Tokyo!

This is a HUGE post because I'm uploading my notes from all four days in Tokyo all at once - I didn't manage to find a WiFi hotspot any time before this - finally got one at the airport. So here's the full report.

Day 1:

Landed in Tokyo a bit after noon - walked through the easiest immigration I've ever seen in any country - no questions asked at all. Then got on to the Keisei skyliner train to get to Ueno - I wasn't too sure which way to go from Ueno station so decided to play it safe and take a taxi - the taxi driver ended up being a total sweetheart - the final fare camne up to like Y1500, but he refused to take more than Y1000, saying I was a tourist and he wouldn't accept more. Wow!Anyway, the ryokan (Japanese inn) I'm staying at is absolutely gorgeous - it's got these little tiny rooms where you sit on floor cushions and sleep on floor mattresses and everything's all traditional and Japanese. Very quaint and I love it. It's called Homeikan and here's a pic:


Right after I checked in, I decided to go hang out at Ueno park, which is Tokyo's most famous park - there's a bunch of nice looking shrines in there and it's generally a nice walk. I'm glad I spent three weeks in Korea before coming here - I'm a lot more comfortable now with getting around in places where almost no one speaks English. It was really easy to figure out the subway system, for starters, and once you're comfortable with that and know how to get around, the rest follows quite naturally.After strolling around Ueno Park for a while, I decided to check out the Tokyo National Museum - rather impressive. Spent about an hour or so there.

Then walked around a bit on some pretty darned crowded streets and bought some rice cakes from this guy who was baking them in a very neat looking machine. It was about 6 or so when I was done seeing Ueno so I figured I still had enough time left in the evening to go check some other place out before my legs died on me - hopped on the train to Akihabara, which is the electronics district of Tokyo. That was QUITE something - they were selling all sorts of stuff at crazy discount prizes. I think I even saw this place selling Sony PSP's for Y900, which is like $10!!! At least, the posters looked like that was the price, but I'm sure there was a catch somewhere. There had to be! Anyway, it was still fun to browse around. I spent something like an hour in an anime store and ended up buying two little anime action figure dolls.

By then the stores were beginning to think about shutting down, so I started hunting around for dinner. There was an australian burger place that a lot of tourists were heading to, but I wasn't about to settle for something quite that tame on my very first evening in Japan! Eventually I found this quite little "noodle soup bar" with rows of silent office workers eating quietly, and it looked like an interesting experience, so I walked in. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of those places which doesn't really have a picture menu but you buy a ticket from a vending machine and then give the ticket to the chef, who dishes out what you asked for. Which was all very fine for everyone else, but the vending machine didn't have a single English letter on it. I stood in front of it for a couple of minutes, staring at all the buttons and words, wishing that by some miracle, if I stared at it long enough and concentrated hard enough, the letters would magically make sense. Sigh. Eventually I gave up and decided to play Noodle Soup Roulette. Pushed in some money, closed my eyes, and hit out blindly. Voila! I had a ticket and NO IDEA in the world what I was going to get. I figured that noodle soup of any variety would be reasonably edible anyway, and if I didn't like whatever meat/seafood was in it, I could push that to the side and concentrate on the noodles. Which is what I eventually ended up doing - there were two or three different types of meat in there - crab, which I didn't mind, something like anchovies, which I don't like at all, and some third unidentifiable thing which I tried a small bit off and decided to let be. The noodles and the soup were awesome though and there was a LOT of that, so pushing the seafood to the side of the bowl wasn't a big deal at all. I felt at the end of it like I had ARRIVED in Tokyo, so it was fun!

Just got back to the ryokan - they've given me a kimono to wear while I'm indoors, so I feel all dressed up! The footwear rules are also pretty intense - you take your shoes off at the entrance of the ryokan and get into their "house slippers" before you get inside the building. You take these house slippers off though before you enter your tatami-mat covered room. Anytime you leave your room, you put your slippers back on. You take them off again when you enter the "bathing area" and put on special "bathroom slippers" which you absolutely SHOULD NOT be seen in outside the bathroom. Even the gardens have special "garden slippers"! It's all very complicated and I have to make a conscious effort to make sure that I'm not at any time in the middle of a serious social slipper gaffe, which I suppose would send me to footwear jail.

Anyway, am totally exhausted so that's about all for now. More later...
Need to find an internet cafe so that I can upload this onto the net. For all its tech city reputation, Tokyo has a serious shortage of WiFi networks. I can't find ANY!

Ten minutes later:
ACK!! My pillow is a "sand pillow" - the thing is filled with sand!! It's hard as a rock!! This is insane! Whatever happened to goosedown? Or any down, for that matter! Or heck, even cotton? Wool? Shredded cloth? Paper??

Day 2:

The sand pillow and I didn't get along at all. It spent the night ignominiously on the floor. It's going to stay there for the next couple of days.

