After 10 hours and 50 minutes, I arrived the second day at the Incheon International Airport around 5:30 in the afternoon local time. I felt hot and humid once I stepped out of the airplane. I haven’t had such a hot and humid summer for more than four years. What a good reminding!
Sohn, one of my Korean labmates, suggested me to change money at the airport. Jeongwoo, with who I’m going to stay, advised me to buy a phone card at the airport. After I got my suitcase, I went to the money exchange to get Korean won. The exchange rate of dollar and won was 1 to 980. I changed $300. I got 294,000 won. I felt I was rich first time. However, that feeling didn’t last long. I went to a convenient store to buy phone card. It cost me 5,000 won.
I have heard my American friends complain when they were in China, they couldn’t read, because everything is in Chinese. This time, it was me who complained. I can’t read Korean. The guide to use public phone is in Korean only. Thanks to the help from two policemen at the airport, I was able to find the correct type of public phone to call Jeongwoo.
Jeongwoo had to work that afternoon, so she was not able to come to the airport to pick me up. She is very thoughtful. She sent me a map with both English and Korean. With Jeongwoo’s map and help from airport bus staffs, I got onto the airport bus 603 to Seoul National University. The bus first got on the highway. Along two side of the highway, I could see quite a few greens. Once the bus passed the old airport and got off highway, more buildings and more people occurred. I could see three or four stories of buildings standing along the road one after another, with colorful neon lights and ad boards hanging outside the buildings. The four lane road, and buildings remind the airport area of Chengdu, Sichuan where I went to college in China. When the bus got closer to Seoul, I could see the more buildings standing along the road, more neon signs hanging outside the buildings, more people walking on the street, and more vehicles moving on the road. The bus was getting slower.
Jeongwoo told me to get off the stop before Seoul National University. However, because the language problem and misunderstanding, I was taken to the Seoul National University. With the help from a SNU student on the bus, the driver said he could take me back to the bus stop where I should get off. Jeongwoo and I planned to meet at a Starbucks nearby the bus stop. I got off the bus, walked along the street, and found the Starbucks on the other side of the street. It was dangerous to cross the street as the traffic was quite heavy. There must be a crosswalk somewhere, so I stopped and asked two young fellows passing by where the crosswalk was. These two young fellows looked like students. Once they understood I wanted to cross the street, they offered me help to take me to the crosswalk. One of them even helped me to push my suitcase. What a nice guy! By the way, he is good-looking too.^_^.
Jeongwoo had been waiting for me at the coffee shop for more than one hour before I met up with her. It is so good to see Jeongwoo again. It has been three years since she left Seattle. Her hair is shorter than before, and she got prettier. After she took me to her apartment and gave a call to Seonyong, who I would see the next day, we went out to have dinner. It was around 10 o’clock. We shared a big bowl of noodle and octopus soup. Jeongwoo said it was a Korean traditional dish. I haven’t tried this noodle soup before. I forgot to take a picture and didn’t remember the name… Yet, I still remember the shape of the handmade noodles and its delicious taste.
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