South Korea

I flew Cathay Pacific from Hong Kong to Seoul in January 2020. The Lotte Hotel World, Gangnam, the palaces, the street food. Seoul in winter was cold and beautiful and relentlessly modern.

The DMZ was surreal. Standing at the border between North and South Korea, looking across the most heavily fortified border in the world. I visited two days before COVID hit Korea. Two months later I’d be back in Boston and the world would be locked down.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last normal trip of that era. The Hong Kong protests had already changed my plans. COVID would change everyone’s. Seoul was the punctuation mark at the end of the most intense stretch of travel I’d ever done.