Went to Harajuku today - checked out the Meiji Jingu shrine first - it's the most venerable shrine in Tokyo and dedicated to Emperor and Empress Meiji. Along the way, I washed my hands at a sacred well, took pictures of some royal fish in the imperial fishing pond, walked through the most gorgeous Iris Garden, saw what seemed to be the last bit of a Japanese wedding (though I'm not sure if it was an actual wedding or just something for the tourists to gawk at) and checked out all the lucky charms that they were selling near the shrines - charms for long life, good health, luck, wealth, traffic safety (yes, traffic safety - it must be an issue in Tokyo if they actually need to sell CHARMS for it).

After the shrine, I headed to Takeshita Dori, which is this pedestrian-only street where all the teenagers in Tokyo hang out on weekends. It's for sure a fun street - I spent hours browsing through these little boutique stores there, indulged in some absolutely wonderful chocolate and whipped cream crepes and generally did a ton of people watching - the street is full of kids dressed in the weirdest of fashions - the Goth look seems to be REALLY big in Tokyo, along with the other extreme of baby pink lace and frills, and there were plenty kids showing off absolutely bizarre outfits quite proudly. After that I got to this Oriental Bazaar, and bought a few souvenirs - not too many coz I'm beginning to reach suitcase limits here so I've switched into "heartbreak mode" (don't buy it unless it breaks your heart to leave it behind).

Hours and hours of walking and browsing and walking and people watching and walking and walking later, I'm back at the ryokan. But my phone detected a WiFi network around a nearby Starbucks, so I'm going to tote my laptop over there and see if I can log on.

An hour later: I don't believe this - Starbucks doesn't have its own WiFi network! There's some lame LiveDoor network here and I can connect to it but I can't browse until I enter a livedoor username password. And I tried signing up as a new user but the whole darned website is Japanese - I even ended up finding the sign up page by trial and error but then I got totally stuck because my laptop doesn't have the language pack for Japanese installed - so while I could kinda navigate if the links were images, I can't for the life of me figure out anything on the signup page because all I see are garbage characters. Bummer! I just spent fifteen minutes trying to fill in the signup form, but I'm doing something wrong because I keep getting an error (RED garbage characters). So foo this and I'm going to go back to Seattle and just upload all these blogs at the same time. Which will kinda defeat the purpose of them acting as an update to the world, but guess it can't be helped.

I miss Seattle's ubiquitous connectivity.

I'm going to do several things once I get back home:
1. Walk all over my apartment with my shoes on. These slipper rules are getting on my nerves.
2. Stand in the middle of Capitol Hill, turn on WiFi on my phone and BREATHE in the internet.
3. Call everyone I know - I need to let the GSM networks know I'm BACK!
4. Take my car out on a long drive. Drive across the 520 bridge several times.
5. Watch a movie at the theatre - I don't care what's playing - I'm sure I've missed out on several summer shows, so there'll be plenty to pick from.
6. Spend a day at the Elliot Bay bookstore - I miss bookstores - I've seen only Korean/Japanese bookstores in the last month and it hurts to walk past a shelf full of books and not be able to browse.

Do I sound a bit frustrated? I guess I am - I'm tired and totally cut off from everyone I know - and I can't even get on the NET! I mean, cut me off from my phone - fine! Ouch, but fine - I can live with that. Cut me off from the internet in general - BIG BIG BIG OUCH!!! I think I'll just go back to the ryokan and sleep. I've got Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" with me so I guess I'll read a bit of that. I think on some level, this could be a learning experience - like learning how people lived before the Internet existed.

Shucks!

How DID people live before the Internet existed??!?!?

Odds and Ends:

Cars drive on the left in Japan. Like in Britain.
Taxi doors open and close automatically - a taxi driver could get confused if you try and open them manually, since he's simultaneously hitting the buttons that control them.
Rain in Tokyo is oddly like Seattle's rain - the kind you can walk through. Still, everyone has umbrellas.
The internet is very very very elusive (yes, I've said this before. It's important enough to reiterate.)
There are almost no buildings older than 50 years ago - the city was almost entirely destroyed during air raids in World War II - even the old shrines and temples are all remakes of the originals and were built in the 1970s.
The public transport is spectacular - there's a subway system as well as a monorail system, and between the two, you can get anywhere at all in the city.

Day 3:

Woke up very early today and headed out around 7 to catch the morning activity at Tsukiji fish market - it's the largest such market in Asia, opens at 5 am with the day's fish cargo and is apparently all sold out by 9 am. It was pretty crazy - I've never seen so much seafood type stuff in one place - there were a million kinds of fish, clams, mussels, oysters, octopi (octopusses?), squid, crabs, shrimp, lobsters, eels, weird bug-like things with whiskers, long puffy sack like creatures and other bizarre unidentifiable creatures from unimaginable depths of the Pacific Ocean.

