In mid-April, I attended my first overseas concert, which was EXO's 2024 'ONE' fan-meeting. I found out about the fan-meeting pretty last minute while browsing the Melon Ticket website, which is a popular ticket platform in Korea for concerts, musicals, and theater events (another popular platform in Interpark Global). Most of the good seats were all gone, so my friend and I had no choice but to get tickets for the seats in the back of the arena. Regardless, I was super stoked because I'm huge fan of EXO and their songs!
The venue was the INSPIRE Arena, which is a part of the INSPIRE Entertainment Resort, a relatively new hotel that opened just last year. The hotel is located in Incheon, so the commute to get there was over an hour. We were initially on schedule, but our taxi driver accidentally took a wrong turn, which meant that he had to continue down the really long road that we were on until he could circle around again. The hotel is near the Incheon Airport so you can imagine that the roads are super long. This ate up a lot of our time, and we ended up having to rush, which I was pretty bummed about because I wanted to check out the hotel. I took a couple of pictures while running through the hotel, but they aren't great and are mostly blurry lol.
When we got to where the ticket office was, the place was absolutely packed with people. At a certain point, we were convinced that we wouldn't be able to get to our seats on time with how long the line was. While in line, I noticed that there was some sort of dress code amongst the fans, as almost everyone was wearing blue. They apparently announced on Twitter that the dress code would be sky blue. My friend just so happened to be wearing a light blue button-up shirt, so she fit right in, but I was unfortunately wearing a light grey sweatshirt. The ticket booths were organized alphabetically by first names (not last names, which I found unusual). There were physical tickets, which were kept in green Melon (the ticketing platform) envelopes, different from how concerts in the U.S. usually use QR codes for entry. After exactly an hour, we made it inside the venue, with only three minutes until the show started.
Overall, the fan-meeting was amazing, and I was so happy that they performed so many of my favorite songs. The games that they played were also really entertaining and fun. Since it's a fan-meeting, the event was on the shorter side, but it was such a surreal experience to see EXO live. If you're into K-Pop, I seriously advise regularly checking the popular ticketing websites (Interpark, Melon, and Yes24 - these are like the big three) for any upcoming concerts that you might be interested in attending. Also keep in mind the ticket sales open dates and time, especially for more popular groups/artists. If you really want to attend and the group/artist is popular, consider purchasing a membership (if available), which will allow you to purchase tickets at an earlier date.
If you want to purchase concert merchandise, get there a couple hours early. If you get there last minute like I did, the popular merch will likely be sold out and lines may be super long.
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