I wouldn't recommend having a drink here, I go to Starbucks in Amsterdam South quite often and the drinks and food there are great. However, the drinks and food at the Starbucks at Schiphol was really bad.
In Frankfurt our lucky day started, we (all 3 of us) got upgraded to business class! I have never flown business class before, so this was an awesome experience. The cherry on the pie was that we were flying in the new Boeing 747-8, with an all-new business class. We were able to lay completely flat and had a menu to choose from for dinner (of course I chose the Korean main course). It was a smooth flight, as far as I can remember because I slept most of the time.
We arrived at Incheon airport with hardly a jetlag. One of the biggest challenges of this day was finding our way in the subway network with our suitcases. We started out with the express rail from the airport to Seoul station.
At Seoul station we had to change to the metro network, this is where things got difficult. For some kind of unknown reason the Koreans have tiles on the pavements (also inside the metro station) that are almost impossible to cross with suitcases. Once we had made our way to the right place in the station we found out that there was no elevator and that the escalator was not working. Eventually we got everything to the right platform. If you ever do get lost in the metro network of Seoul there is always a very nice Korean person nearby to help you, most of them even speak a decent amount of English. Once we reached the right station and got all the suitcases upstairs again we had a hard time finding our hotel, the GS hotel. However, as mentioned before the Korean citizens are very helpful and before long a few very nice Korean people were helping us, one even called the hotel for us. Turned out we were really close by and just walked the wrong way.
The hotel is pretty small, but the rooms are nice, I have a real bed and not a foldaway bed (which is not uncommon for 3 persons rooms) and we have free Wi-Fi! Furthermore, it is very conveniently located, about 3 minutes from the metro station and 7 minutes from Insa-Dong.
We ended our first day sightseeing in Insa-Dong. We spent a lot of time at Ssamziegil, which has some nice shops, including a Jetoy one.
We ate next to Ssamziegil, at a cute little restaurant serving what we thought was typical Korean food (in the end it turned out it was not as typical Korean as we thought), we had a great first meal.
All photos can be found at my flickr page
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