It was also the PERFECT location for a million sushi restaurants, so I decided to turn Japanese and have sushi for breakfast. I picked a place at random (it looked awfully crowded, so I figured it would be good) and walked in - it was a tiny little sushi bar and seemed family run. There was a set menu of soup, green tea, 8 pieces of different kinds of sushi and three rolls - I only identified the salmon. I think there was also tuna and mackerel. I'm not sure what everything else was. But it was crazy fresh and therefore extremely good. With just one problem - in Japan, apparently, they put the wasabi INSIDE the roll, so you can't control how much you get. And normally, just the slightest touch of wasabi is enough for me. But this chappie was putting a merry dollop inside each one of my rolls. So every bite went straight through my head and I had to spend several minutes recovering. I'm glad there were only 3 rolls - I couldn't have managed more of those. The regular sushi pieces were just fine, so I liked those a ton more.

After that, I walked over to the Hama Rikyu imperial gardens - they only opened at 9, so I had to spend a few minutes waiting at the gate, but I got to be the first person inside. Which was very very nice coz I pretty much had the whole place to myself - spent almost an hour just sitting by this very beautiful lake staring out at a rather picturesque tea house, thinking about life, the universe and everything. Note to self though - the next time, try NOT to be the first person in a garden. The solitude is gorgeous, but the first person in the garden is ALSO the first person to walk through all the spiderwebs strung across the pathways by busy arachnids through the night. Not pleasant.

After about an hour and a half there, I hopped on a boat to Asakusa, where I spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon checking out Sensoji Temple (Tokyo's oldest temple - the original was built in the 7th century - this one, of course, is only a copy, but it's still very beautiful. It's a pity so much of Japanese history was destroyed in 1945. Heck, it's a pity so much of the whole world was destroyed around then.

I also got a "fortune" letter - you put a 100 yen coin in a wooden box, and then shake another box until a long bamboo stick comes out, and the stick has a number written on it, so you find that number on a set of wooden drawers and take your fortune, written in both Japanese and English, out of the drawer. My fortune doesn't make much sense to me, but it was kinda funny all the same to go through the whole procedure - it goes "The black clouds on the moon were cleared up, it get really bright again. Just like the moon and stars shine clear, everybody have calm mind with nothing to regret or worry about." Which I suppose is good.


Then spent a bit of time browsing Nakamise Dori, which is a quaint little pedestrian-only street outside the temple, lined with stalls selling all sorts of crazy stuff - souvenirs, kimonos, old swords, antiques, clothes, shoes, more souvenirs, fans, etc, etc.

Got back to the ryokan a bit before 4 in the afternoon - I'm not sure if I want to head out again today - I'm just so awfully tired and a little sleepy too, having woken up so early today. I think I'll take it easy this evening and try and get some rest.

More later.

Day 3:

So the plan was to go to the Ghibli museum today but I think I planned badly - it's closed. Bummer. Things in Japan follow weird holiday schedules - some places are closed on Sundays, some on Mondays, some on Tuesdays - it's impossible to figure it out.

Oh well.

So I decided to come back to Takeshita street in Harajuku to have another one of those absolutely sinful crepes that I had on Sunday.

The place is much quieter today - not so many students and tourists hanging out - I guess coz it's a weekday. I think on the whole, I've done all the sightseeing I want to do - I'm getting a bit saturated now. So I'll probably just walk around this neighbourhood and explore randomly with no itinerary whatsoever. I'm carrying my laptop with my in case I stumble across a WiFi zone somewhere - unlikely, because even the Starbucks here in the middle of downtown (which is where I am right now) doesn't have a network. I keep looking to see if I can spot anyone else with a laptop in a cafe or something, but nope - no such luck.
Well, it doesn't matter much anyway now coz tomorrow I'll be back in Seattle.

Day 4:

Wednesday. Waiting at the airport....

Do androids dream...

I met an android today. Her name is EveR 1 and she's beautiful! I wish I'd had my camera with me but I didn't - though she's famous enough that there's several articles about her online - and this is what she looks like:


So a bunch of us from work decided to walk down to the Coex center where Microsoft was having its Mobile and Embedded Dev Con for Korea - Jae, one of the devs from my team here was making a presentation so we figured we'd come and cheer him on. The same building was also where SEK 2006 was being held - that's the Solutions and Contents Exhibition of Korea, and it's supposed to be the largest info-tech exhibition in the country. EveR1 actually opened the exhibition, introducing some of the big participants and all that sort of thing - she was brilliant! She has facial expressions and smiles and blinks and everything. She can't walk but she talks and waves and it's pretty insanely cool!

