For the past few days, I’ve been randomly digging through photos from my solo trip to Seoul in 2018. It started simply because I’ve been thinking about going back to Korea, but the longer I looked through the photos, the more little details started coming back to me. There were even things I only realized now.
For example, I arrived in Korea on November 9, 2018, at around 10 p.m. By then, the trains from Incheon had already stopped running, so my very first night in Korea was spent sleeping on one of the airport benches until morning. I couldn’t really sleep at first, and at some point in the middle of the night I noticed a film crew shooting something not too far from where I was lying down. A movie, a drama, a TV show. I still have no idea what it was.
The trip itself didn’t really have a theme or any particular purpose. I went because I happened to find a cheap promotional airfare, and because back then I was used to travelling alone anyway. I just wanted to walk around, go wherever looked interesting, and photograph whatever made me stop for a second.
Even though I had planned the trip quite thoroughly, I still made plenty of adjustments along the way depending on the weather, the situation on the ground, and simply how I was feeling physically that day. Some changes were practical, while others were completely spontaneous. One day, for example, I randomly went to the World Cup Stadium area, wandered around, and somehow ended up climbing a nearby hill. It wasn’t part of the plan at all, but from up there I got one of the views of Seoul that I remember most clearly: the city stretching out below, mountains in the distance, and trains passing underneath. Looking at the photos now, it’s funny how some of the best parts of that trip came from going slightly off-plan.
I also still remember the kindness of strangers I met along the way.
On a train to Nami Island, a young Korean woman noticed that I looked confused and helped point me in the right direction. Around the World Cup Stadium, there was also an older man who saw me trying to take a photo of myself by balancing my camera on some rocks. He suddenly offered to take the photo for me instead.
It turned out he had worked in Indonesia before, in Semarang, if I remember correctly. His Indonesian was all over the place, but he tried so hard to speak it anyway. It was such a small, random encounter, but for some reason I still remember him very clearly.
I also met a few travellers from Malaysia during the trip. I stayed in touch with some of them on Instagram, and years later I even met one of them again when she came to Jakarta. We still follow each other to this day.
Maybe that’s part of why this trip feels warmer to me now, eight years later. I travelled alone, but apparently I was never completely alone. There were strangers who appeared for a few minutes, helped me, talked to me, took my photo, and then disappeared back into their own lives. There were wrong turns that somehow took me somewhere better. And there are so many photographs that I probably took simply because I thought, this looks nice, but now they feel like tiny pieces of a version of my life that feels very far away.
If I ever make it back to Seoul, the trip will probably be much more purposeful this time. There are places I specifically want to visit now; museums, libraries, neighbourhoods I want to wander through, and a few personal reasons for going that simply didn’t exist back then.
But looking through these photos also reminded me of something: I probably still need to leave some room for having no plans at all.
Because apparently, some of the best parts of Seoul in 2018 didn’t come from an itinerary.
They came from the things I never planned.
The photos below are a few fragments from that trip.
Seoul, November 2018—before I knew that eight years later, I might see the city again in a completely different way.
