Since I am on a bit of a roll, I thought I would write about the second trip to Korea right now as well. I don't have complete notes for this trip for some reason, so I don't even remember how long it was.

Thursday, July 15

Since I liked Korea so much the first time, Victoria and I decided to take one final trip there before we left Japan. We managed to get a direct flight out of Toyama this time for a reasonable price. The plane was fully booked from Toyama, mostly by one or two large tour groups. We had to get there early to make sure we could get a window seat, since Victoria really wanted one. However, when we got there, no one was manning the desk, so we had to wait a long time before we could check in. At least we were at the front of the line though.

Once we got to Seoul, we found a hotel at an information desk at the airport. We stayed at the YMCA in Insadong, near where I had been last time. I knew the area well, so I already knew where the YMCA was. The price was a bit higher ($60), since it was summer. However, the room was not really that nice. It could have been a lot cleaner. I would've gone to the same small place as last time, but they didn't have A/C. Since we were hungry, we went to a really small, nice restaurant nearby. It was the same one I had been to with the woman, daughter and grandmother who lost their guidebook during a palace tour on my first trip. They had amazing fish the first time, and it was the same this time when Victoria got it. I got a Korean pancake and ate some of Victoria's fish since it was huge. We mostly wandered around the arts stalls and city streets the first day. Then we took a several hour nap, probably because it was pretty hot. I think we ate at Subway for dinner since we had already had a large meal for lunch.


Friday, July 16

We got up early and went to the biggest palace, Gyeungbokgung. We got to see the changing of the guard ceremony, which was pretty cool. Then we looked around some at the palace buildings. However, it was so hot, I didn't want to go out of the shade to see many of them. We went to a nearby sandwich shop to cool off and get lunch. Then we walked past an army of protestors chanting about the war in Iraq (Korea sent troops around that time). Next to these protestors were about 200-300 police in full riot gear, about one per protestor. It was a little scary.

We went into the largest bookstore in Seoul, and bought a magazine. Magazines are generally very overpriced in Japan (10-15 dollars), and it was a better deal in Korea, probably because of the currency.

Since it was hot, we decided to go see a movie. We went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11. It was pretty good, though I think one has to apply a filter to what you see, since it is all from Michael Moore's perspective. It was interesting seeing it surrounded by Koreans. I don't know if they understood everything, or if it was just certain cultural things, but Victoria and I were the only ones laughing at some of the funny parts.

On the way back from the movie theater, we started seeing even more police (several thousand, I believe), lining the entire street, and down every alleyway. They were all in full riot gear with shields and everything. It was very intimidating. After a little bit, we found another group of protesters going down the middle of the street between all the policemen, shouting stuff about the Iraq war. We were hoping they liked Americans. I think all the policemen were really quite scary, not comforting. Reminded me of a police state or something. At least no fighting broke out of anything. It was more of a show of force. Order by intimidation, I think.

We had a very relaxing night of watching tv and eating salads from Subway. I think there must have been a Subway right next door, because otherwise there is no good explanation for why we ate at Subway so much.


Saturday, July 17

We had breakfast at the YMCA (western style, instead of fish and rice), and then went to an art museum. We walked around the city, seeing the City Hall and a nice cathedral.

We tried to eat at a TGIF restaurant, but they were all incredibly packed for lunch, with 1+ hour waits (there were four close to each other). We ended up finding a pizza restaurant that wasn't crowded instead.

After another nap during the hottest part of the day, we went shopping for awhile, and used the internet some. I think for dinner we went back to the restaurant with the good fish. However, we weren't as hungry, so we just ordered a fruit salad and Victoria had some ginger tea. Unfortunately, the fruit salad was a big disaster. It was apples, carrots, and celery, completely drenched in mayonnaise. It was pretty gross, and we didn't eat it all.


Sunday, July 17

One of our goals on this trip was to have a relaxing trip, as well as see stuff. Many of our trips to new cities turn into what I have named "adventure travel," where you want to go see new buildings, museums, etc. This can be quite tiring. So we wanted something that was more like "vacation travel," where we could rest. With this in mind, we decided to skip the more historic places in Korea that we could see, and head to a little beach resort, called Daecheon Beach.