The other exhibits were also pretty neat - tons of big companies had staked out their territory in this huge huge room and were showing off all their latest toys. The most elaborate display was by this company called Haansoft that's trying to directly compete with Microsoft by having an online version of office productivity software that runs on Java/AJAX and is completely free - it looks exactly like MS Office and they have exactly the same UI and the same sort of look and buttons and Word and Excel and Powerpoint - I'm not sure whether they're walking on very solid legal ground but it was fun to check them out. And they had these two gorgeous girls in gold glittery outfits playing rock'ed out versions of classical pieces on violins on a stage (kinda the Vanessa Mae style) so they were definitely drawing big crowds. Microsoft had its own corner too and a horde of respectful admirers sitting on the floor around some of our sales folks demo-ing Vista and Office 12. Felt pretty good to see that and feel a part of it. And letsee... what else - I drooled over portable media players, spent some time watching a bunch of college kids playing Dead or Alive on XBox kiosks, managed to stop myself from pocketing some gorgeous mp3 players, checked out cellphones of all shapes and colors and sizes, did hi-fives with the rest of the team every time we saw a Windows Mobile device, watched replays on huge huge gigantic screens of Korean footballers kicking past the Italian goalkeeper in 2002 and wild crowds erupting in red frenzy, bought myself a pineapple Fanta (nice, better than the standard orange), stood in front of a two wheeled robot chanting "Dae Han Min Kuk!", laughed at another robot with Einstein's head, decided I want to get me a new laptop - one of those ultra sleek ultra light ones, and generally spent a very nice afternoon geeking out.

Also had Korean bingsu for the last time today - if I ever ended up making a "Top 5 desserts of all time and space", then bingsu would definitely be in that list. It's definitely the most amazing thing I've tried out here in Korea - it's a bowl full of very finely crushed ice, almost snow, and then they pour fruits and ice cream or frozen yogurt and this amazing sweet red bean paste over that, and the final result is heaven! Specially if the fruits are like pineapple and kiwi and cherries, which are all my favorites.

Sigh...

I'm definitely going to miss that. Along with a ton of other things about Seoul - it's always sad to leave a city just when you start getting comfortable in it - I mean, I've just about reached a point where I don't feel lost and an outsider anymore and now it's time to leave. Although it'll be nice to go home too - I miss Seattle and it's going to be wonderful to see the crowd back there again. It's funny though how my mental state has oscillated from "Wow, this is so exciting" to "Where am I??" to "Hmmm... I think I'm beginning to figure this out" to "Bummer, no, I'm not" to "This is awesome fun" to "Sob, I wanna go home!" to "Ok, I'm finally getting this" to "Awww... now I'm going to miss Seoul!" through the past three weeks. But I'm very very glad I came and I think on the whole I had a fabulous time and I absolutely would love to come back here some day.

Anyway, gotta pack now - my flight's at 10 am tomorrow and it takes an hour and a half to get to the airport, so basically I've got to leave the hotel at some obscene time.

And my next update's going to be from downtown Tokyo.

So long, Seoul!

Hard to believe it's already time to leave - three weeks have gone by pretty darn quickly. And I've seen a ton of new places and tried out a ton of new things and met some really awesome people - on the whole, my trip's been rather a success.

Visited the Samsung offices today to make a presentation to the development team there - I think that went off pretty well - the dev lead was really friendly and had a ton of questions during and after my talk, which made the whole thing a whole lot more interesting than if I were the only one speaking for the whole hour. Greg later told me that he's normally very tough and he isn't always so nice, but I thought he was awfully sweet. The rest of the team was rather shy, but I was pretty impressed at the turnout - there were more than 40 developers in that room. I have to admit it was slightly intimidating at first, but then I kinda switched into TA mode and pretended I was back at UT facing my students, and it was ok after that. There was still definitely a thread in my brain going "ok, you're just blabbering - move on to the next slide" and I was also pretty worried about my throat - it's still a bit sore since my cold over the weekend, and when I'd done a dry run of the talk with the Microsoft team onTuesday, I'd had quite a bit of trouble - I could barely speak halfway into the talk and had to stop several times to let my throat recover. Gotta hate colds! Fortunately, everything behaved today, so it all went off well.

Got back to the Microsoft building around 4-ish or so - the team had planned a "graduation party" for me, so we went out to this totally amazing Korean barbecue place for dinner - Korean barbecue rocks! And I think it's a fitting end to my cuisinary adventures in Seoul. I don't think I've eaten so much in ages.

Pics:

Here's all of us at work before heading out:

And here we are at dinner - I love how we sat on cushions on the floor and cooked everything on grills built into the table. And after spending the whole day in 5.5 inch heels (I had to dress formal for the talk) it was such a joy to take those darned shoes off and just sit down. For sure everybody said they looked great, but why does looking nice have to come at such a painful price - my feet aren't going to forgive me for weeks! The agony!!!

Anyway, here we are at dinner:

Ok, my mom's buzzing me online, so I'm going to scuttle for now. Tomorrow's my last day here at work, and then it's off to Tokyo!

More later...

Monday Update

Not bad - Korea tied France in the game last night! Very very cool!

Overslept a bit today, but fortunately by the time I woke up, my visiting virus had decided that I sleep way too much and it wasn't having any fun. So it left. My cold's gone! I must say that was the shortest real cold I've ever had - I say "real" coz I've had a few "pretend" colds where my throat goes "I might I might not" for an evening and then all's quiet after that. Those don't count. A "real" cold is when you're actually sniffing and you can't pronounce your P's and T's and M's and your head feels like a train station in 1879 and you thank all the powers that be for the fact that human beings don't breathe cutaneously. Ew!

