Wednesday, May 5

I woke up a bit late, so I had to run to the bus stop to try to catch the bus to Seoul. Unfortunately, I got there right on time, and was told it had come several minutes early that day. The next bus was not for two more hours, so I took a bus to Yangyang instead to try to get an express bus from there. Luckily, I managed to get on a bus without any problem. It took under 3 hours on the bus to get to Seoul, which was a lot faster than I thought it was going to be. The bus ride was uneventful, except I saw a commercial for "Nutcracker!" on the TV, which was the show that the dancers were involved in. It was due to start in Seoul on Saturday.

In Seoul, I headed for a district with a lot of cheap hotels, the Insa-dong area. The hotel I was looking for in particular was nowhere to be found. Luckily, a man on the street told me he knew where it was and said that I should follow him. That began a ten-minute walk away from the area of the hotel, but I figured he must know where he was going. Eventually we stopped at a tourist office, and he said, "Ask them." Well, it was better than not having a hotel, but it certainly was far from where I wanted to stay. Instead, I asked the tourist office to book me a place at a cheap hotel. The found one for about 20 dollars a night with a private bathroom, so I took it. It was decent, and had free internet, and free telephone calls to America, Japan, and Canada. So I called Victoria several times while staying there.

After I checked in, I went to one of the royal palaces, Gyeongbokgung, and saw the end of a changing of the guard ceremony. The royal palace was particularly crowded for a weekday. The palace is mostly a reconstruction, because either the Japanese destroyed most of it or the civil war did. The palace admission is really cheap, about 50 cents. It also includes entry into the national folk museum, which had traditional dress, crafts, and games from the three ancient Korean kingdoms. It was fairly interesting. I found it especially interesting that the Koreans are thought to be the first people to create a metal block printing system. Also, they created their phoenetic writing system in about 800 A.D., representing a great advancement over Chinese characters that the Chinese and Japanese have never figured out to this day (well, the Japanese have a phoenetic system, but consider it inferior).

I felt like some comfort food that night, since I knew I was going to be eating alone. So I bought a big American-style pizza and some ice cream and went crazy while flipping through the 100-odd TV channels they had. The coolest was actually the online gaming channel. They had a network dedicated to video game news and competitions. Korea actually has a whole online gaming league of professionals who do nothing but play video games against each other. This TV channel showed some of those games, which were interesting for me to watch. One game they played a lot of was Starcraft, which I used to play in college, and I knew some of the strategies. It is a fun game, and it was fun to watch as well. I think I watched it a bit too late into the night for my own good.


Thursday, May 6

Because I had stayed up so late the night before, I woke up later than I normally did on the trip, around 10am. Continuing my comfort food theme, I went to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. There were a ton of Dunkin' Donuts all over the place. In general, there were a lot more American restaurants in Korea than in Japan. I don't know if it was because of the prolonged military presence in Korea or what. Victoria and I saw a similar trend in Okinawa, where there were a lot of military bases around.

After breakfast, I called the woman I had met hiking, Kyung Mi Lee. There was no answer, so I went on a tour of another palace. This palace could only be seen as part of a guided tour, so I had to go at one of three times for an English tour. The tour was a bit bland, and I didn't pay attention to the tour guide hardly at all. She kept sprinting ahead as well, which annoyed me. I guess she had to finish by a certain time, though. What I did instead was make friends with the other people on the tour guide. There was a giant church group from somewhere in Seattle, who had their own tour guides as well. There was also a grandmother, mother (Veronica), and daughter(Maya) trio that were quite interesting. The grandmother and mother were from Chile. The mother lived in Japan, and was married to a British man. Because of all this, the girl, who was about 6, spoke English, Spanish, and Japanese. Wow. It must be confusing for her at times, but I think that is the best way to go about doing it. Just learn tons of languages when you are a baby.

I practiced my Spanish some with them, and we got along quite well. After the tour was over, they were going to go to the palace I went to the previous day. However, they started looking for their maps and guidebook, and they realized they were gone. They searched the bathrooms, asked at the ticket stand, etc. but the books were nowhere to be seen. The mother apparently has this problem a lot and tends to misplace things absent-mindedly. Because of this, the grandmother kept all the money and passports.

Around they time they started panicking, I stepped in, and told them I could take them to the tourist information place that was nearby, and figure out where an English book store was so they could get a new guidebook. Since I had been there to book my hotel the day before, it worked out quite well. At the tourist office they got lots of information about Seoul and the rest of Korea, and I circled the largest English book store nearby for them to go to. Meanwhile, I called Kyung Mi again and this time arranged to meet her at the same tourist office in an hour. They were very thankful, so they took me to a nearby restaurant for lunch. This restaurant was very small, but quite interesting on the inside. The chairs were all tree stumps, and the food was incredibly plentiful. We each ordered a meal, and ended up eating only two of them. The fish I had there was delicious. We said goodbye and they left for the palace.

I waited around for awhile, and then the tourist office got a call from Kyung Mi. Apparently she went to the wrong tourist office, so they were going to be late. She brought her sister, Yoon Jung Kim, who still lives in Seoul, with her. Her sister spoke Japanese at about the same level I did, so we used that when I couldn't understand Kyung Mi's broken English. One interesting thing about Korean names is that they all tend to have three names, whereas Japanese only have two names. There are also only a limited number of Korean last names. I read a statistic like 80% of the population has one of 8 last names. The sisters had the two most popular ones, Kim and Lee.

The first place they drove me was to a cable car which led up the only hill in the middle of Seoul, Namsam Park. From the top of the hill, we could see a long way. The most scary thing was not the heights which we were at, but instead the layer of smog that we could see covering the city. It wasn't obvious from the ground, but it looked dirty from the air. Even the sisters commented on it looking bad. We didn't go up the tower, since you could see quite well from the top of the hill. There wasn't that much pretty to see.

After the hill, we decided to take a river boat tour, which mostly consisted of driving through really heavy traffic for over an hour. To make matters worse, we got lost and took the wrong road several times, so we had to keep getting back into heavy traffic. A word of advice for anyone going to Seoul. Do not drive there! Ever! They are crazy drivers and even more rude than the Japanese when driving. We got tickets for a river cruise at sunset and had a drink while waiting. The cruise itself was not that interesting, but it was nice to be by the water and away from the crowded downtown area. On the river I could at least feel a breeze.

When the cruise ended, they dropped me off at my hotel and said goodbye. They were really sweet to me, especially since I was a complete stranger. I was pooped from all this, so I called Victoria and then went to bed.