Well, I had hoped that I would survive in Korea without resorting to any Western food, but I’m afraid my enthusiasm for kim chee started to wear off this morning. I can now smell kim chee whenever I walk into a shop or small room. They eat it with everything.
Seoul has a huge number of Outback Steakhouses, which kind of concerns me as to what they think of Australian food. We went there for dinner tonight and the steaks were really delicious. You learn something everyday, and today was no exception. I had no idea that kim chee has an Australian link. The Outback Steakhouse serves a Kakadu Steak, which comes with a special kim chee sauce and Korean style pickles. The authenticity of American chain restaurants can never be questioned, especially when you are dining up the road from an American army base.
The remainder of the day was spent climbing some small hills around the city and hanging out in coffee shops again. I also experienced a rather unpleasant peak hour experience on the subway trains – packed in like sardines. We are very spoilt back in Sydney when we complain about overcrowding on public transport. The locals in Korea have a very different concept of personal space in public transport, to the point where you can hardly breath.
So we are finally moving out of the $20 a night guest house tonight – flying down to Hong Kong tomorrow to catch up with friends and some retail therapy. I am looking forward to some warmer weather and some nice hotels later in the week in Malaysia.
Overall impressions of Korea have been relly good. Getting around the city has been a breeze as the public transport is well priced and very well sign posted, even on the buses. I think I managed to break my travel card today, as it kept setting off alarms on the subway barriers. I went up to the counter and started to explain “Yeah, but no, but yeah, I just refilled my ticket and the ticket machine made a beeping noise, so I didn’t know what to do, and…” - this is a good way of getting free travel all over the country, as the people in the train station barriers do not know how to handle Vicki Pollard situtations. They just open the gate and let you through.
I think Jikon is coming up here next year, so hopefully I’ll get to travel around the countryside a little bit. The Koreans really look after the old palaces and historic sites, which date back over 1000 years. I’ve also found that the locals are really helpful, even when you can’t speak the local lingo.
Categories: Korea · travel
My ipod still hasn’t turned up, so I will need to get a new one in Hong Kong on Thursday.
Day two in Seoul was rather good. The weather was all misty this morning, and it was rather cool all day – about 14 degrees.
I started the day by myself, as Jikon had to work. I went down to the big market in the centre of town, and succeeded in my mission to find a towel after an extensive sign-language conversation. The guy in the stall was ever so helpful, as he had to go to one of his mate’s shops to source a full sized towel for me, and it only cost about $7. I then proceeded to get completely lost in the huge labyrinth of underground shops that runs through the centre of Seoul. I think there must be many people who just wander round and round. It kind of felt like an urban version of the Blairwitch Project, crossed with Alice in Wonderland – I swear that I kept passing the same shop about 6 times on order to locate the one and only Krispy Kreme Donut shop in Korea. I considered buying a loaf of bread and dropping bits along the tunnels in order to determine if I was going around in circles. Everything is written in Korean, and the malls run underneath all the roads. Jikon said it would be easy to find Krispy Creme Donuts, (probably by following all the fat Americans from the local army base). I did eventually find it and I am pleased to confirm that I did not buy any donuts.
We did more walking around the city and went off to Changdeokgung palace in the afternoon. This palace was pretty similar to the one from yesterday, except that it had huge gardens that were ablaze with the colour of autumn leaves. The Korean king built the second palace, just in case something bad happened to the first palace. It’s good to see that they had good business continuity planning, although the back up site is only located a couple of miles from the original palace – this unfortunate piece of bad planning seems to have worked in the favour of the Japanese who have attacked and plundered this palaces whenever the opportunity arose. They are still rebuilding both palaces since the last attacks in WWII.
We had a great evening down in MyeoungDong, quite a kewl area with lots of young people and blocks and blocks of shops, pubs and restaurants. Dinner as even better tonight, as we managed to find a place that had an english menu. Once again, the restaurant had lots of gas pipes all over the floor and ceiling, and the food was cooked at the table. The chicken was mixed with some herbs and kimchee and heaps of rice. It ended up like a Spanish paella – really tasty.
Categories: Korea · travel
