Saturday, October 4, 2008
Addendum to the Previous Post
Korea Part I
Ok so it’s time for another exciting blog post!!! I wasn’t allowed to leave my room today because I was told someone was going to stop by the fix the internet that had been working flawlessly until today and possibly the AC as well. Of course, no one showed up and I sat in my room all day for the 2nd day in a row! WOOHOOOO!!!! Anyway, we’re going to take a break China and Wuxiness to talk about Korea (because I know hearing about my trip there will be the highlight of everyone’s week). As you can tell from the title of this post, all was not chipper in Korealand which is somewhat of a recurring theme of my trip there.
To begin, one of the reasons why I went is that I need to have a layover somewhere and since I’d never been to Seoul it seemed like a cool place to go. I also (incorrectly) assumed that alot of people there would speak a passable English, you know what with American troops being on their soil for the past 50 or so years and Seoul being a city of around 10 million people. Let’s just say Ume was made a complete ass of through my assumption. Most people barely spoke any English and I only learned three words of Korean (‘hello’ ‘thank you’ and ‘yes’, which I guess would’ve been sufficient if I’d gone searching for a lady or the night, but not much else). M
ost of my communication with people came in from of puzzled looks, and me pointing at things. Great times.
The flight to Korea could’ve been worse. I got an aisle seat in the last row of the plane, but I had no one sitting next to me, which was AWESOME. I got to stretch out a bit and relax. Unfortunately, I had a hard time working the console system in front of me. However, I was able to watch the majority of Iron Man, Kung Fu Panda, and some other movies. Mst importantly, I was able to watch ALL of Step Up 2: The Streets. I’m not sure if I liked that or the first o
ne better. SOme of the dancing scenes seemed kinda forced, which was unfortunate. Look for that on most critics Best of... lists at the end of the year. Turbulence was minimal until the end, when I almost shat myself as we flew over Russia. Not good times at all. We got in around the same time as a plane from Ulan Batar so we got to share our baggage claim with the damn Mongols. Unfortunately the Great Wall doesn’t extend far enough north to protect Korea... After catching a cab into the city with a doctored meter (huzzah for paying twice the suggested price for a ride into Seoul!), I got the my hotel at 6am and woke up the front desk person.... who proceeded to speak no English. Through gestures and grunts, I find out I can’t check in until the afternoon. I ask if I can leave my mountainous bags at the hotel, he says yes. Then we just stand there looking at each other for a minute. So I ask him agai
n, and he says yes, then points behind me to the wall in the lobby. Apparently that’s where I was supposed to leave my bags. So I took my laptop out of its case and out it in my backpack, then went out to wand
er, which would become a theme of the trip. After a stop in an internet cafe and three hours of wandering, I was hungry, but too scared to enter a Korean restaurant, so I ate at McDonald’s for breakfast (somehow I lucked into picking a hotel that had a 24/7 McDonald’s a one minute walk away... awesome!).
I finally decided to go to a museum and wound up at a former imperial palace of Korea called Gyeongbokgung (kinda a mouthful...). It was pretty sweet. They had a bunch of old Korean artifacts and such, including the first two cars in Korea. I’m not sure if I was supposed to be taking pictures in there, but I hid my camera well enough so I didn’t get in trouble. Even if I’d been kicked out, admission was free!!! It’s the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Korea (ROK, not to be confused with DPRK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), so a bunch of places weren’t charging admission. After walking around the palace grounds
for awhile and seeing a changing of the guard ceremony, I left and went to find some lunch.
My hotel was in the Insadong neighborhood, so I walked around there looking for a suitable place to eat. This is the first incident of me getting severely lost. Only major streets and some alleys have names in Seoul. Unfortunately, most of the city consists of small neighborhoods with small alleys, so it was nearly impossible to navigate. I had a Lonely Planet travel guide with me, but it could only do so much and admitted such. After trying in vain for 30 minutes to find a sp
ecific restaurant, I just started walking down alleys, looking for a place with pictures and perhaps an English language menu. I finally got tired of that (once again I was being a little bitch and was too scared to enter a freaking restaurant) and entered a busy place. They say me and I ordered sam gyup sal, a fatty pork dish that was recommended by one Mustaffa. It was absolutely delicious.
