We took the evening flight to Korea, together with the family except my dad. 🙁 Screw you meetings, you stole my dad from our trip. 🙁 Ok anyway. Enough of that short rant. Back to the giddy me.

As you all know, I’m a freak when it comes to travelling. I lalalalove to travel. If I have gazillion dollars in my bank account (wishful thinking), I’ll be treating my whole family, friends or maybe even strangers to explore the world with me. Travelling is learning. Connected to my personality, that has the enthusiasm to learn, travelling is another source for knowledge and experience.

When I found out I’ll be travelling to Seoul, South Korea with the family, including O, I became like a little girl who received her most-awaited bag of candies. Super big YAY!!!

As expected, Incheon International Airport was more advanced and more amazing than ours (Philippines). But don’t worry Filipinos, we’ll get there. Soon! I hope! Let’s think positive for our country.

From our terminal, we rode the airport train to transfer to the 1st terminal where our service was waiting.

From Incheon International to our temporary home in Dongdaemun Seoul, it took us about an hour, without traffic.

Out of all my travels with mom, this was our first time to get out of the hotel zone and try a residence type of place to stay. Mom, the conservative woman she is, feels that spending nights in a 5-star hotel is the safest and most trusted place to temporarily stay whenever she travels. I get her. Safety first, right? For some reason, she changed her mind and gave Residence Unicorn a shot because of its soaring high ratings in hotel booking sites. She was impressed by the reviews of people who actually stayed in Residence Unicorn.

After mom purchased from booking.com, Ponny, one of the owners of Residence Unicorn, contacted her immediately to arrange our room and other details for our stay. Based on my personal experiences, Koreans are not the friendliest race I’ve encountered. Some of them are great, some are extremely the opposite. With that, I had low expectations for Koreans. But this lady we met, Ponny, stands out from all Koreans I’ve met. She is hospitable, exceptionally gracious and pleasing to deal with.

Ponny gave our family her biggest and cutest room, which could accommodate up to 7 persons. Our room has a long wooden dining table, a kitchen, a swing, and other tools that transported us back to home. The word cute is stamped in every part of this room. And how can I miss, free WiFi with an average speed of 50 Mbps. WOW!!!! Dream internet speed if you live in Manila. Haha!

Kitchen utensils were complete with plates, bowls, mugs, glasses, Korean chopsticks, cooking pans, water heater, dishwashing materials, etc. A fridge, a stovetop and a microwave oven were present to heat or cool our food.

Outlet plug in Korea differs from what we use in the Philippines, usually 220v. O, being the boy scout, worried about not bringing our universal adapter for travelling. Well, the good news was, we didn’t have to purchase our own universal adapter since Ponny provided for that. Yay!

Meet my alter ego… perhaps the real Jill. :))

In front of Residence Unicorn, there’s a supermarket and a convenience store named GS25, where we bought some snacks – famous Korean spicy noodles – on our first night. I loved our location instantly! It isn’t too crowded like Myeongdong but everything we needed was either in front or a few blocks away. Besides, walking in Seoul Korea is not something to worry about. It is a safe city!

One of our boo-boos on our first night was not exchanging more money for our food. Given the rate is not that competitive in the airport, mom only exchanged what was enough for our airport service. Ponny was an angel! She knew our problem – being hungry with not enough Korean won in hand – she voluntarily lent us money we needed. Actually, more money than we needed. What a sweet lady! What hotel does that? None!! We loved Ponny even more!

Ponny recommended 678 Chicken for our first dinner in Korea. Mom and Reine were so tired and didn’t have the energy to walk around the city to look for food. Besides, it was really late and the choices were limited.

678 Chicken delivered 2 kinds of crunchy Korean chicken – spicy and original crunch. Mom had a love at first bite affair with GochuJang Chicken – a combination of sweet and spicy without overpowering each other. Mom and I normally share 1 cup of rice with each other. And that Korean chicken was beyond normal. She finished her rice, as far as I can remember! Absolutely, she adored 678 Chicken and wanted to order another box the next night. (Uhm… Mom, we have yet to explore Korea. Haha!)

Every box has a can of coke. I understood how complementing a glass of ice cold coke was after consuming 3 pieces of GochuJang Chicken then sipping on it. Aaahhhh! That was freaking good! YUM!

As mother’s request, we ordered 678 Chicken twice during our 5-day stay in Korea.

These chopsticks illustrate the cast of our Seoul-ful adventure.

And the tummies were ready to rest after that fulfilling night. 🙂

 Don’t miss out on my next Seoul-ful South Korea travel post!

Cheers,