Asia 2016 - Day 4 - Lost in translation

Alas we made it to Seoul. Its been sometime since I was here in 2007. Back then our little tour group (4 people total) had its own tour guide. This time around we are only two people and none of us speaks Korean.

Let the adventure begin.

We took Korean Air from Qingdao airport which is really a top notch airline with extremely nice flight attendants. As we were flying just before lunch with one hour time difference they even offered us some light breakfast.

Arriving at the Incheon International Airport it became clear immediately that we had left China. It just felt different. We had to wait in line to pass the immigration checkpoint and they took a biometric photo along with fingerprints which was a bit shady but otherwise everything went smooth.

Then we purchased a city pass which I assume is mostly for tourists but only contains Korean characters. That should have been the first warning sign. Finding the bus and leaving the right station proved not difficult as every stop was announced in English.

Once we got off the problem started. We had not Internet access and therefore no google maps nor email. However we came not totally unprepared. I had downloaded tourist information and maps of Seoul from the Tripadvisor app. Unfortunately the map was not precise enough to show the guesthouse and it crashed in regular intervals. We stumbled around for a while and then decided to take a taxi as we were sure that we were in the right area but simply too blind to find it.

The taxi driver eager to drive us fumbled around with his high-tech-voice-recognition-seven-inch-display-gps-system while avoiding several car crashes but could make sense of the address we had with us. 3000 KOR lighter he basically dropped us off where we started after he had driven us around the block. Next Ran used her phone to get the phone number using the internet. That totaled another 40€ but gave use the right address. Just before we met a crew from ilogen delivery service (Their motto should be Delivering parcels and people to their destination). We passed the phone with the receptionist from the guest house to them and they wrote us down an address. Using that piece of paper we managed to ask our way to the guest house. I am currently sitting in the seventh floor of Mmmio house looking down at the street we had spent over an hour.

As we had finally arrived we quickly checked in ordered a taxi and left again, but not without a proper business card, for a spa treatment that we had booked in advance. We could definitely use some time to relax.

First we were sent into three increasingly hot huts starting at a cozy 70°C and ending at a pan-fryingly 103°C. Next we went to gender-separated showers and a preparation bath with scented hot water. After we soaked for 5 minutes a burly Korean man waved me out and showed me to a massage table. He literally started scrubbing the skin off me, showing me multiple times the grime he had rub off. My skin started to feel raw but also cleaner. Then he used hot water to rinse all the dirt away and put some lotion on me and massaged my shoulders and legs and most in-between like a baker would knead a bread dough.
Satisfied with his work he sent me back to another hot bath and we were done, more relaxed than before.

I finished first and waited for Ran in the room above. My first instinct was to sit on the bench and put my feet (we left our shoes in the locker) on the pillows but then I remembered the Korean's fondness for sitting on the floor. Hence I quickly sat on the pillow rather than using it as a foot rest for my sweaty socks.

Back in our room we ordered some dinner.

Apparently ordering food is a national sport which we also take part as this is simply a guesthouse with a small kitchen but not restaurant.

Good night everybody.