Korea Day 6 - The Birds

We were leaving Ulleungdo later in the day but first we wanted to take a tour around the island. We had tried to go on one the previous day but it was apparently run mostly in the morning. I say apparently since almost no one on the island spoke any English so there was a lot of pointing involved in any communication we had to do. The boat for the tour was fairly big with an inside area without any real chairs and an outside deck. I spent the whole time on the deck but it looked like there were a lot of Korean people just happy to hang out on the floor in the enclosed area. They sold some types of snacks on the ship which seemed to be less for people and more for the flock of seagulls that followed the boat. Maybe I had accidentally gotten on the seagull feeding cruise instead of the sightseeing one since that's all people seemed to be doing. I immediately disliked this since I was sure people were going to get pooped on by the birds. And sure enough after not too long people started getting hit. Even that wouldn't have been so bad had I not spent the whole time sure that sooner or later I was going to get hit by the birds as well. There were also some people taking pictures, though I think most of the people looked at the birds a hell of a lot more than they looked at the scenery.

One man though had a video camera on a tripod and seemed to be literally recording every second of the voyage around the island for what I believe must be his entry to the worst vacation movie ever contest. The island itself was very pretty basically being a few peaks covered in trees rising out of the water. There was also a smaller flat island off the coast which was some sort of nature preserve, though it didn't seem like much lived there. By far the most interesting thing to happen on the trip was what one guy kept trying to do to the birds. He would hold up a very small piece of food with one hand, and when a seagull would try to fly down and get it he would attempt to grab it with his free hand. The first few times this didn't work so well and I became convinced that he really couldn't do it. But finally he grabbed just at the right moment and snagged a bird right out of the air. He held it for a moment by its wings as the terrified bird squawked and tried to bite him. He held it up to show it proudly to the amazed crowd as a smiled happy with his victory over the bird. After a moment he threw it back where it continued to fly. Later in the trip he managed to do it again, and this time I was watching him and managed to get some pictures.

After we got off the boat I was mostly just grateful that the seagulls had missed me. We went back to the hotel to get our stuff and we couldn't find anyone else around. We looked for a while for someone to give the key to, we had already payed yesterday. We finally just left the key in the room and closed the door. We got on the boat back for the mainland and I don't know if it was just luck or what but I wasn't nearly as sick this time. When we got back we just went to stay in the same hotel as before. We were able to accomplish it this time without wrestling the old man. We went out and found a restaurant that actually had a picture menu for once. The problem was the food we both ordered was unbelievable spicy. That was compounded by the fact that the beer they had was terrible and they didn't seem to have any rice. We were both quite hungry so we basically just sat their for an hour and really slowly and painfully ate our way through it.

Korea Day 5 - The Dokdo Defense Squad

We woke up pretty early to get to the boat. I was glad that we already had tickets since there were a ton of Korean people there by the time we arrived. They had us fill out some extra forms since I think we were the only foreigners on the boat. Ulleungdo it seems besides being a large squid catching port is the main stopping off point for people going to the even more remote island of Dokdo. Dokdo an uninhabitable spit of land somewhere in between Korea and Japan has been the focus of intense resentment between Korea and Japan. Both sides claim ancient connection to the island based on old maps showing that it existed, no one really ever lived there of course. When the Japanese invaded and took over Korea one of the first things they did was to have the Vichy Korean government sign over the island to Japan. At the height of World War II Japan controlled basically all of South East Asia, including places like China, Korea. While Germany in the years following the second world war made great efforts to apologies for and recognize the horrific crimes committed the Japanese basically adopted the attitude of, "well shit happened." Japanese school textbooks routinely downplay some of the more horrific acts committed by the Japanese, and they did some really horrible stuff, and leaders of Japan have refused to stop paying respects at a memorial for the Japanese war dead the includes the remains of several high level war criminals.

