Seoul, KR

Hi everyone,

I am in Seoul, the flight was long, still have a bit of a cold that is lingering and the travel doesn't help it. Its quite a change from Bangalore. First impression is that its like New York City. Huge skyline, lights everywhere, bars, restaurants, shops. I feel like I have just returned to civilization.

The airport was not confusing at all. Got my bags, all of them, made my way outside and found the line that was for a shuttle that did a loop through the Gangnam area where I am staying, stopping at a number of hotels on the way. 14000 won, about $15; things used to be much cheaper here but as the dollar has depreciated its not as good. Shuttle left @ 4:30pm and I was at the hotel a but before 7pm; lots of traffic, but a nice drive, dozed off for a bit on the way as well.

Renaissance hotel Seoul is where I am staying. It's part of Marriot and its a standard big fancy hotel. King size bed, TV, internet, 7 restaurants in the hotel, blah blah blah. I took a shower, got online, caught up with Missy on the phone and then went out on my hunt for Kraze Burger.

Not much of a hunt, 10 minute walk down the street, some subway tunnel negotiation just to get under and across the street to where I needed to go, and voile I was sitting at Kraze Burger. I ordered what I thought was a hamburger, though it ended up being some steak on a bun, swiss and american cheese, some sprouts, vinegar (maybe balsamic) sauce and some bacon. IT WAS AWESOME. Meat was tender and delicious and cooked perfectly. The sides were some pickled veggy crap which is what Koreans love, and some fruit, kiwi slices, tomato and orange. I have to admit that I do not recall ever having tasted kiwi. It probably was in the category of things that I hated but had never tried in my younger days of bad eating habits. Regardless of that, I ate the kiwi, orange, tomato and the sandwich and was very happy.

Before I had ventured out for dinner, I had stopped at the hotel concierge to find out about getting a tour of the DMZ. I was setup with a tour that was going to pick me up at the hotel @ 8:15am. After dinner, I tried to sleep because I knew I had an early morning, cold was bothering me and I didnt get to bed until 1am.

Woke up sweating @ 7:15am, got my senses together, popped tylenol and sudafed and went to the 5 star breakfast buffet that I get with my room (though only get it because they offered me an upgraded room package that gave me breakfast and internet and saves me some money over getting each of those separate). What gets interesting about restaurants like this is that they have to provide top quality food to their guest, but their guests are from all over the world, so the spread at the buffet was like nothing I had seen before. I do not know diddely about what Asian people eat for breakfast; no, I lie, I had rice congee with a fried egg before, but that was in California. I took down some eggs benedict, a banana, 2 cups of OJ, a cup of green tea ( the green tea here is fucking great, tea in India was either too dark or not good, dont understand why that would be?), 2 sticks of chicken, 2 slices of bacon (why is it that when bacon is an option I always say yes?), and a hard boiled egg that was not really hard boiled and I didnt touch. Anyways, I knew I needed some food in my stomach because I didn't think the DMZ was going to have a snack bar and I needed some sustenance to help me fight this cold.

DMZ and Palaces are going to come in another post.... just wanted to get some stuff down now. Google apparently makes some highly aggressive assumptions about the language you want displayed to you based on the IP address of the computer you are signing in from; so after struggling for a few minutes to try and get blogger to stop displaying everything in Hangul (Korean letters, look like pictographs but phonetic), writing a rant email about how google sucks because of this and how Yahoo! should never make assumptions about this kind of thing to devel-random@, searching google groups for an answer which I found but doesn't work, I logged onto the VPN so that I could at least get something written.

I have been reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I feel like I read a book of his long ago but if I did, I was certainly much to young to understand it or learn anything from his style of writing. Its hard reading, with very long descriptive sentences chocked full of metaphor that just go on an on and on and sometimes it hard to tell the voice of the story. While I have been impressed in the past with Tom Robbins' wordsmithing, Marquez takes it to another level. I can only imagine what its like to read it in the original Spanish. So when my sentences go on and on filling in the gaps with juicy bits of detail land running down tangents like the bulls in Pamplona as I listen to the brakes of the city busses shrill like the cries of a newborn babe, just bear with me.