Sunday has arrived after my first week in Korea. I took a day trip down to Seoul with one of my colleagues over here. We caught a bus from Songtan/Pyeongtaek down to a major bus station in Seoul where we switched onto a train/subway to get further into town. We basically walked around all day, checking out a few tourist attractions, the architecture,
Gyeongbokgung Palace, multiple shopping areas and so on. One particularly funny moment was around lunch. We passed by a camera store and walked in and were immediately shooed out the door by the owner inside. Then, we went for lunch at a Bulgolgi place. They brought out a large number of items that we were meant to cook in a boiling pot of water in the center of the table. The center pot was on a boiler, and had a split top - half of which they filled with an egg mixture. By the time we realized it was actually just cooking egg, and were about to stir it they came over and were clearly embarrassed that we didn't seem to know how to cook our food. We made a few other gaffes during the meal, including trying to eat the rice before its time (apparently you use the rice at the end to sop up the rest of the soup). The last straw was leaving the ladle on the edge of the pot and melting the handle! The waitress was clearly trying to keep herself from laughing at us. We were laughing, and felt like silly foreigners who didn't know how to do simple things - like turn off the pot before we burned our food :) It worked out well enough, but it seemed that throughout the day we had multiple occasions to show our lack of knowledge on how you do simple things in Korea...
Seoul had a lot of people walking around and enjoying the downtown sights, despite the rain. It cleared up after 11 am or so, so it was enjoyable to walk around through the alleys, shops and tourist attractions. There are two themes when you watch people here. One is the cell phone. They seem to be a status symbol as everyone carries them in their hands - though that may just be due to the large screens these days. 5" or 6" screens on phones are common over here, and even have antennas so they can watch actual TV on them! The second theme is coffee. There are a million coffee shops here, sometimes 4 or 5 on each corner around an intersection. Coffee is quite expensive, with a cup of coffee going for $3 or $4 (or $6.5 at a hotel). Lattes and the like are only marginally more expensive, so I'm tending to the slightly pricier drinks...