The net result of all this is that countries like China and Korea still feel a lasting bitterness toward the Japanese. I've been asked by Chinese people if Americans still dislike the Japanese because of World War II, but I think when you drop a couple of nuclear weapons on a country it makes it easier to forgive. After the end of World War II Dokdo was though by American commanders who were basically running both countries to be Japanese then Korean until finally the US just decided that this was not really their fight and backed off. There was an incident where an America military training exercise near Dokdo accidentally killed several Korea fishermen, Dokdo is near some valuable fishing grounds another source of tension, and MacArthur had a monument to them built on Dokdo as an apology. Some unknown Japanese people later destroyed the monument prompting a build up of military ships in the area. Dokdo has been run by Korea for the last number of years, North Korea has even come out and supported the Souths claim to the island against the Japanese. Until a few years ago tourist could not actually go to the island but recently the government has started allowing people to visit the island. Actually they go on a several hour boat ride for just the chance to land on the island as the weather is sometimes too bad for the boats to dock.

While the Japanese consider this one of a number of small territorial disputes it has with its neighbors the Koreans consider it a matter of national pride. I heard several old school teachers and retired writers talk about defending Dokdo to the death. The ferry we were on was almost entirely comprised of retirees most of whom were heading to Dokdo. A few of the more intrepid wondered if we were there for the same reason. The boat ride which was about three hours long on a hydrofoil made me quite sea sick. The waves weren't too high but the boat was constantly rocking side to side. Some of the old people managed to sleep though Ken who went to the bathroom said there were a lot of people in there throwing up as well. Some of the elderly even broke out the Soju and did shots despite it being before 10 in the morning. When we finally arrived I was mostly just glad I hadn't thrown up. The port at Ulleungdo was so hidden by rocks and the curve of the island it looked like some pirates retreat. The town its self, one of several small ones on the island, was basically one street that ran from the harbor toward the mountain at the heart of the small island. It was actually really lovely with the small town backed by a peak and fronted by a working squid fishing harbor.

We got off the boat and ignored a few people trying to sell us rooms. They were different though from some of the other people who bothered us as even they spoke no English. We walked up into the town a little realizing pretty quickly that hotels were not exactly well marked. As we were standing around figuring out what to do I saw a few people with bags following one guy up some steps near a house. I suggested that we follow them and they came to what seemed like a series of guest rooms nearby. We signaled to the owners that we wanted a room and after some hand gestures we arrived at a price. Our room was basically one little room with mats that spread out on the floor for us to sleep on. Apparently this is a very traditional style of room in Korea as in the old days only the floors would be heated and by sleeping near the floors you could stay warm. The book said that the system worked so well that there could be ice on the ceiling while people slept comfortably on the floor. After we had paid them they dissipated and we never really saw the owners for the rest of our time there. We went out to get some lunch at a nearby place there was no English or any pictures so we literally just pointed to something written on the wall that had an OK price. It came out pretty good and we set put to explore some of the island.

There was a patch cut out right next to the coast and we walked along it for some time. It was really quite beautiful with a lot of interesting rock formations. We passed several restaurants set up right along the coast for seafood. We finally made it around quite a while to where the patch started up a really big hill. It wasn't a long way but it was quite steep. At the top was a lighthouse that looked over some of the coast and another little town. There were a couple of younger Korean tourists with really fancy camera around their necks. I like my camera fine but the speed with which they were able to take pictures was impressive. Inside the lighthouse was a model of Dokdo which was about as close as we actually got. On the way back we met a young college teacher who spoke English and told us how he liked to travel the world. He had been to some interesting countries in central Asia. It was getting late so we decided to try to find a place for dinner. We had some problems since a few of the restaurants couldn't really deal with us just randomly pointing to things on the menu. Finally we found one that was happy to let us do what we wanted and again the food was pretty good. We ended the day by looking around for a place to use the internet as we needed to finalize plans for our DMZ tours. I wanted the full tour while Ken just wanted to main border area. We asked around for a while looking for an internet cafe, but it seemed the only one had gone out of business years ago. After a bit we stumbled into a pool hall with a computer in the corner and even though we used it for at least thirty minutes they wouldn't take any money from us. Even in this place were people spoke basically no English people were still really nice and helpful.

