Have you ever dreamed of seeing snows or cherry blossoms? I have dreamed about it ever since I was a kid...and because we are scheduled to avail our one month annual vacation I decided to surprise my daughter and go out of the Philippines to enjoy our vacation to the fullest - Our destination? the land of k-pops...KOREA!!!
Of course like in any other countries you need to get a visa to enter Korea, some are exempted but Philippine passport holders are required to get a Visa. However, for us who have previous Schengen Visa it was a lot easier, the duration is 3 days only compared to 5 days for those without previous entry to any Schengen country and the requirements are not that strict, they don't even look at your documents meticulously they just look at the Schengen Visa and like a magic your Visa is approved.
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| Korean Visa |
After your Visa is approved you can start checking in flights and booking hotel. We booked our flight through Jeju Air, 3 months before we applied for Visa. It is because I am pretty sure we will be approved of our visa since we have previous schengen, but for others who are not sure don't take the risk unless you are willing to book an airfare with "free to change" option. The only advantage with booking early is you can get it at much cheaper price. We get ours at 214.80USD each inclusive of taxes.
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| while waiting for boarding |
But since we are traveling from the Philippines we have to pay the travel tax amounting to 4,060.00 for 3 persons.
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| Travel Tax.. no exemptions !! |
We have booked our hotel in advance Ramada Seoul through booking.com our favorite booking site and we got it at KRW425,014.00(SAR1,324.00) and we have with us KRW1,000,000.00 (PHP54,000.00)as pocket money
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| Snap of our pocket money |
We arrived at Incheon Airport at 4:50 am and it was very cold. We have to wait for the ticket booth to open so we can buy tickets for the airport express bus limousine that will bring us to downtown Seoul.
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| me and Denisse at the ticketing station |
It is always fun to take some adventure. It was very hard though because Korea like China is not an English speaking country. You have to at least know some basic Korean words which fortunately my daughter knows and it did helped us through. We as much as possible avoided areas where natives abound like public markets. We stayed in a classy hotel that is near most of the places we wanted to visit and go to luxury malls so there is for sure an English speaking person. I tried to print the picture of the hotel, good thing is that the booking. com printout has an address written in Korean so it is easy for the driver to see
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| Hotel confirmation |
Finally we were able to buy our tickets and then off we go to Downtown Seoul.
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| Riding the Bus going to our hotel. |
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| Bus Limousine tickets at 16,000KRW each |
And we have just discovered that the Bus Limousine stopped right in front of Ramada Hotel. So my advise for first timers like us is to check the bus route and book the hotels where the bus limousine stops. You have to do a lot of research. You can check it out on this link
