Day One

South Korea has opened up its borders for tourism again, by lifting the 7-day quarantine requirement. Time to explore the country before travel is stopped again somehow.

After a lovely 10-ish hour flight to Seoul with Korean air (I might have had the best in-flight food ever; mix-it-yourself Bibimbap, so delicious), I arrived in Seoul.

Once you land you have 24 hours to supply a negative PCR test result, or there will be consequences. Luckily there are plenty of testing facilities at the airport and just 5 hours after landing I got the all-clear by text message.

After a good nights sleep (even though I slept for about 8 hours on the plane, I was still tired), I took the first day to just wander around the surrounding neighbourhoods of my hotel.

The hotel is surrounded with little shops that sell only a few items, but have a ton of those. In this case 2nd hand motors.

Ducking from alley to alley, I found myself on a lookout point near the Han river, that splits the city in two.

From this viewpoint, I made my way to "Seoul forest", which is more a large park than a forest, but still a nice place to hang out during the mid-day 30-degree heat.

It was almost 15:00 at this time and my jet-lagged body demanded some proper food, so I hopped on the subway across the river to the Apgujeong area, hoping to find some lunch.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I found some delicious Naengmyeon which are cold buckwheat noodles. I picked the "Bibim" version, without the soup, and some Mandu (dumplings) on the side.

It was slowly getting dark at this point and I wandered around some more.