Seoul, Korea

Getting to Seoul was actually a bit of an accident. I missed an Air India flight out of Bangkok due to not checking the time correctly. I was scheduled on a 12:30 a.m. flight with a 10:30 check in time. The check in time listed September 4th instead of September 3rd - the flight was actually the night of the 3rd, early morning of the 4th. I discovered this, horrified, because there are only two Air India fights out of Bangkok a week. My mom was with me on this trip and started making phone calls to the airlines trying to get us out. It was hopeless. No one would help us because we were on a Delta ticket and the delta office wasn't open for re-ticketing until Monday. I had to catch a flight on Monday out of San Francisco back east that I would miss unless we flew out that Saturday or Sunday. We finally got in touch with the Delta office in the states and they said they could do nothing for us while we were still in Bangkok, but we should go to their partner airline Korean Air in the Bangkok airport. Taking their advice, we headed there to speak with the KA people. They pretty much ignored us and said we would have to wait for the Air India flight on Wednesday. I basically said to the guy that we HAD to get out of Bangkok and that I would just wait there in the Korean Air office until they authorized putting me on one of their flights. They didn't know how stubborn I was then, but they figured it out when they didn't see us leave after a while.

They eventually relented and put us on the flight out that evening to Seoul where we could catch a Korean Air flight to San Francisco. It ended up being not so bad because we had a full day in Seoul to explore. It was something we might not have experienced had it not been a total accident.

Seoul gave us a peek at what a more northern Asia looks like. The architecture was completely different and the climate is a bit more accommodating. We hit the main sights to see, the Heunqnyemun Gate, the new modern buildings, the markets and street stalls. By the end of the day, we were exhausted and had to return to the airport for yet another long-haul flight. What was a big mistake on my part ended up being a nice little serendipitous peek into a country I might not have otherwise visited.