Tour of Seoul, South Korea
Pictures: Days 1 & 2, War Museum, Palace, NYLA Club
Day 1 - Arrival, 2002 World Cup Stadium, a mall
The first day of the tour, Saturday, started out early because we had to be at the airport by 7AM to meet our tour guides. The sun came up outside while we waited for the whole group to be ready. There were nine of us who went: Tracy, Sabrina, Mathias, Surabhi, Tom, Mya, Sanne, Yeelo and me. We caught the bus to Central, then took the airport express line in the MTR.
Once we got to the airport, we met our tour guide, got our tickets, checked our baggage, and had time for breakfast before we left. I just got a mocha at Starbucks, and while I was sitting there drinking it, it struck me how funny it was so see so many white people in one place. Even though Hong Kong has a lot more foreigners than just about anywhere else in China, the population is still about 98% Chinese. Seeing so many non-Chinese in one place after living in Hong Kong for over a month was startling. I can't imagine how wierd it'll be when I get back to the States.
We all pretty much just slept on the flight over, then got out of the airplane, out of the airport and into our tour bus. Somwhere in there our group of 9 was merged into the tour group of about 40 or so, the rest being Hong Kong residents, and generally older than we were.
Our first stop was the 2002 Seoul world cup stadium. It took us over an hour to get there from the airport, on a highway that was actually on the right side of the road again, surrounded by open countryside. It was nice to see open space and fields again after the building-crowdedness of Hong Kong. The stadium itself was okay, looked like any other stadium I've ever seen in my life.
The next stop was a shopping mall in what looked like some kind of downtown area. I didn't really have much idea of where I was at any given time because the tour was in cantonese, given by a particularily annoying women we all really disliked by the end of the tour because she never stopped talking. An hour there on the bus, talking. Two hours somewhere else on the bus, talking. Non-stop talking. Ugh.
Anyway, the shopping center was okay, certainly different from anything in the States, though I saw another one like it in Beijing. It was mostly clothing, and each floor was a specific kind, like men's clothing, children's clothing, shoes, etc. And it wasn't like a big department store, it was many aisles filled with different sections with a person selling their merchandise in each section. It's really hard to explain in words, actually, and I don't think I managed to get a picture of it.
While I was there, I just bought a couple pairs of earrings, ate at the food court on the top level (I'm a traiter to travellers everywhere; I ate pizza) and spent the rest of the time in the arcade. I was with Surabhi, Mathias and Tom for most of the time. No doubt the best part was the arcade where we played air hockey and took a bunch of pictures with a photo booth.
After that we were taken to someplace to have dinner, Chinese food, then drove for over an hour to our hotel for the night, and I went to sleep early after a nice bath.
Day 2 - Spa, the themepark Everglades, another shopping area, sleepover
The next day started out with one of the nicest parts of the trip, the spa. I think we were there for 2 or 3 hours, and it was just wonderful. We all got into our bathing suits in seperate women/men locker rooms, and spent the rest of our time in the warm pool, in the hot tubs, both normal and medicated, and in the sauna. One thing I really liked was this waterfall type thing in the middle of the main pool. When you sat/stood under it, it poured down on your shoulders and it was like getting a neck/shoulder massage. Very relaxing.
Next went to a theme park called the Everglades. It looked like any other themepark I've been to in my life, but we did get an opportunity to learn how to make Kimchee, a smelly Korean dish made with cabbage, chives, hot chili powder, etc. We even got to take our kimchee back with us, which we could eat after it had been in the fridge for 10 days. Sadly, I left my kimchee behind in the last hotel we visited.
After that we had a Korean BBQ dinner, which was very good. You basically cooked the meat yourself and mixed it with rice and some vegetables. Pretty tasty. Through the meal I talked with a young couple from Hong Kong, maybe late twenties early thirties. They both spoke pretty good English and I found out that the wife was a Mandarin teacher, which was cool. I got to practice a few words of Mandarin and just enjoyed the meal.
Soon dinner was over, and then they took us to a another shopping area, this one consisting of a line of stalls and stores on each side of a large street. I liked that shopping, where you get to bargain more. I ended up getting a few nice scarves and a pair of pants.
Our allotted time for shopping ended too soon and we headed to our next hotel destination, which turned out to be a skiing resort quite far away from the city. That night we all had a sleepover in one of the rooms, because that hotel didn't have beds, they had futons to go on the floor. By combining the futons and blankets for the four rooms we had been given and sharing the space, we made a pretty comfortable sleeping area.
Of course, we didn't put that all together just to sleep, so we ended up staying up late, to 4 or 5, playing cards, drinking games, talking and generally having a good time. That was my favorite hotel of the three we stayed in while we were in Korea.
Day 3 - War Museum, Casino, Palace, Club NYLA
During day 3 we had a hard time getting up, which was expected, and spent the in-between-places-bus-rides sleeping.
