We arrived back from South Korea just over a week ago and the trip was everything that we hoped it would be: fantastic food, great locations and stunning scenery. It was also absolutely exhausting. Some random stats and highlights:

• Miles walked over 13 days: 89
• Most useful purchase in preparation for the holiday: an eSIM (more on this later)
• Most unusual food: sea squirt
• Most raw garlic cloves in a single meal (each): 3
• Number of men needed to deal with a poolside snake: 6, including one in a safety helmet.
• Photos taken: around 600
• Hours playing the new Zelda game: around 25
• Constant life-saver: Google Live Translate
• Weirdest breakfast (my wife; not on the same plate and over about an hour): Omelette with avocado and asparagus, sautéed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, rice, mapo tofu, spicy Chinese aubergine, banana milk, rasperry Danish, 2 coffees
• Hours spent poolside debugging a TLS problem on this site on a terminal app on my phone (5 inch screen): 4. Yes, Certbot, we’re looking at you.

Camera
Barring one cheese-eating-grin LinkedIn portrait I got my wife to take of me at the start of lockdown, I haven’t used my SLR in almost 4 years, so I decided it was time to dust it down. I stumbled on the term for what I wanted: a ‘hybrid’ rucksack which, as the name suggests, is half-and-half: the padded dividers for a modest amount camera equipment, and then unstructured storage for ‘essentials’ like my Switch. I ended up getting a K&F Concept 20L bag. It’s pretty decent, although the main buckles are a bit fiddly. As well as my walkabout 24-105mm, I took my fast 50 which I never used. I thought I might do some tripod based long exposures in and around Seoul but, in all honesty, I could probably have got away with just my phone.

eSIM
Based on our own research, we’d decided that we wanted mobile network access, and had been looking at portable WiFi hotspots and physical SIMs. On the recommendation of one of the advisors from the travel company that we use for all our long haul trips, I bought an eSIM. It’s like the Internet Wild West: you end up looking at aggregation sites that resell dozens of variants. I didn’t go with the company that we were recommended: they had a KYC requirement where you had to upload a photo of your passport. While you get it photocopied or scanned routinely at hotels, there is something distinctly offputting about uploading it to hadn’t-heard-of-us-5-minutes-ago-but-trust-us.com. I ended up getting a data-only 14 day deal from a company called klook.com, who linked through to a company called frewie.com who have, I don’t actually know, some sort of peering arrangement with a South Korean provider called KT – who are big. They had shops everywhere. And I had an IP address geolocated in Hong Kong. Simple as that (!). No KYC passport info required.

I don’t know, or particularly care, how the network stuff bootstraps on a phone, but I get the distinct impression that the (physical) SIM provider gets some room to play in terms of configuration they can apply. The reason I say this is because when I got to the hotel in Seoul, jet-lagged to hell, and tried to set it up, my phone seem to be suggesting that the eSIM was going to be from my UK network provider. The instructions the eSIM company emailed me were wildly different from what I was seeing in the config menus.

As there were a couple of warnings about what I assume are fallback options between providers, I decided that the safest thing to do was to take the physical card out of the phone and then set up the eSIM. To cut a long story short, it worked really well. However, there were a couple of things I didn’t think of beforehand. First, I thought, now it’s set up and working, I’ll just double check that I have the data roaming cap set to zero with my UK company. Their app uses SMS as a secondary authentication factor.

Doh!

A few days in, my bank card was refused in a shop. It was a one-off, but I know that my bank would…

Doh!

Oh well. I’ll know for the next time, and I haven’t been hit with a £500 roaming bill. Yet.

Seoul

We flew with Asiana (thoroughly recommended), and checked into Hotel 28 in Myeongdong. We had enough energy to hit the night market, which was only a couple of blocks away for treats like tteokbokki and mandu.

The next day we had an all-day tour with a guide. Note for future reference: we need to cut ourselves some slack and have very little planned for the first couple of days. It was 30C by mid-morning; combined with the jet lag and our guide’s walking speed (fast!), I hit a wall and thought I was going to have to head back to the hotel.

We had most of the next day to ourselves, so hit the shops around Myongdong. I had no idea that South Korea is the centre of the cosmetics universe, so it was happy hunting for my wife. In the evening we had a tour of a large indoor market in Jongno 5-ga. We had a few firsts:

• De-boned chickens’ feet. Not keen on the texture, but a really nice flavour.
• Raw crab in chilli, still in the shell. That was a big nope.
• Bindaetteok, a mung bean pancake. Delicious
• Hotteok, which is a sweet pancake. Also delicious.
• Makgeolli. We’d had soju in the UK but I’d never heard of this. It’s a sparkling rice wine, and we were given divergent opinions on how to drink it: shake it up first (there is a lot of expired yeast at the bottom) versus have the clear liquid at the top first and then upend the bottle. It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before and really good. Kind of like fizzy sweet and sour milk shake that gets you pissed.