Korea Day 4 - The National Sport of Korea

The next morning we got up with the intention of going on a tour of the other big palace in Seoul before our train. We had decided the previous day to go to a little island that we just noticed on a map called Ulleungdo. The person at our hotel said he didn't think he had ever heard of a tourist going there which was recommendation enough. To get there we had to take a train to the city of Pohang and then get a boat. The boats only left pretty early in the morning so the plan was to take a train to Pohang at night then catch the boat the next morning. After being in China the ease at which the Korean train system worked was a huge relief. We were able to buy round trip tickets in advanced that even involved a stop in a third city. That right, I was actually able to buy a ticket for a city I was no physically in. Ah, the marvels of modern technology. In the morning though it was raining so we decided not to go on the tour since it would be all outside. Instead we just had lunch at some little place and then walked around a tourist street for a while. It was the sort of stuff you'd expect a lot of hand crafted things and nick knacks. There was one guy selling a flute like instrument which was fairly interesting but I wasn't able to find him later when I was thinking of buying it. We had been having problems with alarms as even though a phone would work OK the fact that we couldn't get a signal meant that our phones ran through all there power really quickly looking for one and would be out of power by the next morning when we needed it.

We went over to the mall we had been in the other day to try and find a portable alarm clock. It was a pretty big mall but we had a really hard time finding what we wanted. When we finally found someone selling them the prices were way too high and we didn't end up buying one. Since we were back in the place with the "e-Sports Stadium" we decided to see what they were up to this time. Unlike last time where the place was mostly empty besides the contestants and crew this time it was packed to the gills and standing room only. The difference was that unlike the previous day when they had been playing some shooter they were now playing Starcraft. Starcraft is basically the national sport of Korea. A computer game created by the US company Blizzard, also the makers of the huge in China World of Warcraft, Starcraft is a game where two players build little soldiers to control resources on a map and then crush the other player. It was a very popular game in the US when it came out too and I played for a number of years, but all that was about a decade ago. While it has essentially faded into obscurity in America Starcaft is still huge in Korea. I've seen videos of whole stadiums packed to watch two people play this game, and the really large crowd we saw was certainly a testimonial to that. I know the game somewhat but was not really able to follow it on the level they play it. There was also a team of announcers who I'm sure helped explain things but were yelling in excited Korea.

We couldn't stay too long as we had to make our train. The train station was much nicer and less crowded than any in China, remember that Seoul is as big a pretty much any Chinese city. The train was nice as were the seats and it never really got crowded. There was even a food car that sold a fairly good sandwich. The train was also a lot quieter as no one loudly listened to music and one train attendant even shushed me and Ken once. Oddly enough no one ever actually checked our tickets the whole time, though they're often only barely checked in China. When we got to Pohang we went down to near where the boat left from and walked around looking at hotels. It was past nine or ten so when we got to the reception of a lot of the hotels the people were sleeping behind the counter. There wasn't exactly a lot of English being spoken in this town but using the book to look up the word for beds helped. I didn't want to stay at the first place since they only had one bigger bed instead of two smaller ones and I don't really like sharing a bed that much. We tried a few other places that had a similar story until we came to the Rich Motel. We found a older Korean man behind the counter who showed us around. We asked about a room with two beds and he brought us to one which was actually a gorgeous room with an extra living room area and a computer. The price was too high though so we asked about a room with one bed. He had that also but it was still more than the other places. We were going to leave when he cut the price down to the same as the other places.

Figuring that we were here and the room was nice we said we'd take it. We went down to the front desk to pay and as we were just about to he cut the price on the room with the double beds again until it was only a little more expensive than the single bed. We agreed and paid. Ken though had left his backpack in the room with one bed and fearing that the door was locked wanted the guy to take us back there. Now we had been communicating all this time only by writing numbers down and using about three words of Korean so saying that we had forgotten a backpack was well beyond us. Ken tried to hit the number of the floor with the single room but the guy kept unpushing the button and telling us no. Finally it actually became something of a struggle with me and Ken trying to push the button while he held us off. I'll say this he may have been 80 and five foot nothing but he was really strong. We're both also laughing at this point as we've somehow gotten into a wrestling match with a Korean octogenarian. Finally I'm just able to push the button as we reach the floor and we get off only to discover that the room is unlocked and we can get the backpack. Finally realizing what we wanted he profusely apologizes and we go to the correct room. Before we went to bed that night we were flipping around the channels which besides containing a really odd porn channel, contains two channels of nothing but games of Starcraft. After watching for a few minutes I realize that one of the games is the one we watched earlier that day. So we weren't just watching professional video games we were watching the big leagues.

