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Published: August 15th 2009
After 3 months of faaaaarming my arse off in Japan my visa was set to expire so I opted for a welcome 2 week break to South Korea. The flight over was the worst flying experience I have ever had. En route to Seoul from Tokyo we was awarded some major turbulence, at one point the plane just dropped like a deadweight out of the sky for a strong yet solidly firm 2 seconds, in that instant a chorus of manic screams bellowed out throughout the plane and it wouldn't have surprised me if the biggest came from the cockpit. An air stewardess pummeled to the floor in front of me and crawled desperately to her seat with a face carrying nothing but fear as her burden, it was when I witnessed this that I thought to myself "Shit! This isn't very good!" Nobody wants to see an air stewardess in a panic, this definitely doesn't play well with the nerves trust me. The plane however did obviously scrape on through its airspace hence you being able to read this assortment of words that lay helplessly before you against their will. But let it be said, it was quite a gay
experience.
Upon clearance through customs I was extremely satisfied to discover a Dunkin Donuts joint awaiting me at the airport, any mental scars from the dodgy flight being instantly erased from my feeble mind. I was extremely excited and wasted no time what so ever in ordering myself a frosted strawberry and double chocolate dosage of donuts. And what a treat it was, the checkout girl even informed me out of the blue that I was hansom! What excellent service, I think I was going to enjoy Korea if these early first few moments were anything to go by.
I devoured my donuts with my specially designed cakehole I developed inside the womb way back when and then began proceedings into making my way to Guri City, an area that just about harasses the eastern fringes of Seoul. For the next week I would be based here staying with my Canadian friend Curtis who I met 2 years previously when circumnavigating Cambodia. He is now based in Seoul teaching English to innocent children.
I tracked down Curtis and his Korean fiancé whose name I'm not willing to try and spell properly due to being a bit of
an uncultured cock. It wasn't particularly difficult as Curtis was wearing the exact same clobber he was wearing the last time I saw him back in Thailand 2 years previously. We caught a bus to his apartment where I ditched my baggage and caught a shower before heading out for some Korean munch.
I'd not tried much Korean food before but what I had eaten was a little spicy and a little sour tasting, but satisfyingly pleasantly pleasant. This evening would be no exception, many Korean dishes are barbeque themed where you essentially sit at a grill and cook your own food to its desired requirements. On this eve we opted for some sort of Octopus concoction, extremely tasty and extremely spicy, my tongue felt as if it had been sliced down both sides and filled with molten lava. Water as well as beer was a key component to this meal, as would perhaps be the case for many Korean dishes.
Come morning it would be a very western eggs on toast for breakfast, my first western breakfast in sometime, I did however spice it up a little, much to the disgust of Curtis by adding peanut butter
to the equation, thus creating peanut butter eggs on toast. If you haven't tried it before then I whole heartedly recommend it, it was a sublime treat.
As it was now a weekday Curtis would be working so I was left to explore Seoul for myself, he pointed me in the direction of Deoksugung Palace and suggested this as a good place to begin my Seoul journey. So off I set, only to discover that the Palace was closed on Mondays, aboo!! So I was then left to do what I feel I do best, wonder around aimlessly and just see what crops up. Always a good way of soaking up the surroundings and local culture of a place I feel.
So one early discovery for myself was that Korea was a Christian nation, I did not know this, and if you like me did not know this then now like me .... you now know this. Clustered all over Seoul there are many Churches to be found. In Myeongdong I came across a Catholic Cathedral, apparently the main one in Korea. Almost comes as a surprise seeing such a huge gothic structure slapped into the heart of
A thing
being thingythis huge Asian metropolis.
From just walking around the streets of Seoul you get the mainland Asia feel that is very absent from Japan. The hustle and bustle of everyday life smearing the streets, street vendors selling their wares, bellowing out in the name of their trade, curiously anonymous smells wafting over from unknown sources and of course the mainland Asian crouch position is ever prevalent, mild elements of poverty are present, the occasional beggar here and there, the handicapped it would seem are left to fend for themselves, I've seen a guy with no legs pull himself across the floor with his arms pushing a pot of pennies in front of him, a mentally handicapped man in a wheelchair singing karaoke by the side of the road. All this very absent from across the pond in Japan.
However in many areas of the city it becomes obvious that in recent times South Korea has become another rising Asian economic superpower, and seemingly does so every day. Seoul now boasts a population of about 12 million people making it the 4th largest city on earth. All over the city construction is under way and modern day architecture flows
with the old being replaced with something new and upbeat. High rise skyscrapers and classy shopping malls seem to be the order of the day. Doused with only small undertones of grime of which can perhaps now only be considered as the Korea of the past, this you can tell though is being cancelled out as time dictates. For an historical look at Korea Seoul probably wasn't the place to be.
