Keeping up with Korea (Part1)

It's yet again another time for our annual family vacation--an out of the country trip with the whole family. After booking promo tickets months earlier, we then arranged for a travel agency to process our Korean visas. Obtaining a Korean visa is free of charge unless you pay someone else to do all the hassle of going to Manila for you. We paid 1,500php each for the processing fee plus an unexpected additional 1,800php for an unused visa fee from the previous year. In two weeks our visas were ready.

I spent hours on the internet researching about Korea a couple of weeks prior to our departure date, and man, was it hard! Korea was the most challenging trip to plan. So little information and details were given with regards to directions on how to get to places and most of them were too far away from Seoul. After getting severe headaches from looking up on the net, I gave up trying and relied solely on "come-what-may".

Came July 3rd and we were all excited to set foot on a first world country. I was not expecting much from the place since based on my readings there was nothing much to go nor see in Korea especially on a summer. But I was in for a big surprise.

At the Mactan Cebu International airport the immigration officer already gave me a hard time. I actually thought my family would be flying to Korea without me! He asked me so many questions especially about my profession (I'm a nurse, btw). He asked for my company ID and when I could not present one, he probed even further. He looked at my passport and saw I've been to other countries and then questioned why I went to Bangkok so many times! Is that even rational? That sounded like a really stupid question. Because I have the means, a**hole! He even accused me of lying about not having been to Korea since I had my visa from last year on my passport. It was an unused visa since we had to cancel last year's trip due to time constraints. If only he looked further he would know it was unused. I was so pissed I really wanted to scream at him and punch him on the face. But since I knew doing so would totally hinder my chances, I neglected the thought. After about a hundred questions, he finally let me in. With a threatening tone he said, "Ikaw na bahala mag prove sa immigration sa Korea ha." Damn right I will!

The whole family (plus my parents not in the photp). We were the only Filipinos at the boarding gate.

The plane ride from Cebu to Korea took 4 hours, Philippine time. (Korean time is ahead by one hour). I wasn't surprised when the immigration officer did not even ask me a single question. He simply gave a friendly smile and a nod.

We were greeted by my brother-in-law who worked in Korea and whose place we were crashing (LOL). We were supposed to ride the airport limousine bus but it runs only until 11pm. We took a taxi instead and were amazed by how tremendous the language barrier was. The taxi driver kept looking over his GPS, calling someone for help and speaking in Korean. It took nearly 30 minutes for him to finally fully understand where we were headed. Whew!

The taxi driver kept doing this while we all just waited. LOL.
Our taxi fare cost almost 4,000php

The one-hour drive from Incheon to Seoul was not exhausting at all. I was too excited to even get tired. Haha. We arrived at around half past twelve. It was really cold as we stepped out of the taxi. Quite a surprise 'cause it was summer in Korea. We had an amazing view of the city from my bother-in-law's pad, not to mention easy access to food shops just right outside the building. Baskin' Robbins, 7 Eleven, Starbucks to name a few. Our accommodation was perfect.

View from the pad.

After a few talks, research and discussions on what to do the next day, everyone dozed off to prepare for an exciting day ahead.

Look what I've done out of boredom.