Korea Day 3 - Fun with Guns

The next morning, or more likely early afternoon, we went to a place near the hotel to get some breakfast. The food was the same sort of mash up with Kimchi that we had at other places. It was good though and the place we ate at was little more than a kitchen with about three tables in it. It actually seemed that most of the business was selling food out front to people who passed by but they also did meals. We took the subway down to the war museum, which is supposed to be a good one. Immediately the scene there seemed pretty strange as instead of mostly camera toting tourists it was mostly Korea teenyboppers. As we got closer we saw gigantic signs for some signer or group called the Mobius. It seemed that the big area out in front of the War Museum was going to be the host for a gigantic pop concert. I doubt there was any actually connection between this pop star and any war commemoration. It just seemed totally out of place to me like going down to the Vietnam War Memorial in DC and seeing a Britney Spears concert. There were already a lot of people there for what must have been an evening concert when we got there around noon and I even managed to get a sign. The crowd was about 90% female and all under the age of 16.



Outside the actually war memorial stuff included a lot of old planes and tanks, not too dissimilar from what we saw at the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City. As I was looking at a big plane that you could walk up and look at the cockpit of there band started rehearsing giving the whole place a wholly inappropriate sound track. Most of the other tourists there didn't seem to mind too much though just going about their business. There was a group of what looked like Korean Boy Scouts walking around. The artillery pieces they had all set up in a row were actually pretty impressive. We went inside the museum and got tickets. There was also another type of ticket available for some kids thing but we didn't know what that was about. Inside the museum was actually set up in a sort of confusing way so we had to walk around for a while before we found where the main tour started. While we were looking around we discovered that most of the lower floor of the museum had been turned into some gigantic play room for children. I actually wished I was four years old because it looked fantastic. They had an area where kids could put together toy train tracks, and a gigantic train ride around the middle of the room, actually it looked like the whole place was sponsored by Thomas the Tank Engine.

Around the other side of the room they had a moon bounce and a big slide. They also had this clear inflatable tube that kids could walk in and they get the whole thing to roll. The most interesting area though was two big pits filled with little colorful balls, sort of like the children's area in a McDonalds. But the two pits were connected by a conveyor belt that had to be cranked by hand and would raise the balls up until they would fall down a slide into the other side of the conveyor belt. The children would then use little buckets and shovels to start the process over again. I don't think I've ever seen a children's toy more suited for teaching children how to work on an assembly line. Now that's how you build GDP. There were a huge number of tiny flags over the whole thing also for some reason. It was just like the concert not exactly what you would expect to find in a war museum. The actual war museum part was pretty interesting. I'm not really a huge fan of museums but it had a series of videos which I always prefer. I actually knew quite a bit about the Korean War before going there so I didn't learn that much. The single most interesting thing was the picture of an old blind man the South Koreans had run into outside of Seoul when they liberated it. The battle lines in that area had gone back and forth so many times the man greeted the soldiers with flags for both the North and the South since he was so confused.

I knew that Korea is famous for being a place where video games are treated as a serious sport so we had asked one of the people at the hotel if he knew where we could go to watch some games. He gave us the name of a subway stop that came up right into a mall. The first odd thing about this mall was that there was a Mexican band playing outside for some reason. I don't know that much about musical tastes in Korea but if they're anything like China something with a lot of horns isn't exactly what they're looking for. We went into the mall and looked around for a little while with no success. Finally I noticed that there was something listed as an "e-Sports Stadium" on the top floor of an electronics store. We took a series of escalators up about eight floors to until we got there. There was a person sitting outside one of the doors and when we approached we were just allowed in. Inside was a TV studio with a big stage and a number of chairs. On the stage were two tables with five computers each with TV monitors in front of them showing exactly what each person was doing. There was also a big screen behind all of them showing a big version of the whole thing. They were playing a shooter that I didn't recognize but they're all pretty much the same anyways.