Daecheon Beach has a mud festival every year which is the only really big event it has. Unfortunately, it was the week before we arrived in Korea, so we missed it. It would have been interesting, I am sure. It was very confusing trying to figure out accommodation in Daecheon Beach, because few of the hotels are online, and almost none of them are in English. It wasn't really mentioned that much (or well) in the travel guides I read either.

The problem is the following. There is a city called Daecheon, and a city called Daejon. Sometimes, to make things more confusing, they write the same sounds different ways in Roman-letters (the old way and the new way). This means that 'ch' and 'j' are sometimes interchanged, as well as 'eo' and 'o'. So we had to differentiate between the city, the beach (not next to the city), and this other city that was far away. I basically ended up copying it from the book and showing it to people at the bus stations, because I must not have been saying it right. No one seemed to know where I was asking for. We did eventually find out we needed to go to Poryeong (Boryeong) that is the nearest city to Daecheon Beach. So we took a bus there, and then a taxi to the beach from there, because we were tired of fuffing around with buses.

The beach was a bit of a disappointment. The beach itself was fin: sandy and long. However, it was also very crowded. It wasn't just the beach-goers that made it crowded. Instead there were about a billion people renting or selling things on the beach. You could buy ice cream, balloons, fireworks, etc. For rent they had inner tubes, umbrellas, storage lockers, and small tents. It was difficult to walk on the beach without someone harassing you about will you buy something from them. Lining the beach was a boardwalk, beside which were a billion identical seafood restaurants with fish and other seafood swimming in tanks by the window, ready to be snatched out and diced up for your meal. Behind the restaurants were about a billion identical hotels, all with similar furniture and construction. They all had cheesy names such as the Hotel Titanic, with a picture of Leonardo Di Caprio on it. I think we stayed at Hotel Opera or something like that. It was fine inside, if not a bit overpriced at around 70 dollars a night. We had a real problem with mosquitos inside our room. I don't know what that was about, but they seemed to come from the bathroom, so we shut the door when not in there.

We tried to find some dinner at one of these seafood restaurants, until we realized how expensive they were. Most of them served up Korean-style sashimi, or raw fish. However, that seemed to be mostly what you got: a giant plate of raw fish. For that privilege, it cost something like $50-100 per person. I think you got a pound of fresh fish each. We tried to explain that we wanted cooked fish, like we had in other delicious restaurants in Korea. But no one spoke any English, and we had to leave after being seated, because it was just too awkward. To make things more embarassing, the waitresses seemed to think we thought the price was too high, not that we wanted different food. (The price was too high, but that wasn't the biggest problem.) So they kept offering cheaper and cheaper prices to us. I think it came down to 20 dollars each, which wasn't horrible. But we didn't really want to spend that much on dinner anyway.

We discovered that if we walked down the boardwalk to the end, it wasn't really an end. Instead, there was an older part of the beach resort with non-identical restaurants and more character. They also had rooms in Korean houses for rent. Too bad we didn't know about that, or we would've gone there instead of our hotel. We found a much cheaper delicious restaurant where we had bibinbap, which is rice with egg and tons of delicious Korean vegetables and greens. They pretty much gave us as much as we wanted. We were very full afterwards. I think we paid about $2 each for this, for comparison. It was lucky I can read a Korean menu, because there was no English in this part of town either. I gather few foreigners come here. I don't think I would recommend it to anyway, to be honest.


The Rest of the Trip

The rest of the trip was about three days, but we didn't really do anything that exciting. There is only one story about our stupidity. We brought a lot of clothes and things to Korea to mail home from there. The Korean postal system is much cheaper than Japan's. We could send things home via airmail for the same price as Japanese surface mail. So we packed up some clothing and other things and then carried these heavy boxes two miles to the post office. Unfortunately, we forgot something, and I had to run back to the hotel. Once I got back, we continued on to the post office to find out it had just closed 5 minutes earlier. So we had to carry the boxes back and try again the next day. It was very silly though.

After a couple of relaxing days on the beach, we went back to Seoul and flew back to Toyama.

A couple of comments on Korea. I really enjoyed it a lot both times I went. It was much cheaper than Japan, but fairly similar in many ways. It definitely had more American influence than most places in Japan (barring Okinawa). There were tons of American stores and restaurants.

