Travel stories: Losing my passport for the second time – Seoul edition

I spent April and July in South Korea this year, mostly in Seoul. I loved it, and Seoul might be my favorite city in the world – I’ll talk more about why another time, but one of my “fun” travel stories is losing my passport there back in 2018. During my world tour that year, my trip partner and I had a week in a nice hotel in the middle of the city thanks to my points and miles obsession. It was one of my favorite stops – the hotel was great, and I loved that the city was clean, safe, and convenient. Plus there’s a special place in my stomach for Korean food.

On our last full day, we had dinner at a highly-recommended beef BBQ restaurant, grabbed some frozen yogurt across the street for dessert, then picked up a few things from a convenience store on our way back to the hotel. After a subway ride, we were back at the hotel and in the hallway when, for some reason that I don’t remember, I realized that I didn’t know where my passport was. I had brought it along just in case we wanted to do any tax-free shopping. We searched our pockets – nothing. Maybe I put it in the convenience store bag with the sodas for some reason? 

“Where’s the bag…”

“You had it…”

“No, you had it…”

“Great.”

Whatever, I figured it couldn’t have been in there anyway. There’s no good reason I would’ve put my passport in a plastic convenience store bag. Then I remembered that I had emptied my pockets looking for a receipt while we were in the frozen yogurt place (I think having a receipt from the BBQ place gave us a discount or something). I must’ve dropped it there.

I went downstairs and asked the hotel concierge to call the yogurt shop to ask if it was there. Not there. She called the restaurant too, just in case. Nothing. I figured it was on the floor somewhere over there and nobody had seen it yet. Or at worst, it was on the ground somewhere outside nearby. The honor system is pretty solid in South Korea – I’d heard plenty of stories about people dropping or leaving things behind and coming back hours later to find them untouched. I took a solo trip back to the area and retraced my steps.

A bunch of walking around later, I still had no passport. My last chance was finding out what happened to the bag of drinks. I figured we must’ve left it in the subway station since we sat down on a bench while waiting for the train. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, and it’s gotta be there, right? Nobody would’ve messed with a bag of sodas. I made my way back to the exact bench we were at…nada. Damnit. What now?

We were flying out the next morning, and there’s no way I would’ve had time to get a temporary passport from the embassy. I guess I could ask if the subway security station would check out the security camera footage? I wasn’t gonna hold my breath, though. If it was anything like the U.S., it’d be a whole bureaucratic/privacy issue to look at security tapes – there’s no way it would get done in time, and who knows if that’s even where my passport was. I stopped by the security office, just in case.

There weren’t any English speakers around and, not that I know a lot now, back then my Korean consisted of “please give me”, “thank you”, “where’s the restroom”, and “do you speak English?”. Using a translation app on my phone, I tried to explain what happened, and thankfully they understood whatever broken Korean my app surely gave me. I can’t tell you how surprised I was when, without batting an eye, they walked me back to the security camera TVs and started browsing through the tapes. After a few minutes of searching, we find what we’re looking for – the two of us walking into frame and sitting down on a bench, black plastic bag in-hand. I won’t say whose hand it was in…but it wasn’t mine. 🙂

The train arrives, I stand up just a few moments before she does, and onto the train we go, leaving one black plastic bag filled with sodas and maybe a United States passport alone on the bench. Minutes later, an older man sits down next to it, looks around, peeks in the bag, and brings it with him onto the next train. Sigh. I’m not really bothered by it – he must’ve figured someone forgot their drinks, assumed nobody was going to come back just for a few sodas, and didn’t want them to go to waste. But now I have no way of knowing whether my passport was in there or not. The officers make some calls, then let me know that the local police are coming to see what they can do. They arrive pretty quickly, get updated on what happened, and ask me to come back with them to the local police station.

English was still in short supply, so I tried calling a couple friends back in L.A. who speak Korean, but it was maybe 2-3AM PST, so no-go there. Thankfully, the officers were able to get a translator on the phone who explained the deal: The older man who picked up our bag was a senior citizen who gets free subway rides through a Korean Social Security-type program, which meant they had access to his personal information. They knew this because they were able to backtrack him on video and cross-reference times in their system to see when and what transit card he used to enter the subway. Not only did they know who he was, they knew from his entry and exit times that he used the subway at consistent times every day. Back to my issue, the official route was filling out paperwork and going through a judge to be legally allowed to contact the guy at home. But that would take time, and they knew I needed my passport by the next day. Instead, they proposed that we tell the security office at his home subway station to look out for him and go from there. The police officers took me back to the hotel, and all we could do was wait.

We wake up to our hotel room phone ringing at 7am. “Hi, this is the front desk. There’s a police detective here with your passport.” Whaaaaaaat!!? I race downstairs to the front desk to find him holding my passport and a plastic bag. The front desk translates that I just need to sign a piece of paper saying that I got my lost item back. I wish I had asked for more of the story, but I was just happy to have my passport back. I still don’t know why I put my passport in that bag. Here’s the funniest part of it all, though: the detective also hands me a plastic bag with my drinks in it, but it’s a white bag now. I don’t know exactly how it all went, but this is what I like to think happened: The guy gets home, takes the drinks out, and realizes my passport is inside the bag. He thinks about what to do, throws my drinks back into another bag, and brings it all to a police station, where it finds its way back to me.

I’ve heard at least a few people say that, while they’re generally helpful, I got a bit lucky with how above-and-beyond the security and police officers went for me. Regardless, it was one of those cool humans-are-still-nice experiences that I won’t forget.