The teams would run around shooting each other eliminating players until whoever was left won. They would shout out suggestions or some such thing to each other while the game was going on also. The teams were actually very well organized with coaches sitting off to the sides in suits and even some team cheers. It was a pretty surreal experience to see it being filmed for TV. Me and Ken were at least filmed once as I think they don't get too many tourists at these things. The whole place was really fancy also with some top notch looking equipment. There were also what seemed to be judges standing behind the players. The most interesting team was an all girls team that wore matching high heeled shoes. They lost mostly but it was fun to watch. There was one guy in the audience who I hope was one of there boyfriends since he was yelling along with them on all the team chants and very excited. Even the other Korean people around him seemed to think he was a little nuts. You've got to respect any country though were playing a video game can be considered a career option. After the games were over, me and Ken went to a Korean BBQ place where they cook the meat in front of you with these turning spits. It was a little hard to figure out but our waiter was incredibly attentive and we had some Soju, a Korean liquor that it about 40 proof. It's not as strong as something like vodka but they drink it in shots so they end up drinking a lot of shots.

Korea Day 2 - There's No Dancing in Baseball

We slept in quite a bit on our first full day in Korea since neither me nor Ken are really into getting up early and I was exhausted from not having slept the previous day. We decided to go over to a sushi place that the book mentioned. Again given how few numbers there were on anything and the fact that we couldn't really read any of the signs I'm not sure if we actually found the place we were looking for or just another sushi restaurant. We took the Seoul subway to get there which is a huge system but a very easy one to navigate thanks to a lot of clear marking and maps. It can be exhausting to use it though since every stating is on multiple levels underground and they don't really seem to believe in escalators. Some days it felt like all I did in Korea was just walk up and down endless sets of stairs. The subway stations are also like little underground malls with a ton of shops selling all sorts of things from food to clothing. But even with all this going on the system is very clean even having some of the nicest public bathrooms I've seen around, with real toilets to boot. The sushi place was very good though expensive. I think we each spent around $20 which when you're used to spending $1 on food is quite a lot.



After lunch we went to Gyeongbok Gung one of the two big palaces located in Seoul. On our way there we passed what seemed to be the US embassy which was mostly notable for looking like a building from the 70's contrasting all the much more modern buildings around it. The palace itself had been burned down several times. Once during an invasion the palace was burned not by the invading army but by the people of Seoul who were pissed off at their leaders for fleeing the city. We got a free English tour which was helpful since it can be sort of hard to know what your looking at without some guidance. The palace was a series of one story building designed out in concentric circles. The building were definitly nice looking but it wasn't exactly spectacular. The most interesting thing was actually the changing of the guards right when we got there. They had dozens of people in traditional dress marching around for quite a while. Ken noted that it looked incredibly similar to the forbidden city in Beijing. Actually they noted a lot the connection between Korean and Chinese culture. The thing in the palace I spent the most time looking for though was a trash can. For a country with no litter they seem to have amazingly few trash cans. In China I would have just chucked my trash anywhere but Korea is so much cleaner I was really looking hard for one. It wasn't just their either on the whole trip me and Ken had a lot of trouble getting rid of trash.



After we took the tour we headed over to a small US military base in Seoul to see if we could get tickets for the USO tour of the DMZ. There are a number of private companies which run tours of the DMZ but the guide book said that the USO tour was the best and it was the cheapest anyways. Once we got there though it turned out that they were sold out and for the USO tour at least you have to book way in advanced. We had some extra time to burn so we just sat around for a while at a nice coffee shop. We both wanted to see a baseball game and with two teams playing in Seoul there are games pretty much every day. Going to a game in Korea is somewhat like going to a game in the US 20 years ago. The tickets are cheap they aren't anywhere near a sellout and they let you bring in whatever you want. We tried to get the nicest tickets they sell but it seemed that they were sold out of those for the home team side. They divide the stadium up with fans for either team sitting on opposite sides. Really the most shocking thing about the stadium though was that they let you bring in outside beer. They won't let you bring in a hot dog in most places in the US and when they're charging $9 for a beer in new Yankee Stadium forget about bringing your own.



