Seoul (1/4): Arriving in Seoul and a River Walk

My Asiana Airlines flight arrived in Seoul around 3:00 p.m. on Thursday afternoon. The airport wasn’t too busy so it only took about 20 minutes to get out ot the main terminal’s waiting area where I sat down and waited for Jisue to arrive.

She arrived a few minutes late, but it turned out that she had to attend a funeral / memorial service for a friend of hers from school. It was sort of sad — apparently he suffered from chronic headaches and received surgery to fix it — supposedly a very simple procedure. But after a while he had problems and then lapsed into a coma. So she just got the phone call that morning at 11:00 that he had passed away. Needless to say, it was quite a bummer.

We grabbed a taxi back to her place and I unloaded all my luggage. But soon enough it was time for us to go grab some dinner. We were originally going to meet up with Jisue’s older sister, Jiheun, and her husband Ok Tek (who we call “Oppa”) but Jiheun had a cold and couldn’t come out. We decided to go get some bi bim bap near JongNo 5-ga — my favorite bi bim bap place in Seoul! Naturally, it was delicious beyond descrīption.

Jisue near the river

After that we decided to go for a walk. We actually walked along the same river that was in Raffi’s blog so I felt like I was having a serious deja vu. All the same lights were up so it was all quite familiar. We checked out the pictures in the under-the-bridge gallery and sat listening to some guy playing guitar. But Jisue was having a serious craving for Smoothie King so we went for a walk. By pure coincidence it turned out that there was a Smoothie King right near the waterfall. It was also right next to a Bennigan’s. Two of Jisue’s favorite places in the world. If there was a Starbucks on the corner she would have just camped out on the sidewalk. If you added a Burger King then her head would have exploded.

We got her a smoothie (I tried some — it was quite good) and then grabbed a cab back to her place where we crashed amidst the mess that has become her apartment (she’s in the process of moving and just finished two term papers for graduate school so it’s understandable).