Our first stop was the museum for the war that seperated North and South Korea. We couldn't actually go inside the museum since it appeared to be closed, but we got to wander the grounds for half an hour, seeing airplanes, tanks, replica bombs, etc. The architecture of the museum reminded me a lot of DC, with it's towering columns, large set of stone steps, benches, fountains and trees. I would have liked to stay there longer just for the atmosphere, but I bought a few touristy items to take home and then got back on the bus.
As we were headed towards our next destination, a casino, I remember looking out over the fields and forests and thinking about how peaceful it looked, and how different it must be from what it was during the war, when the area we were travelling over was surely where at least some of the war was fought back and forth.
The casino wasn't that fascinating, over an hour I lost a little money at the blackjack table and the slots, and concluded that gambling is pretty pointless to me. Blackjack is fun, but I don't need to bet money to do it.
After the casino we went to the palace museum. It wasn't very old, as it had been rebuilt in the 1950's after the war, but it was still worth seeing as it had been rebuilt to look as it would have been. It was mostly pretty peaceful, especially around the two lakes that were on the grounds. It wasn't just one big building like you might think of, but many different buildings spread across the grounds, similar to the palace in Beijing. It's hard to describe, so you'll just have to look at the pictures when I get them up.
We spent a couple hours there, taking pictures and looking around, I bought some postcards and a Korean phrase book in the folk museum's store, and then we were back in the bus again. Our next stop was dinner, another Korean meal, soup this time, and then we took a couple hours to get to our next hotel, which was in the actual city of Seoul.
That night we decided we were going to go clubbing, so after getting settled in, changing our clothes and getting directions to a club, we headed out. We got in two cabs to get to the clubs, and that was certainly an interesting experience, as we spoke no Korean and the cab driver spoke no English. We hadn't even thought to get someone to write down the name of the club in Korean. Somehow we managed to get there, both of the cabs, only to find out that the club we had been recommended to was closed for renovations. We basically stood around confused for a while while Yeelo bargained with the conceirge to get a deal at another club. Eventually they reached some kind of agreement, and we all ended up in two taxis once again, and ended up at a club called NYLA.
The club was certainly unique. First of all, you had only two choices as to what to drink: beer and whiskey, and you didn't really pay individually, you paid by table, which would either get you one whiskey or 8 beers, as I recall. It was pretty expensive for either one. Second, there was the huge TV screen that routinely showed pictures of the trade towers consumed in fire and smoke, which was upsetting to say the least, though I don't believe it was meant to glorify the bombings. It seemed like the idea of the club was some kind of unity with the States, thus the name NYLA (New York, Los Angles).
And then there was the social interactivity between men and women, which isn't really the appropriate description for it. Basically, if there were more guys than girls at a table, a waiter would come over and drag a few of the girls off to a table where there were mainly guys. And I mean that literally. They would come over, grab your arm, and pull you over to a table. If you protested too strenuously, eventually he would give up (the waiters were all male), but since that was the way things were there, most girls didn't really protest to that degree. Also, if a guy at a table saw a particular girl he was interested in, he would ask the waiter to bring her over, and the waiter would.
I don't actually say this from personal experience, since I wasn't dragged off anywhere, though all the rest of the girls at our table were at one point or another. I think it had something to do with our waiter, who told me I looked "just like Brooke Shields" (the model), that I was "very beautiful", "you don't have a boyfriend!" "How long will you be in Korea?" and got a little touchy-feely by the end of the night.
Other than that, I did ask him about some things, like whether or not Koreans liked Americans (he said that "of course" they did, with a shocked look that I would consider anything different), whether or not they got a lot of foreigners in the club (about once a week, and apparently Coby Bryant, a famous basketball player in the States, visited about a year ago with "a lot of bodyguards"), and I asked why the pictures with trade towers, but he never got back to me on that.
After a few hours of drinking and dancing, we left around 4AM, somehow managed to get the taxi cab to get us back to the hotel, and got a couple hours of sleep.
Day 4 - Sleeping on the bus, Myung Dong, Departure
After our late night, we slept on the bus from when we got on around 9AM or so to around 12PM. I think we missed an expensive crystal shop in that time, ah well.
By the time we started waking up a bit, we'd arrived at another shopping area, called Myung Dung. I enjoyed it there, though it was less of a market than just streets with stores up and down them. I managed to get a pair of jeans in my size, which I never expected to do while I was in Asia, so that pretty much made my day, though I won't tell you how much they cost. We were there for a couple hours, wandering around the stores and having lunch at a restaurant where our tour guides had given us a coupon for a free meal.
After that we got back on the bus and headed back to the airport to catch our flight and return to Hong Kong.
Posted by blablues at November 21, 2002 03:20 AM
