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!