Anyway, just four more days left on my Seoul trip. And then I'm off to Japan. Yu-jung's charted out an itinerary for me in Tokyo - with pictures and instructions on where to buy tickets and everything. That's just totally amazing - she is an absolute sweetheart! I'm going to miss the group here - they've all been so very sweet. I do hope they visit Redmond sometime. We went to lunch today at a place that was having some sort of a football promotion and one of the devs picked up a "Go Korea" scarf for me. I told them I'd wear it in Tokyo - the rivalry between the two countries is rather strong. The cheering around here when Australia beat Japan in the World Cup game a week or so ago was about as loud as if Korea had won! Although, that was SOME game - 3 goals in the last 12 minutes! Woo!

And I'm off - more later...

Sniff....

Wend do Inzadog agaid doday. Ab dowd wid a bad gold. Don'd dow where I bigged id ub, bud id'z very irridading. Hobe id goes away zood.

Oh bubber.

Yep, unfortunately, I've decided to pick up a cold here - I guess it's not very surprising considering that my immune system isn't used to such a different environment. But man, it's such a pain to have to spend a weekend feeling crappy. I did still go out today - it was a lovely sunshiny day, so I went to Insadong again - I think that is easily my favourite street in all of Seoul - it's just so much fun to browse around in all the art stores. I bought a few more souvenirs and some gifts for friends, and then I went and had really spicy burning hot oyster tofu soup, which did make my sinuses feel a lot better for a while. By sunset though, I was beginning to feel ehhhh again, so I spent the rest of the evening as a couch potato - I'm on my third consecutive movie right now. I think I'm going to try my "sleep 18 hours at a stretch in a really warm room and bore the cold out of your system" therapy tomorrow - it always works!

This bug has gotta go.

More later...

Also...

I ate octopus today.

cOddWildlifeEaten ++

The King and the Clown

So I watched a Korean movie today - Wang-ui namja (The King and the Clown). It was apparently a tremendous hit earlier this year (some 5 million people watched it in the first three weeks of its release, which is quite a lot considering the total population of Korea). Anyway, since a lot of it was filmed in the Korean Folk Village that I went to on Sunday, Greg (my team lead here at MS Korea) lent me the DVD and said I might enjoy checking it out. I must say I really liked it - it was very beautifully done, although the story's very sad. I totally loved being able to recognize all the locations and buildings where the scenes were filmed. And since it's a period drama, the costumes and set design and everything was just totally gorgeous.

I'd go into greater detail but blogger's pinging me very frantically with a "Scheduled outage at 8:23AM PST" message. I don't know what time it is for sure in the US but I think it's getting close to that so I'll just post this before it dies on me.

And here's the movie poster...

Aaaargh, upload speed tending to zero...

Doh!!!

Come ON!!!

Don't die on me, blogger!

Doot doot doodoot doot... hmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnn.....

UPLOAD!

Phew! And here it finally is.

More later!

Dae Han Min Kuk!!!

And Korea WON!!!

Oh my god - I've never seen such a tremendous outpouring of national emotion - it was incredible - an entire country wearing red and going absolutely crazy!! It was a thrill to even be a part of it!

I bought myself a Red Devils tshirt earlier in the evening and a whole bunch of us met up at Club Q at around 8:30. The enthusiasm everywhere was amazing - random people in the elevator at my hotel were thrilled to see me wearing Korean colors even though I was a foreigner, and the streets were just crowded with red. Togo scored first and I started getting a bit worried but the Korean team picked up soon after that and two reasonably quick goals had everyone going totally berserk in the bar. I even went and recorded a sound file on my phone of the cheering and the chants of "Dae Han Min Kuk" (Korean Republic) - the chanting's followed by a rhythmic clapping which is just totally catchy! And once the game ended, the whole of Korea appeared to have turned into one big party - every single car on the street was honking in time with the clapping rhythm, people were just totally overrunning the streets, there were bikers zipping by waving Korean flags, random strangers were running up to exchange high fives with us - I totally loved it! It gives you a high to see so many people so completely euphoric!

I have no voice left, I've cheered so much all evening. The last time I cheered like this was when UT won the National Championship game at the Rose Bowl earlier this year (woo, and what a game that was - one for the ages! Vince Young for President!)

Pics: The group, and me in Korean colors.

And the sun came out today

The IRONY!!

It does feel suspiciously like a Seattlite weather god is following me around. How else do I explain the weather report -

Monday Sunny
Tuesday Sunny
Wednesday Thursday Friday Sunny
Saturday Pouring cats and dogs and horses and monkeys
Sunday Kinda grey but no more livestock from the sky (thank you very much!)
Monday Bright and Sunny again, and a whoop-ty-doo to you

There has to be a law against bad weather on weekends. I'm sure it's illegal on some level!

I do miss Seattle though - in spite of all that rain, it's a lovely gorgeous city. I guess you don't get to be the Emerald City without a ton of natural irrigation.