The food is amazing at most Korean restaurants, and Korean barbeque is to die for. They are also very generous with side dishes. When you order one main course, you always get rice, soup, and many vegetables dishes. If you want more of something, they will normally give it to you for free. They also use metal chopsticks in Korea, which are more environmentally friendly than the wooden ones in Japan. Koreans just seem like the most sensible Asian nation. First, they give you a spoon when you have soup. Japanese people just drink out of the bowl. They used to use Chinese characters, but now most use hanguel, a phonetic method of writing, which is so easy and consistent that I learnt 80% of it in two days.

Korean drivers were really scary though, and seemed intent on killing people. I read somewhere they have the worst accident record for a modern country.

So, as long as you don't rent a car, you should have a wonderful trip to Korea. I recommend Gyeongju as my favorite place in Korea.

First Korea trip, part 3?

Sorry it has been so long since I wrote about the first parts of the Korea trip. Kept forgetting about it.

Friday, May 7

I got up early that morning and headed over to the large palace I had been to earlier. On the grounds there, every Friday, they give out passes to go tour Dae Wa Haeng, the Blue House. It is the Korean equivalent of the White House. Since the President lives there, I had to show my passport (I can only imagine North Koreans are not allowed on the tour), and we were only allowed on the grounds and peripheral buildings. We weren't allowed to take photographs except in one particular area, I guess for security concerns. The house is surrounded by beautiful gardens, and lots of security forces. We also went inside a banquet hall where heads of state are entertained. It was a neat experience, since visits are so limited. Apparently in the 90s, security forces arrested a crack army team from North Korea that had snuck over the border in the gardens. They were on a mission to assassinate the president, and were detected just in time. Nothing that exciting happened on our tour though.

Afterwards, I went shopping for some presents, and found some nice Korean handicrafts. I also wandered around some crazy markets looking for stamps, among other things. I asked people where I might find stamp stores, and they manage to point me to a place near my hotel. I went there, and was directed back to the original place I was looking. The stores were underground about 100 meters from where I first asked. Unfortunately, the stamp stores mostly had new stamps, not used ones. 80% of the store owners didn't know Japanese or English, so that didn't help things either. One storekeeper gave me some cancelled Korean stamps for free, so he became my favorite.

I eventually wandered around until I found the train station, which was new and modern. I bought tickets for my trip on Saturday back to Pusan, the port city with the hydrofoil to Japan. On my way back, I stopped off at the newly renovated City Hall courtyard. They were having a laser light show there to celebrate the renovation. It used to be an ugly traffic circle, but they turned it into a nice park area. The light show was delayed by about 30 minutes, and then was disappointingly short. It was only about 3 minutes long. Then it kept repeating itself. They mostly shown lights onto the city hall, plastering a fake Roman facade on it, and making the city hall appear to tilt, etc. It was a bit of a disappointment, so I went back to the hotel after 10 minutes.


Saturday, May 8

The train I got a seat on was the new Korean bullet train, the KTX, which is the first bullet train in Korea. It runs from Seoul in the northwest to Pusan in the southeast, and it slightly slower than the trains in Japan. However, it cost about 1/10 of the bullet trains in Japan, so who am I to complain. One thing about the train was that the seats were fixed, so half of them were backwards (including my seat), and they were much more narrow than the Japanese ones, which are very wide and comfortable. However, they did have luggage storage space, which the Japanese trains don't have. My train was fully booked, so I was a bit cramped.

When we got to Pusan, I went back to the same guesthouse I had been in before, since I knew where it was and that it was clean and cheap. Unfortunately, there were no more Japanese people there. Actually, I was the only person at all, so it was a bit lonely. I had a plan to go visit some church by the ocean, but I think I gave it up when the bus never came. Instead I went downtown and looked around the shopping area there. I thought I might see a movie, but the only movies playing were "The Passion" and a bunch of Korean movies, so I didn't see anything. Instead I just got some things that looked like french fries (they were actually some strange Korean vegetable like a potato), and some other stall food from street vendors. Eventually I just went back to the hotel, as I had to get up early the next morning. Probably my least exciting day.


Sunday, May 9

I woke up at 6am and made it to the ferry on time. This time, the ferry was mostly empty, whereas it was full when I came across. I think the end of Golden Week, the Japanese holiday period, is to blame.