In the afternoon I stumbled across a little park where I thought that I would take a little break and sit in the shade and escape the intensity of the sun for a little while as I was well and truly saturated in my own sweat. This however turned out to be a bad idea as a bunch of old trampish Korean bums refused to leave me alone, taking it in turns to walk up to me and say "HAAWOOOO". This sort of shit really gets on my tits, they were like a bunch of retarded teenagers who thought it was hilarious to say "Hello" to whitey and then run off back to their respective little gay gangs giggling amongst themselves like.....COCKS!!! I left them to be batty boys
by themselves and made tracks to Namdaemun Market.
At Namdaemun I would receive another huge dose of mainland Asia, Namdaemum Market is said to be the biggest retail market in Seoul. This point certainly proven upon my visit, bustling it was I tell ya, bustling, bodies everywhere, very cramped with its narrow streets designed before the existence of road vehicles which would at times become gridlocked with clumps of humans. It was just a maze of stalls channeling the back streets of Seoul for what seemed like miles. You name it and Namdaemun Market probably has it, within reason of course. I just so happened to be looking for a new watch strap as my old one had become old and withered and stunk like White Hart Lane. I found myself a man that looked like a possible watchman, who pointed me in the direction of another possible watchman, who in turn pointed me to another possible watchman who was in fact a genuine watchman. I showed the genuine watchman my watch and he took it upon himself to decide what colour and style of strap the white man would be having. He chose black and named 10,000won (about
a fiver) as his price. This I knew damn well was a complete rip off but my bartering skills were rusty, actually they always have been, it’s just not really in my nature to haggle with someone when I’m so used to just paying the stated rate. I’d just feel like a scumbag, so instead of feeling like a scumbag I opted to feel like a mug instead.
As the day drew to a close rain began to enter the equation and it did so in style, it absolutely pissed it down. I admired its ferocity, but disliked the royal drenching that I received. I may have even missed the rain if the stupid lady in front of me in the queue for the bus hadn’t decided at the last moment that she no longer desired to get on the bus and in doing so the bus driver with his mainland Asian mentality figured that anyone stood in the queue behind this stupid lady didn’t require getting on the bus so he just drove off and left the rest of us to go swivel. Incidentally this pissed me right off so I decided to walk back to Curtis's apartment
in the pouring rain.
The streets of Seoul really did look kind of cool though it has to be said, kind of Blade Runner esque as the night drew in and the neon lights began to illuminate the streets. The traffic lights in Korea however can F%%K right off. They are a joke, probably amongst the worst I have ever come up against on my travels. Don’t get me wrong though, they probably have them situated in all of the right places but it’s just the amount of time one has to wait in order for the green tosser to say go, something that becomes even more apparent when it happens to be lashing it down. Come rain or shine though who wants to be waiting 10 minutes at each individual intersection? Sort it out!
The proceeding day continued to hammer it down so I decided that I would head to the CO-EX mall to check out Terminator 4. As in Japan everyone on the tube is embedded deeply into the world of their mobile phones, the slight edge here however is that many seem to have a large antennae sticking out of their phone to which television
is being broadcast to. One only hopes that it doesn’t burn up as much juice as the mightily unmighty Sega Game Gear.
After some mindless Terminator 4 action which is what I so desired I headed back to the tube where I would learn that my Seoul subway card was somehow already clocked into the subway system, even though physically...I was not. This wasn’t good at all as I had some considerable ground to cover before I could get home. I saw an old Korean guy of some authority who just so happened to look like he wouldn’t speak a bone of English. To which my assumption of course would be 100% correct. He pointed toward a ticket credit machine which lets you top up your travel card. I knew damn well that the issue did no lie there as I had a good 8000won of credit on my card, not to mention the fact that the machine on the gate was actually telling me the problem. The guy was failing to acknowledge that small if not largely important fact though. So I left old matey boy to it and went to the ticket crediting machine to check my...credit.
As I suspected, 8000won, plenty of money. So I went back to old matey boy, when he saw me again he looked like he had just seen an old enemy. I pointed to my travel card, "8000won" I proclaimed in English, but with a Korean accent I might add. This time he pointed to what looked like some sort of ticket booth help desk which I could see from where I was standing was clearly not open for business. Old matey boy just wanted me out of his life, to which I gladly obliged to ... sort of.
So me and my gay not working travel card went for a walk in the rain to try and find the next station along to try my luck at. I actually ended up walking around for a good few hours experiencing a whole lot of floodings within the local vicinity. Burst river banks, broken brollies, flooded football pitches and leaky pipes all seemed to be quite high on the list of torrential priorities in such climatic conditions.
I did eventually find another subway station where I would encounter the exact same problem. Luckily this time however the nice old dear on
the ticket gate who again didn't speak a word of English (and why should she?) took me by the arm like a lost child and led me through the ticket gate and away I went, victorious.....and very damp...again. When I reached my destination at the other end I was able to clock out of the subway system with success................which was nice.
En route home I started to get an unpleasant sensation in my stomach, by the time I actually got home it wasn’t much better, I could sense something very unpleasent on the cards.
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The Big Red Blob
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Bread Talk
Love it, there has been a distinct lack of bread shops in your updates cockgobbler!