So I'm cheating and using Chinese for this title instead of Korean ^^. I figure since I went to China on vacation I can bend my rule a bit here hehe. As I had expected, I had no occasion to use Korean in Beijing, BUT funny (and luckily) enough I was able to use it on my way there!
Because I didn't take a direct flight to Beijing, I had to transfer at Dalian, where I ran into quite a few issues...first off our plane entered the airport about 20 minutes late, at 12:20PM. After immigration, I waited for my bags...for about half an hour >_<. That led me to get to the checkout counter at 1PM, at which point I was told that it was too late to get on the 1:30 flight (which I don't think was true...). Regardless, all of us on the Seoul flight were moved to the 3:40PM flight, but at around 3PM the weather suddenly got super foggy and rainy, leaving us stranded in the airport. After a few hours, I tried talked to the lady at the counter, except my Chinese wasn't advanced enough to fully understand her and for her to understand me. Luckily, this woman, who apparently had seen me reading a Korean book, came up to me and asked the title of this post "Do you speak Korean?" I told her yes and after she helped translate, I learned that she was a Choseonjok 조선족 朝鮮族, a Chinese person of North Korean descent. Her accent (different from anything I'd ever heard and somewhat similar to a Chinese accent...somewhat) took me a bit of time to get used to, but through her help, I was able to get a hotel room for the night and realize what was going on in all the chaos! We were woken up at 1AM in the morning to be taken to the airport, where I fell asleep waiting for announcements. Luckily a Chinese girl woke me up, helped me change my ticket to the new flight. We finally arrived in Beijing at 5AM, where the girl helped me call my friend who was originally going to pick me up, figure out where my hostel was and how to get there, and give the information to the employees so that they could send my luggage there (which was delayed about a day). By 7AM I made it to my hostel and promptly passed out for a few hours before going to meet Ian!