Anyway, tomorrow's the big game - Korea vs. Togo, FIFA World Cup 2006! The hype around here is pretty insane! There's big screens everywhere showing highlights of Korea's games from the last World Cup. All of us from work are going to hang out at a bar tomorrow night and watch the game. Go Ji-sung Park!!! If we win (look at me, a week in Seoul and already it's "we") then I expect the partying will go on quite a while!

Must get myself a red Korea t-shirt. Or face paint.

Korean folk village

Sunday...

Woke up to the sound of more water falling out of the sky. Bummer. Still, Yujung and Greg and I had planned to visit the Korean Folk Village today, and we decided not to let a bit of rain spoil things. So I grabbed my trusted umbrella from yesterday and we headed out. I'm glad we did, because about half an hour after that the rain stopped, the sun kinda came out and it turned out to be a completely nice day.

So the folk village is this big area where they've recreated what traditional villages in Korea would have looked like in different parts of the country and at different points in history. It's extremely well done and they even have a bunch of wood/paper/silk workshops and traditional theatre and dance and acrobatic performances.

It's hard to describe it really, so here's pictures.

Traditional rich landlord's house.

Me visiting rich landlord people.

Horse riding - these guys were spectacular. Those horses were going pretty darn fast and yet their riders were so graceful in their acrobatics.

Lunch being cooked - that's haemul pajan (pancakes stuffed with seafood and green onions)

Lunch. It was really good!

Yujung crossing a stepping stones bridge - she was wearing sandals so I don't think it was too easy, especially since those stones were pretty slippery - I had my "wear everywhere all year round" boots on and still had to watch my step.

Folk dancers - very impressive.

This guy looked like he was about to fall through the entire twenty minutes of his performance - he tripped and hopped and wobbled and skipped and I have no idea how he managed to stay on that rope, with only a fan for balance. That was some extreme tightrope walking.

It was about 6-ish by the time we were done seeing everything at the village - the last show was a traditional Korean wedding, which was extremely pretty - brides look gorgeous anywhere in the world! And then we headed back to Seoul and went for dinner at a laboki place (basically a mix of noodles, rice cakes, vegetables, pork and the spiciest red sauce I've ever had). It was amazingly good, but insanely spicy and two bites into it I was in absolute agony! My ears were hurting, my eyes were watering, I was turning every possible shade of red, and yet I just kept eating because it just tasted so good. It was crazy!! But wow! After that, we had a dessert of fruit and red beans in crushed ice (papingsu)

And I'm back in my hotel now and looking forward to next week. I think I've about covered most of the major touristy activities and places, so now I'll probably just wing it and hang out.

Maybe I'll go to Insadong again (tha arts and crafts alley).

More later...

Of palaces and markets in the rain...

Saturday's agenda:

1. Buy an umbrella

It's embarrassing that I've spent two years in Seattle without ever needing an umbrella and my very first weekend in Seoul, I break down and get one. Ah well. It's true though that monsoon thunderstorms here are a tiny bit stronger than Seattle's diamond-drop rain (that's light rain that you can walk in without really getting wet - it leaves diamonds in your hair). Still, it felt somehow like "giving in" to buy an umbrella. I guess I might need it in Tokyo too (hopefully NOT) but I don't see myself ever using it in Seattle.

Anyway, and from that paragraph, it's obvious that it was a SOGGY day in Seoul! Still, it was a Saturday and one of only two Saturdays I get in this country so I wasn't about to waste it indoors. Specially after arming myself with a brand new brolly.

Decided to go explore Namdaemun market first - that's the totally markety market market (if that makes any sense) where you get authentic Korean stuff. It's INSANE. Crowded like wow, in spite of the rain, and absolutely full of completely unusual stuff. I took tons of pictures and I think I spent half my time going "No way!!" and "Oh my god!!" It was literally overpowering - they had food stalls lining the sides of the street, people selling clothes and toys and handicrafts and wierd stuff and live eels (yeah, live eels - I actually spent about 5 minutes staring at a wok full of live baby eels - in a seafood stall). And there were women pushing wheelbarrows through the street at a mad speed with just raw chunks of meat on them - you had to get out of their way really really fast! And there was a store that sold kimchi chocolate (I didn't try it). It was crazy!! It was amazing!!! I didn't know which way to look!

I didn't buy very much coz I simply had no idea what everything was - I did get some small souvenirs from the arts and handicrafts section of the market, but I wasn't brave enough to try anything from the food stores - this guy at one store called me in and pointed to some packets of green leaves going "Good present! You buy!!" and I was like "Tea??" and he goes "No tea, seaweed!" and I'm like "Oodeah!" And then he pulled open a bag and handed me a square of the weed and insisted I try it. And I was like "Just like that? Just eat it???" I did try it - he'd already put it in my hand anyway and it would have been kinda rude to refuse. I took a tiny nibble. It was .... umm.... let's just say I thanked him very nicely and walked away very fast.