As you can see from that photo, ordering one dish also brought out six side dishes. In Korea, apparently no one eats alone in restaurants (except for me...), so I felt like a douche for the whole trip because I’d have so much food on my table but could barely eat half of it. So after shoving as much food into my face as possible, I paid and left (at this point I’d like to talk about currency. A quick and dirty way to convert is that 1000 won is about $1 US, which made things easier. However, they don’t have anything above a 10,000 won bill, so you have to carry a stack of money wherever you go, since while Seoul isn’t quite as expensive as Tokyo, it also isn’t really cheap). I decided to go back to my hotel and check in, before going to my next stop on the day: the Seodaemun Prison! They let me check in after making a copy of my passport (which is apparently illegal. I didn’t know that. I personally made three before I left the country in case something happens [which is a good thing-- the school currently has mine and then the PSB will need it for a week to process my reside
nce permit....], and there have been innumerable copies made by people in Korea and China. Hopefully there will be no fake me’s running around, but we’ll see). So I got up to my room turned on some Olympic baseball and figured I had like 45 minutes before I left the room, which meant it was nap time!!! For those of you whom I talked to before leaving, you already know about my 15 minute nap on the floor which turned into 2 hours sleeping on the floor, even though there were comfy chairs literally inches away from me. So, I have a tendency to sleep. This 45 minute nap turned into 5 and a half hours. oops.
At this point I was scrambling because I didn’t want to waste the day. SO i quickly showered and left the room so I could go to the Seoul Tower before it closed, to get a nice view of Seoul at night, then I’d eat some dinner. I got off the train at Seoul Station and started walking in the general direction of the tower because, of course, I didn’t want to take a cab because I couldn’t communicate, and I didn’t know if a bus went up there. The Seoul Tower is the highest point in Seoul, so you’d think it’d be easy to find. That assumption would make you wrong. Like me. After walking close to an hour uphill, and still nowhere near the tower (and on a dark, deserted street at like 10pm, I decided to call it a night and turn around so I could grab some food then head back to the hotel. Of course, I’m nowhere near a restaurant at this point. I had to walk all the way back to the station, but then I got confused and went on a train heading the
wrong direction (this is also the subway ride where I walked on the train and three conversations in my general vicinity just stopped so people could stare at me. I thought foreigners were alot more common in Seoul than they apparently are. I can’t count how many blatant stares I got from people. It’s seriously a homogenous society). I had to get off at the next station when I realized I was going the wrong way, then get back on the train. I got off at Jonggak Station and got lost leaving (this was before I realized all the exits were numbered and pointed in specific directions depending on where you wanted to go. I just left at the first exit and had no clue where I was). I entered a neighborhood with a bunch of bright lights, hoping to find a decent place to eat. There were alot of bars and young people around, and after wandering for a good 20 minutes I stumbled upon BBQ Chicken, another Mustaffa recommendation!!! I walked in and was handed a menu completely in Korean which I couldn’t read. Awesome. So after a few minutes of struggling, a water came over. She didn’t speak English but she helped me, and I was able to order fried chicken and a beer. Of course, I ordered a whole fired chicken (pictured below), which I of course could not finish. It was awfully tasty though!
Anyway, I finally figured out where I was and stumbled back to my room for the night. I noticed my camera was starting to run low on battery, so I looked in my colossal bags for my charger which is how I found out I packed the wrong camera charger. Instead of taking the correct one, I took the charger from my old camera. That I lost. Last Year. In China. I figured I could last half of the next day (while I’d be at the National Museum of Korea), then replace the battery on my way to Seodaumun Prison. Lo and behold, I was wrong. Stay tuned for the next installment of my Korean adventure entitled “Why the Chinese Are Better Capitalists Than the South Koreans”! Coming Soon!
P.S. I’ve officially set a new record for posts in a year! Huzzah! And either China has blocked Blogger or my interweb has gone out again!