So many posts on the Korea Trip! After all it's 9 days of travel so there's a bit of content to cover. A summary of the posts covered:
Highlights of Korea Trip May 2015 (Part 1 of 3): Nami Island, Gyeongbokgong, Deoksugung
Highlights of Korea Trip May 2015 (Part 2 of 3): N Seoul Tower, Painters Performance
Highlights of Korea Trip May 2015 (Part 3 of 3): Jeju
Shopping in Korea
Korean People
We got to visit some nice places in Korea, but our visit coincide with Korea's family weekend, causing 4+ hour traffic jam and massive crowds on the first two days of our tour. We get to see more Koreans though, and as the tour guide said, Koreans like to wear very bright colors, and they can be very pushy. I used to have a better impression of Koreans, as I thought they wear very nice clothes are are as graceful as the kpop girls.
We also observed that most adult Korean girls have double eyelids, but most Korean little girls have single eyelids.
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| Cute little Korean girl with natural eyelids |
Korean Food
Most of our food in the package tour are Korean style food, usually consisting of a steamboat, several refillable fermented cold dishes and rice. One day we had BBQ instead of the steamboat. One day we had bibimbab. One day we had Ginseng Chicken. None of the food really excite me, but they fill my stomach. I have never been a fan of Korean food anyway, but after 9 days of Korean food, I am going on a strike!
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| Typical Korean Meal |
There are some interesting street foods though. Unfortunately I don't have much pictures of them right now. Of course, not as exciting as those found in Taiwan night markets.
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| Cheese Egg Bun |
If you force me to name ONE food which is so good that I can't forget, it must be the cheese garlic bread from Angel-in-us coffee cafe. It was really good. We wanted to eat again but we realized that not every Angel-in-us cafe have it. The pastry differs from branch to branch.
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| Cheese Garlic Bread from Angel-in-us Coffee near Namsam Park |
Korean Transport
We took the metro at Korea on our free day. Some of the gantries look quite cool. The doors are always open, maybe they will only close when you attempt to cross without scanning your card.
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| Gantry at Korean metro |
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| The inside of the stations look about the same as everywhere else |
The Tour Package
As mentioned in the Part 1 post, the trip consist of 6 people, 3 from my family and 3 from my boyfriend's family. We are glad that we took a tour package, because it's easier to suit a big group consisting mostly of old folks. When all of us walked together, it can be really inefficient because everyone can have different ideas of how to do things, and we can end up immobile. With a tour package, there is a specified time to report back to the bus at every attraction point. So we can start off together and we can go on our own before going back to the tour bus at the specified time and hopefully have meals together.
However, in Korean restaurants, each table consist of table of 4, so our group of 6 usually have to be split into 4-2. Sometimes we are placed on consecutive tables, other times we are split into different rows. What disappointed me was that we were always the group that is split up into non-consecutive tables. There was another group of 5 and a group of 6 that never had to be split up throughout the whole trip. Only our group get split up all the time, even though they could just put a 2 person group to join us instead of splitting us. If it was really necessary to split up the group of 6, I think it would be fairer to sometimes split us and sometimes the other group, not splitting the same group all the time.
One of the major advantage of a tour package is that transport is all covered, especially in a country working in an unfamiliar language, it can be more challenging to navigate by public transport or walking.
The most irritating thing of going on a tour is that they must bring you to shops for you to spend money. It is really wasting time and money. You can say that the money spent is a choice, but the old folks don't really have a sense of how much their cash is worth in the foreign currency, and they tend to overspend quite a lot. They get very eloquent sales people to sell health products at very inflated prices, using scare tactics to coerce you into parting with your cash. My bf's dad bought the ginseng powder, costing us 1.5 million won - SGD $1800++. Urgh, feel the blood oozing out my heart.
One thing I think that was not very ethical of Hong Thai Travel agency was that they made everyone "upgrade" their tour by adding 90k won/pax (~S$114/pax) to cover a duck meal to replace a meal that was supposed to be self-paid, upgrading the included seafood steamboat with some raw seafood, and adding a DIY soap making into the itinerary. Actually, I accidentally fell asleep when he was saying this, the next thing I knew was that he was collecting so much money from us. When I was wondering what I was paying for, my family told me just pay just pay.. so I paid..
Later on I went to clarify with the tour guide after all, I just paid so much money, shouldn't I be aware of what I was paying for? After understanding the package, I decided to withdraw from the seafood upgrade, since the basic seafood is more than enough for us, and we got a refund of 30k per pax. Actually, the Singapore tour lead had initially told me that the seafood upgrade cost 35k won per pax, so we didn't actually get a full refund from the seafood upgrade. As for the duck meal, I actually would still prefer to pay for what we want to eat, but the tour guide said it would be inconvenient since the whole bus are going to the same place. Same for the DIY soap making, we had little choice but to pay for it because otherwise we are just going to sit outside and wait for everyone else.
So instead of 90k / pax, we paid 60k / pax. At least we didn't pay so much for what we don't want. In the end, we found out from other tour members that they did not eat much of the seafood upgrade, because they don't dare to eat so much raw stuff. I felt heartache for them for paying so much for something they did not like, and were not given the option not to pay for it. The tour guide actually told me not to tell people that we got a partial refund, but I later think it was quite an unethical move. The duck meal was one of the worst meals too, and in the itinerary it was supposed to be self-paid meal. We would not have taken this if we had a choice of what to eat.
At the end of the trip, the photographer will also give everybody a photo album to make you buy some photos. The evil trick was that they did not give 1 album per family. They gave my mum 1 album, my aunt 1 album, my bf's parents 1 album and us 1 album - 4 albums in total. In the end, my mum and aunt paid the full price because they did not haggle, while my bf's parents paid a discounted price. For me, we just bought 1 picture. We later realized that some photos were duplicate, and were awed at the how unethical they can get to suck more money out of us. The worse thing is, the old folks who aren't very good with money just paid them without questioning, without allowing us to say a word more.
Will I patronize Hong Thai again, or recommend it to others? A big NO from me. They were not the cheapest package in the first place, and that is OK, provided the tour is suitable for us. Poor planning of seating arrangement? Maybe the tour lead was young and inexperienced, and it's not a major issue to fuss over. What I could not accept was their unethical ways of pressuring unsuspecting customers to fork out so much money into things they would rather not have. I'm not sure if other tour agencies are like that too.
It is the first time for us to go on a mega family trip like that. Family trips are rare for us in the first place, so I treasure the memories a lot. There were a lot of unhappiness throughout too, but I don't know how better to manage them anyway. Sometimes one-sided efforts aren't enough to make everybody happy. "You need to allow yourself to be happy!", I subtly told my mum one day.
Following the work trip in Montreal, I extended the trip for 4 days for personal travel. I would love to stay longer, but I have already planned for a house warming party for my new house before I knew about the trip.