I do wish though that I'd had someone Korean with me to tell me what everything was at all the food stalls - some of the stuff actually looked rather interesting but I wasn't sure what was safe to try and what wasn't - I've already fallen ill once this trip and I don't have ANY medication with me (if you're reading this, ma, don't worry - I'm fine) so I'd rather not risk trying unidentified stuff from streetside vendors. Still, it was tons of fun to look at!

After a few hours at Namdaemun, I decided to go check out the Gyeongbokgung Palace - they have a "Changing of the Guards" ceremony there that I'd been told to go see. It's an absolutely beautiful palace, covers a pretty large area and it was the main royal palace during the reign of the Joseon dynasty (~1400 to ~1900). There's multiple buildings, each one absolutely spectacular! My favourite one was in the middle of a little lake, and gazing at it across the water, with mountains in the background and lightning in the sky was just absolutely amazing.

I'm sure the palaces are absolutely gorgeous on a sunny day, but I kinda liked them in the rain - there were very few people around, so it was completely easy to believe that I actually was walking in a 14th century world and I almost expected to see brilliantly dressed women rustling quietly through the palace hallways. I'm glad I got to see this place without the mad rush of a million other tourists. Some places are just better appreciated with their serenity intact.

On my way back to the hotel, I got stopped at the subway station by two Korean girls who were volunteer missionaries for a church and they wanted to give me some pamphlets - when I told them I wasn't even religious, they were very intrigued and wanted to know more about how I thought. That led to us spending more than an hour at a nearby Burger King and talking about all sorts of things from religion to history to war and terrorism and politics and the future and genetics and evolution and Darwin and space travel and multiple universes and families and parents and culture and oh my god, tons of stuff. It was REALLY really interesting and they were just so nice - they've offered to show me around Seattle sometime later this week if I want to meet up again. It was nice to just sit and talk - I guess I miss my friends and it's a tiny bit lonely being in a strange country all by yourself.

Anyway.

I'm going to go see if there's anything good on TV. I watched a Chinese movie yesterday with Korean subtitles. I'm learning the alphabet - I know how to write my name in Korean now. Yay.

More tomorrow - hopefully it should be a nice day (Forecast: scattered clouds). If it is, I'm going to go check out the Korean Folk Village.

Fri night at Apgujeong

And the weekend's here! Unfortunately it looks like it may be a bit of a soggy one. How is it possible that I travel literally to the other end of the world from Seattle, and it STILL follows the old familiar pattern of "sunny weekdays, soggy weekends". Bother. Well, here's hoping the weathermen here get it wrong. It did rain today though - a gorgeous short wild monsoony storm with lots of lightning and thunder - lasted just for an hour in the afternoon, which was absolutely perfect coz then it made the evening wonderfully cool. I don't really mind that kind of short downpour. Anyway, so I decided to head out after work to Apgujeongdong, which is the ritzy happening part of town. Taking the subway at rush hour is quite the experience - now I know what sardines feel like. Not too bad though. I got to the Apgujeong station at about 7-ish in the evening, and then walked around getting increasingly lost - even had to come back to the subway station several times to check the neighbourhood maps on the walls there.

After about an hour and a half of walking, I found what I'd been looking for - Seoul's very own Rodeo Drive - it's even CALLED Rodeo Drive. And it's this gorgeous alley filled with fancy little boutique stores and big brands and a ton of very fashionable people. Very neat, and tons of fun to browse around in. Though I'm very proud of myself - I didn't buy a thing! I've decided to save suitcase space for genuine traditional korean souvenirs, not branded stuff that I could get in Seattle anyway.

I'm not in any of the snaps coz I'm the one taking them - and the one time I asked someone to take a snap of me, I got a snap of some random people walking in the foreground. So I'm not about to bother anymore. I look quite a mess anyway - half an hour in this heat and humidity and the only people who still look great are the Koreans. The tourists mostly all look pretty drained.

Other updates... letsee... I'm getting rather familiar with Korean bakery products - they make the most amazing vegetable scones here. To die for, totally. I had seven at one go for breakfast! They also make really interesting "gelatinous rice balls" - which are kinda like round bun type things with some kind of red bean paste or something inside - they're really nice and they have the exact same rolling capabilities as golf balls. I would know coz I spent a few very embarrassing minutes chasing one around the bakery - so the way bakeries work here is you walk around with a tray and pick up whatever you want and take it to the counter where they ring you up and pack your stuff. I put one of the rice balls on my tray, along with some other stuff, and then I bent down a bit to pick something else up and before I knew it the darned thing had made a mad dash for freedom. Mortification!! And plenty amusement for the lady at the counter. Oh well.

And I saw this particular sign in an alleyway - it's priceless and I had to take a picture.

To think we go looking for the Vietnamese kind back in Seattle. Evidently we're missing out.

I also found out what I ate on Tuesday when I ventured into the restaurant at Insadong with no clue whatsoever what I was doing - it's called Bibimbap and it looks a whole lot more intimidating than it is. I had it again today at lunch, this time with the whole team, and it wasn't bad at all - I think they got me the less adventurous version today though - coz what I had on Tuesday was pretty intense, and today was definitely a lot nicer.

