Yesterday I saw the mock up of a traditional village, today I saw the real thing, Hahoe Village. Actually inhabited by actual people - not that you would know it because they were all either out at work or inside out of the heat! Anyway, the village was roughly circular and every building was the traditional wooden Korean hut, with either thatched roofs (for the plebs) or tiled (for the VIPs). The village is famous in Korea as the birthplace of the Ryu family which spawned a celebrated Confucian scholar and a government minister - in the 16th Century. Never say a good deed goes unremembered here. More recently, the village has been designated a cultural treasure by UNESCO. I was slightly frustrated that the few public buildings (such as the formal residences of the Ryu ... read more

My final day in Seoul was, I'm afraid to say, super quiet, so not brilliant blog material. I headed for Insadong, the main tourist district and drank in the sights and sounds of the bustling shopping street, including a little annex called Ssamziegil ("ssam-zhee-gill" with soft zh sound, think "je" in French). Ssamziegil is full of little arts and crafts and trinket shops, arranged around a courtyard and over four floors. My real reason for going (other than my inherent passion for shopping, which you all know well) was to try the "poo bread", or toasted sweet bread with red bean paste in the middle in the shape of.. you guessed it, a turd. Quite delicious, if a little disturbing to eat... After wandering round Insadong for a bit, stopping for a coffee at the Korean ... read more

Insadong (phonetic, emphasise the "ng" in "dong" with a hard "d" sound) - the palace district. Seoul has a silly number of palaces, built by successive kings mostly in the Joseon dynasty which started in the late 1300s and ended 67 kings later when Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, so a visit to Insadong was rather a foregone conclusion. Today I saw the principal residence, Gyeongbokgung ("ghee-ong-bock-gung" - say it in one breath with hard "g" throughout and emphasised "ng" at the end). Or rather, I saw its third avatar, the palace having been destroyed by the Japanese not once but twice - the first time following the Japanese invasion in the 1500s and the second time following annexation in 1910. (In the best Fawlty Towers tradition, today's watchword was "don't mention the Japanese"). ... read more

Come to Korea... and speak Mandarin. I met and was adopted by my three new Taiwanese housemates at around midnight last night (when I was shattered but still wide awake, thank you jetlag!) and, on their invitation, we spent the day together today. In case I am accused of overinflating my (non-existent) skills in Mandarin, let me say that all three speak excellent English and pretty good Korean, so I am learning a lot! Our first stop was the traditional village in Bukchon, just a few subway stops north of the Meong-Dong district where we are staying (which is full of little shops and restaurants that will bear further exploration later). Bukchon is famous for its Hanok houses - traditional Korean houses made of wood. Since many of the Hanok are modelled after the architecture in ... read more

*** Last Entry - thank you for bearing with my erratic updates! I hope reading was fun. *** For my last day in Shanghai, I decided to walk around and see as much as possible. I started the day with a walking tour down the riverside of the Bund. I started with the area up by the Suzhou Creek - a smaller tributary feeding into the Huangpu River. Apparently, this used to be a cesspit, but there has been a lot of pressure to clean it up and now, though I should imagine it's far from clean enough to drink or swim in, it's no dirtier than most inner city rivers. On the far bank of the Creek are the Broadway Mansions - an exclusive 1930s apartment block for rich foreigners living in Shanghai. The Foreign ... read more