Annie's Excursions

Woohoo, I went to Korea! It’s super short, only around 2 full days and two-ish half days really. Now you might be wondering, what’s the occasion? There’s no holiday (the next public holiday is the 11th), and Valentine’s Day is a little far off…

The actual main purpose is to to get the boyfriend out of the country since his 90 day visa period from the day he arrived is almost up (wow, time flies!). We’re also attaching our trip to the first weekend of the Sapporo Snow Festival since that’s one of his bucket list items (which is going to be a separate post!), so we have about a week of fun travels. I booked our flight to Korea on 1/31 because I think the flight was a big cheaper that day (and I totally didn’t mean to do it on the Thursday, but it worked out regardless).

Now you may be wondering, “Hey, isn’t this a Japan blog? Why put Korea content on here?”, and that’s totally valid. If you’re here for Japan adventures and don’t care about Korea, I apologize for the interruption in scheduled programming. However, it does end up tangentially related because we’re leaving from Japan, and I’m writing about that experience here so…

Anyway, before any of actual Korea content, here’s some things we prepared, for getting into Korea, as well as getting back into Japan (aside from booking plane tickets of course):

• Booked an Airbnb: Since Airbnbs are generally cheaper, it’s been our go-to lodging of choice. I had done a little research and heard that staying around Hongdae or Myeongdong was recommended, but my boyfriend (who booked it) ended up getting a pretty inexpensive one in Gangnam, which isn’t bad either.
• K-ETA: aka, the Korean e-visa-ish thing. It’s not a real visa per se, but it essentially is what allows you into Korea without one, and is valid for up to 2 years (so I can go back again without having to refill it out!). The process was relatively quick, aside from needing a photo of yourself and the site only allowing up to a certain file size for photos/scans. I had heard previously that approval could take up to a few weeks and a minimum of 3 days, but both my boyfriend and I were approved within a few hours of our submission in late December. You do need to book accomodation beforehand for this application, and it costs 10,000 won (~$10) though!
• Japan Visit Website: Back when I came into Japan, we had to use an app caled MySOS. It’s since been replaced by this website in November 2022, and is the “fast-track” to getting into the country, including customs and Covid-related information. This was also really easy, and I got the Covid approval in a couple hours.
• Pocket-wifi: Wifi is pretty essential nowadays, and when traveling abroad it’s important to either get a SIM card or pocket-wifi because you’ll likely turn your cellular on airplane mode. I rented a pocket-wifi because there were two of us that were going to share.
• Money: Korea is pretty credit card friendly from what I heard, so for most places I was planning on use the credit card I have with no foreign trasnaction fee. I still exchanged some won in Japan just in case I needed cash for paying for a transportation card or street food, or other emergency needs.
• Download apps: I heard Naver or Kakao Maps is much better than Google for getting around, so I downloaded both in case along with other transport apps, ha! I also don’t perfectly speak Korean, so I downloaded Papago, a translation app, in addition to already having Google Translate on my phone.
• Quarantine Information Advance Input System: aka the Q-Code system is how to input Covid-related information for entry into Korea. Thankfully, no more covid test pre or post arrival is necessary, and filling this out should exempt us from quarantine. We couldn’t fill this out until at most 3 days before our departure though, so it’s one thing we couldn’t do too early. It was relatively quick, and you get the QR code right away.
• Packing: Though probably not ideal weather for a Korea trip, it is what it is and Korea was going to be similar to our current weather here, so we essentially packed what we’re wearing everyday here.

January 31: Our flight was scheduled for 3:55pm-7:10pm, and we wanted to arrive at the airport around a few hours prior to our flight. We got on our usual bus we take to Sapporo, and arrived around 10:30. As breakfast, I stopped by the Esta food court because I had been meaning to try the taiyaki and panju from Tokachidaimyou and Kuwataya respectively, and figured the taiyaki would make for a good morning treat, and the panju a snack for later. I bought the pie with wings taiyaki in red bean and panju in chocolate. The taiyaki was pretty good, and I’ve never had a pie crust one before! Of course it would have been best eaten as soon as possible, but I loved the crunchy bits, and the flakiness of the crust. I’m also a huge sucker for red bean filling.