That's all for now - here's hoping for sunshine tomorrow - I'll probably go check out some of the royal palaces and the surrounding areas.

Maybe I should buy an umbrella anyway...

Exploring Seoul: The adventure begins...

Phew! And I'm actually here! So I flew into Incheon airport on Sunday (or Saturday, depending on which side of the international date line my frame of reference is supposed to be) - took a shuttle to the hotel and decided to spend the rest of the day exploring the Gangnam area (which is where my hotel is - Seoul is divided into a number of "wards" - this is one of them) I figured if I headed out, then I wouldn't spend the afternoon sleeping and the night prowling the hallways in a jet-lagged stupor. There's a pretty neat mall very close to the hotel - you step out of the building, quite literally fall down a series of steps going down into the ground and find yourself in subterranean retail paradise. There seemed to be a million people there, shopping, wandering around, eating, and generally doing their thing - people watching is good fun here - the women all dress up tons and are extremely attractive. I felt awfully scruffy in my old jeans, nearly-dead boots and regular t's. Oh well. Anyhoo, so by 8 o'clock, my body clock started screaming "I say, woman!" and I decided to call it a day.

Monday I headed out to the Microsoft Korea office and met the team I'm going to be working with for the next three weeks. They were all awfully sweet and I was thoroughly relieved to note that there was no formal dress code at work. Good - those high heels were already beginning to kill me. They'll go back into storage now. Hello again scruffy boots. Spent the day setting up my machine, meeting people and reading a bunch about the team and the stuff they do. Also spent some time speaking to Greg, who's the lead and really nice. It was great to see that the whole team goes out for lunch together everyday - after asking me several questions about my dietary preferences (anything at all) and restrictions (none at all - well, almost none at all - I'd rather not eat anything cute and furry, but other than that, I'm good) I was taken to an authentic Korean place - we had to take our shoes off before we entered, and we sat on mats on the floor at a really low table with an inbuilt stove and quite literally cooked our meal ourselves. We had something called "army soup", which was apparently invented back in the days of the Korean war - it's a really spicy soup with tofu and SPAM (!!!!) and vegetables and noodles. And they served it with a bunch of side dishes (kimchi, beans, sprouts, other vegetables, some kinds of pickles) and rice. We used metal chopsticks, which are much harder to use than wooden ones, and long spoons. It was definitely more spicy than I'm used to, but I kinda liked it =)

Got totally completely lost while walking back to the hotel in the evening and spent half an hour wandering around trying to figure out where I was. When my personal panic meter began to beep rather strongly, I jumped into a taxi - the chap drove about 500 meters and voila! The hotel was right there. Sigh.

Spent the rest of the evening doing some grocery shopping at the nearby departmental store and polishing up my sign language. It's really wonderful how the people at the store immediately noticed that I'm a foreigner and went out of their way to help me pick out stuff because everything was labeled in Korean and it wouldn't have been too easy to figure everything out without their help.

Tuesday was a national holiday, so I decided to hop on to the subway and go to Insadong, which is supposed to be a touristy shopping sort of place. Buying a subway ticket was hilarious - I asked if they had a day ticket, the guy didn't speak a word of English so I had to stop a random chap walking by and ask for help. He spoke a tiny bit of English but it was still hard to explain that I wanted to know if they had some kind of a day pass or something. Turned out they didn't. Finally I pulled out my map and pointed out exactly where I wanted to go, and he pointed out the subway route I would need to take and told the ticket chappie where I needed to go and after about ten minutes of hilarity, I had a one-way ticket.



Insadong was awesome - I spent nearly 6 hours there, just wandering around - it's full of small arty stores and touristy souvenir places, but it's also really vibrant and full of people and activity. Reminded me very strongly of India - it was just so.. alive!! I didn't really do much shopping, but I bought a few small souvenirs for some friends.



I also decided to be really adventurous and stepped into a totally traditional Korean place for lunch all by myself - I had absolutely NO idea what to order but there was a "simple lunch menu" listed which they pointed at and I was like "Sure!" They brought me about ten little bowls of stuff, and when the lady realised I had no clue whatsoever what to do with them, she sat down with me at my table and mixed them for me. It was.. errmmm... interesting. I can't say I was a big fan of all the flavors - I think a lot of them are probably more of an acquired taste. But I still felt reasonably proud of myself for trying them out.

I still don't know what I ate.

I don't think there was any fur in there though.

Oh well.

So while walking back towards the subway station, I stumbled on a rather pretty park later in the afternoon, with a very nice looking pagoda in the middle - it's very old and very very fragile, so they have it enclosed in glass. It's nice though to see something so old and historical in the middle of a bustling downtowny area, with skyscrapers and people and traffic all around it. If there are still spirits of old living in the structure, I wonder what they think about the world around them.

I'm back in the hotel now but I'll probably head out again later in the evening and get some dinner somewhere. On the whole, I'm really liking Seoul - it's hot and crowded and the traffic is like a video game, but it's also vibrant and exciting and exotic and it's a super adventure!

More later!