You know when you’re watching a foodie show on Netflix where the host is somewhere far flung, and being shown all of the delicacies by a well-informed Instagrammer or food critic? What never happens is that a local man squeezes onto one of the benches beside them and is so completely and utterly pissed out of his brains – bear in mind it was 7pm on a Monday night – that he looks like he might soil himself, and manages to frighten off everyone in the vicinity. Maybe it happens all the time and the rest is great editing.

Next day we had an early start with a trip to the DMZ. The walk back to ground level from the 3rd infiltration tunnel is one hell of a workout.

Busan
There were a couple of big protests in Seoul during our stay and one was happening on the morning that we were due to get the (zombie free) train to Busan. Combine the resulting road closures with the part of town that Hotel 28 is in which has really narrow streets, and we were starting to worry if we would make the station in time. We did, but had to improvise lunch (gimbap), rather than have a chance to orient ourselves and explore. I’d expected the trains to be something like the Shinkansen: in reality, they are a bit more routine in appearance. Although ‘routine’ is something of a disservice to topping out at 185mph and running to the second. Sorry National Rail, but you have about 75 years of progress to make up.

We stayed in the Lotte Hotel: business oriented and absolutely enormous. It was fine: a bit characterless, but you couldn’t fault it for efficiency. It merges into a huge shopping centre which we managed to get utterly lost in on our first evening. I’m blessed with a sense of direction that you might expect a remedial toddler to have, so things got a little spicy when I started making suggestions to my wife about how to get out of the place. When we did, there was some great exploring to be done in and around Bujeon2-dong: various markets and and food stalls.

We were there for 3 nights, which included one full day tour with a guide. Unfortunately the weather was pretty awful, but one of the highlights of the holiday was a trip to the fish market. Our guide was fantastic: we wouldn’t have had a clue. You pick your lunch while it’s still swimming, and 20 minutes later, it turns up on the plate. We opted for a sea bream, half sushi, half fried. We had a few seafood sides as well: scallops and prawns, which were cooked and utterly declicious, and sea squirt – raw and, well, one to put down to experience. It wasn’t gross (which the raw crab in Seoul was), but I wouldn’t go out of my way to have it again.

Jeju
The boarding of the Korean Airways flight from Busan to Jeju was, for a non Korean speaker, chaotic. It transpired that it was done in groupings (‘zones’) but there was absolutely no indication of what we had to do, where to stand or when. That said, we had the same experience on each of the four airports that we went through in terms of security and baggage processing: jaw dropping efficiency. Actually there was one puzzling process for the uninitiated at the bag drop: you have to stand at a specific point and look at a screen to see if your bag is going to make it through (presumably) an initial X-ray check. We had no idea what we were supposed to do. By the time it had been explained to us, our bags were nowhere to be seen on-screen. We kind of shrugged, quietly shuffled off when the staff lost interest in us, and assumed that we weren’t in any sort of trouble.

This brings us to the Shilla, which was our hotel for the four nights we were on the island. It’s pretty swanky and, it has to be said, that the breakfasts were out of this world. But it had Kafkaesque rules about sitting by the pool that we never fully understood. On the first morning, I was told that I couldn’t stay on one of the free loungers (others you had to pay for, and it was expensive) because I wasn’t wearing swimming gear. Twice, in the space of about 5 minutes. It was also timebound: you had to vacate after 3 hours. We weren’t sure how this was enforced: cattle prods and stopwatches presumably. As the prices were eye-watering, we took a walk to a local shop to buy some snacks and booze. One of the staff at reception clocked me as reptilian for having the gall to walk into the place with a clearly visible bottle of soju in a plastic bag. Just so that we didn’t come across as total cheapskates we ate a very refined, and slightly unsatisfying meal in one of the restaurants.

Not our cup of tea, to put it mildly.

Back to Seoul and home
Unfortunately our flight back to Seoul was delayed by about 3 hours. At least we understood what was going on during boarding. Our last hotel was the Four Seasons, where we were upgraded to a suite on the 28th floor. We’ve been lucky enough to stay at some lovely hotels down the years and this was right up there with the best of them. As well as a remote control for the blinds, there was also a remote control for the lid of the toilet. Because, you know, hygiene and effort: it’s the only way to go (in every sense).

I was joking with someone the other day that going to South Korea from the UK is like visiting the future: stuff works, really well. We both loved Seoul: it has the vibe you’d expect of a global economic powerhouse, but not the ‘you fall over, I’ll step over you’ you get in London. We would go back in a heartbeat. All we need to do is work off the calories we deposited while we were there.