Backpacking trip starts from South Korea

After keeping a careful countdown to my flight date for three months, the day finally arrived. On a cooling, autumn day at the end of August 2022, me and my two friends Jenni and Essi stood outside of Itis mall and waited for our results from a Rapid Antigen Test that was mandatory to take to be able to travel to South Korea.

It was a long 15 minutes to wait. None of us had any reason to expect a Covid-19 positive result but at that moment we were all preparing for the worst as this was a trip we had waited so excitedly. Three negative results and the trip started.

How did we get here, though? During autumn 2021 everyone was longing to travel and we explored the possibility of working from abroad. As I have written in my previous posts, I ended up working from abroad with the same group of people. Later we thought of it like a test trip - how did we get along for three weeks straight. We all were interested in Korea as a country after watching so many K-Dramas and listening to lots of K-Pop and wanted to learn more about it (and definitely visit all of its restaurants).

In January 2022 I finally got my visa approval to Australia and I could start planning for my move. At this point there were still no actual plans to visit Korea, but the idea grew quickly as I started planning on backpacking in Asia and Korea would be a great first country.

At the same time as the idea of traveling to Korea together formed, I decided to start studying Korean more to be able to hopefully speak some on our trip - maybe order food or discuss the hotel bookings. I started my studies with Korean School of Finland and had great teachers from Korea help me get forward. I also got some help and tips for traveling.

As I am writing this post, I am sitting in a plane somewhere above China. We had to take a detour through Doha, Qatar, as the war in Ukraine has affected on the flight routes. 6,5 hours to Doha from Helsinki and now almost 9 hours to Seoul from Doha. I have slept, read, watched movies and listened to podcasts and currently am on a mission to watch the movie Frozen in Korean without subtitles.

We'll still have to take the PCR test when we land, but otherwise everything should be done and we are ready for our arrival to Seoul.

Laters!