Day 12; Stay... don't gooo!

After waking up in a bed surrounded by (fake, ok) flowers, in the middle of a (painted) fantasy forest (I'll post some pictures of that, soon), every other motel seems.. crappy. Man, do we get spoiled easily. And so I woke up, way too late, after way too little sleep, to realize it was my last day in Seoul. I don't know if it's just me, but as usual I got used to being in this foreign country pretty fast, and I really, really didn't want to go back to rainy Holland just yet. But yeah, what do you do, apart from deciding to come back to Seoul, soon.

After the disappointment of an already closed Seoul Tower the night before (so, no placing the symbolical lock there, but still granted with a pretty view of Seoul by night), we went to Hwaseon Fortress in Suwon, a 'small' town close to Seoul, accompanied by perfect weather ending in a beautiful sunset behind the great mountains this country is blessed with. Dinner confirmed my enthusiasm for the Korean kitchen once again, and followed by an emotional and sleepless night, this last day left me really, really sad to have to leave this country already...

Day 11; Ketchup!

It seems that you're always running out of time on summer holidays (now that I'm finally learning to read/write/speak some Korean). The last few days have been pretty mellow, with a visit to the night market in Dongdaemun (from 6 pm to 6 am...), 'quiet' little Sindorim and ridiculously overdone (but pretty) Chezlee 'Theme' Motel. As my trip is coming to an end though, I start realizing there are still a lot of things I want to do and see.

So, my last day in South Korea will be my first day out of Seoul, with a planned visit to the famous fortress in Suwon and a little (traditional) village close to it. As for tonight: N-Tower (Seoul Tower) by night, which is supposed to be beautiful, and back to Dongdaemun market to buy you all (and myself, of course) some presents.









edit: These pictures aren't from the night market in Dongdaemun by the way, but from the market in Incheon.

Day 9; Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..

Somehow, everytime I plan to leave Seoul's city borders and pay a visit to the countryside or one of the other cities in South Korea, the weather plays a trick on me and thralls my plans with heavy rain. So no Busan, Jeju-Do, or close by Suwon today, but a visit to Namsangol Hanok Village. Arriving just too late for the traditional lunch offered there, I found that today's weather had a positive effect on the amount of visitors: there were hardly any. Namsangol Hanok is a small village in Seoul that has been kept the way it was during the Joseon Dynasty. Since there weren't any native or foreign tourists in the little village during those years, I actually got a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to look like. Apart from the information and 'do not enter' signs, of course.

Day 7; Get your hands off of your girlfriend!

In a country where kissing on the streets isn't exactly prohibited, but definetely a big social taboo, young adults in Korea usually stay in their elderly house until they get married. Obviously, hormones tend to start to run through their bodies at a way earlier age, while privacy is nowhere to be found. Luckily, a solution is offered through the cities' countless amount of hotels and motels; and if you're a young couple in desperate 'need', you won't have a hard time finding an all-providing 'Love-Motel'. Contrary to what you might expect, these motels aren't some dark, dirty holes, where you're welcomed by a grumpy 40-year old unwashed receptionist watching porn 24/7. No, these places welcome you with a clean, neat and luxurious reception, occupied by a dito receptionist. "Are you staying for the night?" "Hmmno.." "So you're just here for some 'rest', then?"

You'll receive your room key, along with a small box containing single-use toothbrushes, and off you are to your (again clean, neat and luxurious) all-providing entertainment room. And I do mean all-providing; for while so far, by the looks of it, you could've still been convinced this was just a regular hotel, when you actually enter the room it's pretty obvious what this place is actually for. No, I'm not talking free leather masks, whips and chains on the wall, we are still in Korea, but I am talking about lotion, lubricant and condoms being provided by your bedside. A big (BIG) widescreen tv, your own computer, an advanced HiFi set and, most important, a huge airconditioning system compliment the room and make sure that, even if your company wouldn't be as interesting as you'd hoped, you still won't be bored easily. After a hot bath or shower, a wide range of cosmetic products awaits you in the bathroom, to make sure that you can go back to work, school, or whatever it was you were doing, looking like nothing ever happened.

Seriously, I wonder how these kids manage.















*edit* I stand corrected. Not all these motels are clean, neat and luxurious. By far. I guess we were just lucky on the first try. An unwashed, grumpy, 40-year old soapstaring receptionist welcomed us into a small, dirty room with stained sheets, broken walls and a used condom in the trash can. We got out of there as fast as we could, which made it my most expensive bathroom visit ever.

Day 5 and 6...

Not so much to write today actually. The weather sucked yesterday, so I thought I'd go to the insanely big Yongsan mall, but they happened to have their monthly "let's remodel and repaint all our shops and departments" closing day. So went I there again today. Salesmen suck. Hardly any of the (electronic) products have a pricetag attached to it; which basically means that when you're a foreigner, they ask twice as much. "Ok, thank you, bye..."