The only notable thing about the ferry ride was after I went through immigration, but before I boarded, there were souvenir shops selling chocolates and other goods. I thought I would pick up some omiyage for my teachers since I had some extra Korean coins left. The price on the box of 20 plain chocolates I found said 5,000. So, I gave the woman a 5,000 Korean won bill ($5). Then she says, no it is yen (about 50 dollars!). Nothing would ever have cost me that much in Korea. I think my hotel in Seoul was about $25. I just said something to her about extortionist prices, and left. The reason it was so expensive is because Japanese people have to buy gifts for their co-workers when they go away (omiyage). In Japan omiyage is overpriced, but not that much. Mostly I think this was to try to extra money out of Japanese people who had forgotten to buy stuff in the city. In the city, I imagine the same thing was about $2. Since I was not Japanese, I didn't care that I didn't buy an omiyage. I just do it sometimes as a treat for the other teachers. But I wasn't going to spend that much money on a small box of plain chocolates.

Then there were the long train rides back to Toyama, which were uneventful. Thus ended Korea trip 1.

Victoria and I went up to Sheffield on Saturday for a very long day of looking at apartments. We were pretty sure we wanted something close to downtown, so I would not have a long commute to work. Unfortunately, most of the estate agents were fully booked, so we could not make many viewing appointments. Our plan was that if we didn't find somewhere we liked, I would come up some other time this week.

Our first stop was a castle in Sheffield. It was about 15 minutes from the city center area, but unfortunately, you had to walk through some not very nice areas close to the station to get there. There is also a tram, but we were looking for a place we could walk to. However, the apartments are all totally brand new and really nice. The original castle structure is there, but the inside has been renovated into small apartments. The community is gated, and there were nice gardens in the area. The big downside though, was that there were no shops or restaurants of any kind nearby. So, you pretty much have to take the tram to get anywhere, do shopping, etc. It was very peaceful and had great views of the city though.

The other place we looked at was very close (2 small blocks away) to the central shopping district in Sheffield. The flat is in a converted lawyer's office. It is really spacious and much more convenient to work (5-10 minutes walk). We both liked it more than the other one, because it was better decorated and had more space. A local newspaper office is one block away, and Victoria is hoping to get some work experience there. The landlord was nice, and very talkative. I gather he owns mostly commercial properties in the area, and is only starting to branch out into residential properties.

We liked it so much we decided to take it, so we now have an apartment in Sheffield. There are only two drawbacks to this apartment. We don't have a private washing machine (it's shared by five flats, and is coin-operated), and the bedroom needs more storage space, especially a wardrobe. The bed also didn't look that big. Hopefully we can buy something not too expensive to fix some of the problems, though the washing machine will still be a problem.

This next weekend we will be going to Copenhagen Friday-Monday, and then I will start work Tuesday morning in Sheffield.

Well, I have returned to England safely. It is now 5am on Tuesday, and somehow I have just woken up. My sleep schedule is a little off, but it doesn't seem too bad. I went to bed at 10pm, which would be a normal time. I expected I might wake up much earlier, like at 1am or something. If I can go to bed around 10 tonight as well, that would be great.

I didn't have any problems entering the UK with my new work visa. Seems like everything is finally in order.

The good news is that everything has been approved for my new job. I have a work visa and will be flying to England on Sunday. I am really excited about going back to work again. I will be working as an e-learning adviser at Sheffield Hallam University, in Sheffield. I will work closely with professors, helping them create websites, discussion groups, and use other features of Blackboard, a program designed to make it easier to use technology in the classroom.

Another piece of good news is that I have managed to buy a ticket back to England for $400, which is much better than the $1000-2000 prices I was seeing originally.

The only bad news is the my external hard drive died on me, so I lost some of my backed up data, but not too much.

Since I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, I thought I would post an update. Victoria has come and gone, and it was fantastic having her here. We went to Charleston, SC, and to Washington, DC. It seemed like we were really busy, but it was still pretty relaxing as well.

Unfortunately my trip back to England has been delayed due to paperwork issues. This meant I missed my flight and will have to purchase a new ticket, as the old one was non-exchangeable. The good news is that there is no specific date I have to wait for, so I can buy a ticket as soon as I have my passport back.

I will post something once I have my visa and have started work in the UK.