Day 0 begins around 3pm as we exit the plane in Incheon, and slowly regain control of our bones and muscles from the flight. We went through customs and a final security check and we were outside the terminal of the airport. I went to the currency exchange and became a 6 figure man carrying 100,000 WON before we took an arrival picture and loaded onto the bus. It was about 90 minutes to the hotel, and our ‘tour-guide’ Rob was feeding us assorted facts and details to notice along the way (such as 99% of cars being white/gray/black). Another interesting thing I quickly noticed was that many of the sky-scraper apartment buildings were surrounded by 2-3 identical ones, whereas office buildings were often more aesthetic and unique. Rob described it with a ‘parts of a whole’ mentality, where the collective society is usually seen as more vital than the individuality (hence the uniformity of cars/homes).

When we arrived at the hotel, we had to walk a few blocks as the streets were blocked off for the festival (we will return to this soon). Once we went up to the room, we (Tilman and I) could not figure out how to turn the lights on, but I found out you had to put your keycard in a slot by the door to get power to the room (it makes a satisfying start-up noise when you do so as a bonus). We then went to a program start dinner, passing the festival again which had woman in traditional Korean clothing dancing on the stage. Dinner featured all sorts of traditional Korean dishes that I could not name or tell you what was in them. I ate something I thought was ham just to be informed it was in fact duck, so I’ve already tried a fair share of new things.

After dinner, however, is when the day really peaked. We were departing from the hotel in a small group of 5 at around 8 to walk around and we began in the direction of the festival (which was maybe 100 feet from the hotel). To our amazement, all the traditional dancers were off the stage and in the crowd, and a DJ was on stage running pyrotechnics with an EDM setlist as the whole crowd jumped around dancing. We moved in a little closer to the outskirts of the crowd and began to dance a little bit, but once we hopped on a conga line that broke up right in the center, we were in too deep and it was time for action. The DJ counts “1, 2, 1 2 3 4!” as the beat drops and we explode with the crowd as flames burst from the stage. Once he finished, the traditional dancers came back up on the stage, this time leading a Just-Dance style dance-along for the whole crowd as a more modern k-pop song plays. We follow along and dance with the locals until the festival ends and the TV’s read “See you in 2020.”