Cops make you happy!

No comment...

Day 4; Relaxation

That's the thing about muscle-ache. You feel it coming the night before, and you know it's gonna be bad. Really bad. Waking up without hardly being able to move bad (and I sleep in a bunk bed, the top one...). So what do you do? You go to a spa, mess about in the sauna a bit, then get a 85 dollar massage. That should do the trick...


(Kids playing in the fountains outside of Seoul Plaza)

Day 3; How to empty your mind, cleanse your soul and ruin your sneakers

So freaking handy, those iPods. Internet, email, watching movies, listening music and what not. So handy in fact, that when you're going on a trip to the other side of the world, you decide to leave your laptop at home, because hey, I've got this thing only like one twentieth of it's size which can do all the same things, right? Right. When it works. Sadly, people around the world seem to be having problems with Apple's 2.0 upgrade, and as it turned out last night, I'm one of them. Normally, that would be a problem easily fixed, since you can just use your iTunes to restore the whole thing. Not so easy when you're in a guesthouse 7000 kilometers away from your iTunes. Thank you Apple.

Anyway.. Today I decided to go have a look at Mt. Dobongsan, where, according to my treavel guide (thanks Mark!) , you could take a nice hike through the mountains. What I expect from a hike though, is like a walk. Through paths and stuff. So, when I arrived at Dobongsan station and there were all these small shops selling hiking canes and shoes and such, I thought buying that would be rather silly. Something in my gut told me that a hiking cane would be a good idea though, and I decided to follow up on that feeling . Some other thing in my gut told me that buying hiking shoes was probably a good idea as well, but I told that thing to shut up, because I didn't want to carry the shoes I was wearing around.

After five hours of hiking, climbing, scurrying, almost falling and climbing some more, it turned out I should've listened to that other gut feeling as well. Anyway; I'm not going to write much more about this, because as you will see in the photo's, me ending up with feet that refuse to do anything for the rest of the day (days? week? month?) was well worth it. Because WOW. This was definetely a unique experience. Enjoy!

Day 2; Independence Day

It's insane. This city has as big an overload of beautiful women as it has a shortage of trash cans. There's just one problem: they all remind me of a certain someone (the beautiful women, that is, not the trash cans). That being said, indeed most of them seem to give me a lot of curious attention as I'm walking down the streets here. Actually, most people in general look at me as if they've never seen a tourist before. Maybe they just never saw a guy with orange hair.

Anyway, the hotel was actually pretty f*cking good for a 30 dollar room. I woke up (way too early of course, after falling asleep at like 4pm yesterday afternoon) and treated myself to a nice hot bath, followed by a good cold 'rise and shine' shower. I decided to go out for early breakfast and found that the streets were filling themselves with police officers. Seriously, there must've been thousands of them. Oh yeah, that's right: today is Independence Day.. Sixty years, to be exact, since the Japanese retreated from this country. Apparently, Jongno-Gu was where the celebrations where being held, and when I found the stage for these celebrations (which was pretty easy, just follow the huge line of parked police busses), I tried to blend in with the crowd (yeah, right) to get in. It turned out I needed an invitation, but it probably would've helped if I had at least carried a Korean flag, but ok. This little trip did take me to a fascinating location though, the National Folk Museum of Korea: an open air collection of buildings that were actually build on that spot - around this palace with a name that's too hard to remember, let alone write - and statues and totems either replicated or transferred from their original locations, such as Jeju-Do.

Checkout was at twelve, so I hurried back to my hotel, grabbed all my stuff, and headed over to the nearest subway entrance, to travel to the hostel I booked. Yet again, finding it wasn't as easy as they described, even with the map they provided on their website (thank god for unprotected wifi networks..). The first guy I asked though, was standing close to where he parked his car, and he powered up his GPS for me to look the place up. I was literally only one block away, but I still think I wouldn't have found it. When I got there, the visitors and owner and staff seemed to be one big happy family, and Lee actually speaks quite a lot of English, so I'm looking forward to my stay here.

Oh and, before I forget. I hope I'll never find out what I just ate. After trying one fish restaurant where they didn't speak English and actually didn't really seem to understand that I just wanted some food, I went to another, and although they didn't speak english either, at least the waitress guided me to a table and provided me with their menu. Which was, of course, in Korean. All Korean. No pictures. Just names. And prices. So what do you do? I decided to just pick something at random, and as the waitress explained to me what it was I ordered, I just refrained to saying yes, ok and thank you, so 10 minutes later I got a bowl filled with.. something that looked like sheep genitals. I convinced myself they weren't (since I was in a fish restaurant..), but then still they looked like fish bladders. Of a very big fish. Of some sorts. It was actually pretty good.

My jetlag is kicking in again, though. Or maybe it's the insane heat. Or just the fact that I got up at like 5AM. Either way, I'm gonna hit the sack. Goodnight!