After that my boyfriend wanted to get new gloves, so we headed upstairs to Uniqlo. When we were done, my last goal before leaving Sapporo was to get the new Starbucks frapp…unfortunately, they were sold out again of the current Fondant Chocolate even though it was just introduced like a couple weeks ago! Instead, the cashier pointed to another campaign frapp that was more on the down low, and I ended up getting the Double Chocolate frapp that she pointed out. This was my on-the-train drink. It was pretty good, very chocolatey with chip bits in it. And then, we made our way onto the train to the airport!

We arrived at the airport around 12, so we browsed the shops a bit, walked around the Snow Miku exhibition, and grabbed lunch at Miso Kitchen before checking in, because supposedly we couldn’t check in until 2 and a half hours before our flight (at 4). I had checked out the food options beforehand and I thought it had a nice menu selection.

I liked it a lot, and thought it was just right! I actually had my eye on that clam soup, and it had so many clams!

After that we checked in, relatively smoothly, and then headed to security, which also was pretty fast, aside from a lady trying to bring in a bottle of Pocari sweat for her child. They even had slippers for us to wear when we took off our shoes! I also thought it was funny there was a sign that specifically said to take off your boots. Then I had a bit of a wait at immigration, but other than that, we had about an hour or so to kill before boarding started. I walked from one end of the international terminal to the other, browsing the food and shopping options. Most of the food court was closed, aside from one selling bento boxes and two ice cream stalls. I tried to get into a lounge because I saw that Rakuten card members could get in free, but for some reason my card wasn’t eligible. My boyfriend wanted a coke, and since it was cheaper at one of the ice cream stands than the vending machine, I caved and bought a Cremia, ha!

There’s a shop in Susukino that sells Cremia, and even a chocolate version of it that I’ve been meaning to try forever, but hey it’s here and I was in line, so I figured might as well. I love Cremia, and so did my family the last time we came. It has a slightly cheesy, creamy flavor that’s just different than regular soft serve. This one was melting real quick though, so it disappeared so soon.

After that, we boarded our flight to Korea! It was a bit shorter than the projected 3 hours, and before we knew it, we landed. The immigration line wasn’t too long, and all we needed to have prepared other than our passport was our Q-code. Once we passed through, our bag came out pretty quickly, and surprisingly, the Korean customs was super lax, as they informally collected our form on the way out.

We had some options for transportation to our Airbnb, but we opted for the Airport bus since it would be the most convenient, even if it was pricier than the train. We bought our tickets at a machine, and boarded the next bus. The ride was supposed to take about an hour, but the stop we were supposed to get off at wasn’t popular I guess, and we didn’t know we had to press a stop button to get them to actually stop at our stop. We ended up just getting off when the next few people were, so we had to walk quite a bit more to our Airbnb. To add to that, we couldn’t figure out how to get in due to unclear directions, so we had to wait for our host to respond to our questions at 10pm. Eventually we had access, dropped off our luggage, and headed straight to grab dinner since we were hungry. Of course, our first meal in Korea had to be Kbbq!

I did some sleuthing around the area beforehand, and picked out a few barbecue places around the area as some options. We ended up going to a place called Yuk Gab, which had a small menu and slightly pricy but very high quality meat. We ordered two different cuts (was also going to get another one, but they sold out), a cold noodle (I’m pretty sure I ordered the plain one, but the spicy one came out?), and rice and bean paste soup. The man who helped us was super nice, and actually spoke pretty good english when he realized we weren’t Korean.

As a post-dinner snack, we grabbed soy garlic Korean fried chicken from Kyochon Chicken, a place near the Airbnb, to-go, ha! They even gave us a free Coke. When in Korea, gotta go for the chicken and barbecue.

So that’s how we got ready for Korea and Day 1! If I wrote about everything in one post it would be super long, so I’m splitting the main trip into a different post. Part 2 is here.