The stadium was nice and we decided to root for the home team the LG Twins. All the teams seemed to have the corporate sponsor before the team name. The funny thing is why in the world would they call a Korean team the Twins. The Twins comes from the twin cities in the US so I don't know what it stands for in Korea. The game was pretty good the baseball seemed fine though no one really hit with any power the LG Twins had two foreign players, which is the most a team is allowed to have, including an aging slugger from South America who was noticeably fatter than the thin Korean players. The baseball was interesting but the best part of the game was the cheering. Besides the fact that they had a number of NFL style very pretty cheerleaders who did about one wardrobe change and inning they also had a guy who was in charge of coordinating the cheers who was actually more amazing as he was constantly jumping around getting each section involved in the cheering. The other team also had a similar person over in there section though I don't think they had any of the cheerleaders. All in all the dancing was probably more interesting then the actual game.

Korea Day 1 - The Best Airport in the World

We needed to get to Shanghai early the previous day because out flight left at 8am. The train options were pretty limited. There was a D-train that left at 9:30 and two of the slower numbered trains that left at 10:30 and 2:30 in the morning. I was thinking about getting one of the later trains but the woman at the ticket counter said that they only had standing room tickets left. The price difference was also surprisingly small. Ken later thought that while they rarely sell standing room tickets on the D-train the other train might have been standing tickets only and at 2:30 am on a Thursday we would have gotten seats. There were actually a pretty good number of what I guess were commuters on the train and as always a large number of people mulling around the Shanghai train station. As soon as we got off the train we were mobbed by people trying to get us to go to their hotel or ride in their taxi. One of my favorite things about Changzhou is that it's too small to have people hounding tourists; also I don't think Changzhou gets any tourists. We walked over to where the airport shuttle was and found out that it stopped running about an hour before. It would start running again at 5:30 which might have gotten us their in time but it would have meant either standing around with all the migrant workers or spending another night in a McDonalds so we decided to take a taxi.

We ignored all the people trying to sell us one, though some were incredibly persistent. Eventually we just walked a little way down the street and got a metered cab to the Shanghai Airport. Shanghai actually has two airports but by far the larger one is located some distance from the center of the city. It cost close to 200 RMB, about $30, to get out there since all the other options were closed. When we got to the airport it was virtually deserted except for all the people peddling rooms for the night but we decided it would just be easier to hang out at the airport. At first we just found some normal seats to sit in but they didn't really offer enough space to spread out. While Ken was looking for a bathroom he discovered that there was a Burger King open all night on the second level of the airport. We moved down there since they had nicer seats and benches. In America it might be inappropriate to sleep in a fast food restaurant but in China it's just par for the course. Ken got something to eat but my stomach was hurting the whole night so I didn't eat much. Ken was able to sleep a little while I read.

Even though they worked at a Burger King when it was time for their dinner the people who worked their took out a big thing of rice and vegetables they had clearly brought from home. But while that may be very Chinese in many ways the Shanghai airport seemed like another country. It was clean well organized, had nice toilets, western food, it was simply not China. Eventually the next morning rolled around by which time my stomach was actually feeling somewhat better and we got on our plane for Seoul. I had originally talked to Ken about going to Korea during the May Day break but it turned out that that wasn't much of a break so we put it off. I was then talking to Dave about going to Tibet but that just proved too difficult so at the last minute I called Ken up again and we headed off to Seoul. The Seoul airport actually isn't in Seoul it's in Inchon, a place made famous by MacArthur's surprise landing their during the Korean War. Actually the airport isn't even there it's on a small island off the coast from Inchon. The airport has apparently been named the nicest in the world for four years, and it was nice though I didn't notice a huge disparity from Shanghai.

