Who stole a day?

Here we are in Seoul.

Pete from JPD picked us up after lunch and we had a very smooth journey to Heathrow. Except that on the way we got a text to say our flight was delayed by 40 minutes.  And we arrived before check-in had started.  But we were soon ensconced in the lounge, grazing on their buffet.

The seating on our Asiana aircraft was pretty good, and they take a lot more care over meals than some airlines do.  

Korean porridge really isn’t porridge though.  More a kind of vegetable soup with rice instead of oats and side dishes.  But it was tasty.

I was a bit confused by the icon of a pair of y-fronts on the map display though.

We made up 20 of the forty minutes and managed to get off the plane and through immigration quickly by actually taking notice of how long the different queues were.  Then our baggage was among the first out.

When we passed into the arrivals hall we discovered that drivers meeting people do it differently in Korea.  Instead of holding up a board with the name of the person being collected, they stick it to the barrier opposite the exit door and get back to their surfing.  One of the other drivers went and found ours.

While we were there, we also had to go and pick up a wi-fi box to stay connected, again a very straightforward task.

That ended the quick activities, because it was about 6:30 by this time and rush hour in Seoul.  It took another two hours to get to our hotel, which is in a very vibrant, i.e. noisy, area of Seoul.  Hotel 28 was founded by a Korean film director and has a cinematic theme running through it.

What it doesn’t have is a restaurant serving dinner, so after the receptionist marked a few places on the map we set off to find some food.  We couldn’t find any of the places she’d marked, so we settled for somewhere with pictures on the menu.

We chose the half and half Jokbal.  This came with a bowl of soup, a plate of noodles to cook in the soup, several types of kimchi, a salad and a huge platter of pork.  One half was plain, the other half was coated in more chilli that I ever thought possible.  The table came with a little drawer on the end containing napkins and disposable gloves, although we didn’t know we were going to need them at first.  If you’ve ever tried eating slippery noodles with skinny chopsticks you’ll know how much we did.

We stopped off for an ice cream before heading back to the hotel where we looked up Jokbal.  It was probably just as well that we didn’t know we were ordering pig’s trotters.

So, tomorrow we’re off to explore, but first I want to know who stole a day from us.  We left home on a Wednesday after lunch, we arrived at the hotel at dinner time on Thursday.  Were did the rest of Thursday go?