South Korea Trip #3-8: Final update including Last Day in Korea, Return Trip, and Reflections

Time to wrap up the South Korea Trip #3 series, now back in Chandler, AZ. This update covers the last couple days and some parting thoughts and observations. Here we go!

Thursday the 7th was our last full day in Seoul. After weighing options, we opted to visit Lotte World Mall, beginning with “The Black Belt”, lunch, the aquarium, and dinner. Friday the 8th was a very long travel day home.

We began Thursday at ”The Black Belt”, which the girls had spotted in the mall the prior day. This establishment was a kids play place / exercise gym with lots of physical activities to try. We visit these kinds of establishments in Arizona often, as they’re a great way for the kids to get some exercise and wear themselves out. Upon check-in, we ran into the normal barriers from the lack of a Korean phone number, however the attendant was able to help us and used her own phone number to get through the process.

Once checked-in, the place was very clean and well-kept. Compared to those we’re used to in AZ, I’d say the activity challenge level was slightly higher although all of the safety measures were on point. There was a giant ”see-saw” like platform where you could walk back and forth, and it was a neat demonstration of physics – e.g. how weight distribution changed the farther back you went.

The ball pit also had a unique feature in a large, interactive projection screen. The screen had various games you could play (dragons, zombies, etc.) that would rush towards you, and you had to fight them back / earn points by throwing ball pit balls at the screen. The girls had a blast trying to play the game. It was a pretty cool use of technology.

After ”The Black Belt”, it was lunchtime. We’d agreed to eat at a Korean restaurant, and I was hopeful we could find a place that served 비빔밥 (bibimbap), one of my favorite Korean dishes which we’d not yet eaten this trip. Meghann and I began searching, and she found a restaurant called 한국집, which translated to “Korean House”. This restaurant had several options, although nearly half were bibimbap. Plus great reviews. Perfect!

If you’ve never had it, bibimbap is a dish served in a hot pot that contains rice, meat, and vegetables with a raw egg on top. The pot is so hot that stirring it all together cooks the egg into the dish. Very tasty! We also ordered a bottle of soju and mekju (beer) and put the girls on refill duty. They both tried all of the foods, including another go at the kimchi, but still didn’t quite like it.

After lunch, it was time to head down a few floors to the aquarium. The venue was very clean and well-kept, with a great assortment of animals. They had a beluga whale, electric eels, lots of stingrays, penguins, otters, and several others. The girls had a blast, giggling and gawking as they ran from tank to tank to view each creature.

After the aquarium, we took a breather back at the room and decided to explore dinner options. Like usual, it took two to three tries before working something out. We ended up at ”Peck”, a fancy Italian restaurant. I wasn’t sure if they’d let me in (baseball cap, graphic T, flip flops – yikes!) but rolled the dice and they were welcoming.

Meghann LOVES Italian food, although usually has a strong preference for American-style Italian food. Peck was clearly more on the authentic side of Italian – in fact, the menu was only in Korean and Italian. Everything we were served here was delicious. First off, the bread and dip were on point. We first tried to order pizza and they were out, so just kept it simple with two orders of spaghetti (one spicy / one not) and a bottle of wine. The pasta was so good we wished we had ordered more – the noodles were freshly made, perfectly cooked, and the sauce was exquisite. This was without a doubt the best non-Korean food meal we had in Korea, and perhaps some of the best Italian we’ve ever had. I’d revisit on any future trips!

After dinner, we decided to do some final shopping and grab dessert. I found a few t-shirts at some place that felt like the Korean-equivalent of Ross, Meghann found a pair of shoes and sweatshirt in the Nike store, and the girls each got a pair of Crocs with decorative buttons to stick in the holes in the top. We also stopped at G Fassi’s gelato, which was delicious! I had “cocoa” flavored whereas the girls had “normal” flavored. After dessert, we headed back to the hotel and quickly fell asleep.

Our final morning ahead of travel, the girls had spotted a “Bread Barbershop” character just off the hotel lobby. We had just been exposed to “Bread Barbershop” a few weeks earlier when our girls were watching it in on Netflix. Turns out, this show was originally created in Korea in 2020, and has since gained traction in international markets. We had no idea it was a Korean show when the girls were watching it. Nonetheless, the girls were very excited to find life-sized characters they could go visit.

We taxi’d to the airport, and the trip home was fairly uneventful. At the airport, there was a neat Korean cultural demonstration in the airport with music and dancing which the girls enjoyed. We also had one last Korean meal at “strEAT”, a Korean street-style booth in the mall. It was delicious, Meghann declaring it the best Korean food she had on the trip. Vivi opted instead for the adjacent Dunkin’ Donuts.

If you’ve never done an eastern Asia to western US time zone switch, it’s trippy. Arizona is currently in Pacific Standard Time, UTC-8, whereas Korea is in Korea Standard Time, UTC+9. We left Seoul at ~4PM on July 9th, flew for ~12 hours, and arrived in San Francisco at ~11am the same day. Did we… time travel? Our July 7th was 41 hours long (24 + 17 hr time difference). Despite our best efforts to force rapid adjustment to the new schedule, jet lag.