They had us fill out a couple of medical forms I haven't seen before in my travels I'm sure because of the pig flu. I think we also passed a place where they used thermal cameras on us to see if we had a fever. Outside the airport it was very green and I could see a lot more of the sky than I can in China; you never realize how much you miss blue skies till they're gone. We got a bus for about 9,000 won, it's 1,200 won to the dollar, to Seoul. Seoul is gigantic essentially encompassing several cities with a total population of about 25 million about half of South Korea. We went over a bunch of bridges and came to the city proper. It was very big and built up but seemed more spread out like Shanghai then built up like Manhattan. It was also more clean and colorful than the sometimes drab and dirty cities in China. We got off near a metro station in one of the central tourist areas. We tried to navigate around using the guide book map but got lost a couple of times. Eventually we found the area we wanted to go to and the Holiday In, no connection, a nice little hostel. The receptionist was actually Chinese, though ethnically Korea, though he seemed way too laid back to be Chinese.

After unpacking in the basic but nice room we headed out to look for a greasy spoon type place the book recommended. The problem was that street addresses don't seem to be very popular in Korea and while the Holiday In had it's name in ten foot high English letters most places just use Korean characters, which look a lot like Chinese; so while we may have found the restaurant we were looking for since the name was in Korean we'll never really know. The most shocking thing about Seoul is just how many American chains there are: 7-11 Pizza Hut, Dominoes, McDonalds, KFC, Baksin Robins, Starbucks, Burger King, Outback Steakhouse, Subway, Quizznos, Smoothie King, and my favorite and the most common Dunkin Donuts. When I saw a Dunkin Donuts at the airport I was excited but soon learned that they're every five feet in Seoul. The restaurant we went to though served the traditional Korean dish of a bunch of vegetables, rice, eggs, and meat, all served in a dish and mashed up into giant mish mash. Actually the mish mash is pretty good and ever meal comes with a side of Kim chi, a sort of boiled spicy cabbage. While the prices aren't quite a good as China it was still pretty cheap at 4,000 won.

The guide book said that you haven't experienced Korea unless you go to a Korean sauna, and we were both pretty tired so we went to find one. Again we went to about where the guide book said and think we found it with the help of an incredibly small sign. Inside we paid the owner and got a towel and a locker for our cloths since all Korean saunas are naked. There were showers just inside with soap, shampoo, and even razors. We showered and went over to the various tubs. One tub was a standard hot tub with water around 50 degrees Celsius. Another was cooler with the water closer to room temperature. The final tub was in between in temperature and for some reason the water was green. I went into the hot tub than after a few minutes the cold and the warm. Changing temperatures was supposed to produce a good feeling, the book said euphoric, it was nice but certainly not that nice. Ken was disappointed there weren't enough naked Korean people to pal around with. There were a few Japanese tourists but they didn't say much. The other interesting thing was the various sauna rooms at different temperatures. The coolest was at about body temperature, the next was at about 50 degrees Celsius, 122 Fahrenheit, the last though was at 80 degrees Celsius. 80 is around 180 degrees Fahrenheit and close to the boiling point of water. Going into the 80 degree room left a little like being baked alive. It felt like standing in front of an open over but all around. After that even the hot tub seemed cool. We had talked about going for dinner but as soon as I got back to the room I just passed out.

The Beginning of the End

Well the semester's over, I had my last class today and handed in my grades, and tomorrow morning me and Ken will be off to South Korea for about eight days. I'll try to keep a journal again, who knows I may put some of it up while I'm there they are supposed to have the best internet in the world. After I get back I have about another week than I'll be back in the US for six weeks or so before going back to China for another year. This semester and this whole year have been a blast and I'll have some more closing thoughts in a later post. I just wanted to explain why I'll probably not be posting for a week or so. Nothing has happened to this intrepid blogger besides another nice vacation. Maybe I can even catch some baseball in Korea, it's not Yanks-Sox but it's something.