1st Day - South Korea

Impressions of Korea from the air - Many clusters of highrise buildings, nestled among forested mountains, roads look well built and organised. Interesting industrial works.

Ok - I've got 14 hours to do things till my next flight. Breeze through customs with just my passport (no visa required).

Korea has one of those silly currencies that nobody understands because the numbers are all too high. Should a pack of tic tacs cost 1000000? 1000000000? 1000000000? Nobody actually knows because your attention drifts while trying to count the zeros.

Took the train to Seoul. Train very nice and modern. The ticket inspector, upon entering the carriage, bowed to everyone. She then proceeded to not really check anyone's ticket, instead spent about 10 minutes helping a group of older gents who were trying to look something up on their smart phone.

Homeless encampment at the train station. Actually I saw a surprising amount of homeless people. One thing I noted about the encampment however was that the ground surrounding it was kept spotless.

The streets in Seoul are wide. The indicators to walk across have no sound and count down how long you have before they turn red.

Never seen so many affluent, well dressed people. Passed thousands and thousands of them. Every city I've been to has it's rich quarter but Seoul seems to have a highly disproportionate number of wealthy people.

People here keep to the right. Wrong!

Other things of note. Workmen wear blinking LEDs over their high vis. CCTV everywhere. Lots and lots of people out and about enjoying themselves, even late on Wednesday night. They have fewest number of obese people I've seen anywhere. Occasionally very large, very bright LEDS screens on the side of buildings, this and the general cleanliness and newness of the city give it a high-tech feel.

Visited various temples and palaces around the city. It was too late for any of them to be open so I could only look from the outside. They had a section of the Berlin wall up on display, the information board was badly translated into English and the light poles in that street are made in the style that existed in Berlin at the time the wall came down.

Missed my train back to the airport. The first one the next morning would be too late. Had Macca's while I figured out what to do. In Korea they give you a substancial cup instead of something to throw away, when finished you put it in a sink and they wash it for reuse.

Came up with and discarded various plans of how to get back to the airport. Including one which would require me to speedrun through security and get to the plane in 30 minutes of arriving, ehh too risky. Just took an Uber back. Boring, expense but low risk.

The security gates were shut for the night, so I just hung out in the front part of the airport. I wandered around for a bit before having a sleep on one of the long benches. A number of other people doing the same thing, kind of reminded me of sleeping in the shelters on the AT.

Had a shower at the airport for $6. The water pressure was absolutely amazing.

After that it was back onto the plane and off to London. I again had a window seat and there was no one in the middle, so I could kind of lean up against the wall and swing my feet over to middle in a vaguely diagionalish manner be a bit more comfortable. There was a Korean guy in the aisle seat that I chatted to. He was always very johnny-on-the-spot with passing me my meal and the rubbish back the other other day. At the end of the flight he wrote me a note telling me I'm a pretty awesome guy. I am used to this behavoir now, people act this way towards me a fair bit.

Next post London!Read more