We ran into another traveler at bag pickup in SFO doing the same SK to Phoenix journey and he started chatting with us. He mentioned his trip was supposed to be a few days earlier, but he missed his first flight due to the K-ETA form, same as us. (!!!) I wonder just how many that happened to.

Returning to San Francisco was a reverse cultural shock.

The first and most obvious – restaurants and shops in Korea took pride in their service experience, whereas many US businesses seem to struggle to do the bare minimum. The hyper-efficient and highly skilled service workers we’d experienced in Korea were replaced by overworked and undertrained US counterparts. Just on our way home, 1) Meghann went to grab a bottle of water from a store in in SFO – it took almost 20 minutes due the only open register manually entering in meal reimbursement codes for each customer impacted by mass flight cancellations, 2) When boarding our SFO flight, a United Airline flight attendant was shouting and berating another worker who had spilled water while loading supplies, creating a super awkward experience. He also stopped a guy from trying to go to the bathroom during the fasten seatbelt sign, then boastfully told another flight attendant he had found a way to lock the bathrooms to stop people from going when he wanted (yes we were in the very back row lol), and finally, 3) Stopping for dinner at Macayo’s on the way home in Tempe, our server was clearly high to the point he could hardly talk – most of our meal was brought out incorrectly, items missing, etc. These service experiences feel like status quo in the US as of late, and a stark in contrast to our fresh Korean experience.

The general health and diet of people in Korea was noticeably better than in the US. Nearly all Koreans are at a healthy body weight, and I don’t think I saw a single person heavier than the average adult you see in the US. The only overweight individual I saw (slightly heavier than me) was also the only homeless guy I saw, buying a bottle of Soju in a convenience store (I was doing the same lol – he was very polite). Meghann and I also noticed how much better we felt day-to-day on the diet of meat, rice and vegetables over the carb and sometimes fried-food heavy diets we tend we eat in the US.

Korean people in general were overall respectful and good natured. I can’t recall any of us ever feeling unsafe, and several times we were aided by others going above and beyond to help us when we were struggling with cultural or language barriers. The only negative experience I recall is the “angry” taxi driver we’d experienced on our late-night trip from Busan Station to our hotel, and even he drove back to the hotel to drop off Meghann’s bag after it was forgotten in his vehicle.

A main disadvantage between Korea and the US, as I understand, is the work-life balance in Korea is very poor. They work many hours under very demanding conditions. Some quick googling showed the minimum wage In Korea is 9620 won ($7.40) per hour, slightly higher than the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The average one-bedroom apartment in Seoul, South Korea was around 510,000 won, or just under $400. By comparison, the average US apartment rent was $1,300 as of early this year. Food and taxis were noticeably cheaper there too, even in major metro areas.

A lingering question – where do we go from here with Meghann’s birth family? Seeing them was a memorable experience as always. They are wonderful hosts that treat us very well. They got along great with the girls, who clearly enjoyed spending time with them also. The first time we saw Meghann’s birth family ten years ago, the experience of meeting in person and asking questions was more than enough. This time around, further building a connection was hampered by the language barrier. Even with translators present, you are more limited to a “Q&A” format instead of having casual conversation that naturally leads in different directions. While we can continue to see her family on occasional intervals, I feel any furthering of a connection would require one side or the other tackling the language barrier. Not much had changed on that front since the last trip ten years ago.

The language barrier was something I found fascinating and somewhat confusing in Korea. When out in South Korea, you see English almost as much as Hangul (Korean). While it’s common to find people that speak conversational English, especially in restaurants/stores/airports, the majority have very limited English-speaking abilities. I had a hard time understanding – how could Koreans not speak English despite it being so prevalent? My theory – I think many can read English, however the pronunciation of English words in Korea is very different, with different enunciations and sounds. This causes challenges when listening, and especially attempting to speak to, native English speakers.

Case in point – on our last 2010 trip, I learned how to read Hangul letters, which are phonetic just like the English alphabet. It’s very straightforward to learn with 24 basic letters. Learning this made reading signs over in Korea fun and interesting and often times I could spot English words spelled in Hangul – an example, we saw a poster for the new Thor movie coming out. On the movie poster, Thor was spelled “토르”. If you match the letters to sounds, ㅌgives you a “T” sound, ㅗ gives you similar to the long “O” sound, ㄹ gives you an R (or sometimes L) sound, and ㅡ gives you an “uh” sound. Put them together and you get “THOE-RUH”, vs. our pronunciation “Thor”. Many English words when written or spoken in Korean add the ㅡ character (uh) to the end, despite it not being written or spoken in native English. This is one example of many, but it leaves just of enough of a gap between English and Korean languages to make things challenging. I’m hopeful I can continue studying and learning post-travel.

This wraps up the Korea Trip #3 series – we had an amazing time, and I hope everyone reading has enjoyed coming along for the ride. My goal with writing was to have a diary of our trip for future memories, but also share the experience along with friends and family. I now have to decide where to go next with the blog. We travel internationally about once a year which I can continue to cover but may also cover various hobbies and interest I have as well. Please write your feedback, questions and comments in the comments area below. Thanks for reading!

Dustin

Full South Korea Trip #3 Series: