Here’s another relic from last month’s trip to South Korea — you can click on the image above for a PDF of the waiver I had to sign before entering the Joint Security Area at Panmunjeom.

I love that neither the United Nations nor the governments of South Korea or the US and A were willing to take any responsibility for what happened to me inside the JSA; no wonder everybody on the tour wanted their forms back as souvenirs!

I grabbed a couple of quick snaps on my TyTN on the day of my return to Canada, mostly to document the fabulous buffet breakfast I had at my hotel.

Thanks to my online booking I was able to enjoy free internet in my room and a free daily buffet breakfast at The Koreana. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all about breakfast, and while traveling it’s especially important to start off the day right, and the hotel restaurant certainly didn’t disappoint…

From the very first morning when I found myself in front of this machine I knew I was in good hands.

If you didn’t know Douwe Egberts makes Senseo coffee, which I’ve been drinking at home every morning for more than two years.

And by the way, if you ever wanted to bribe me you can’t go wrong with just about anything from my favourite shop of eBay.

Before grabbing that first cup of coffee I’d put in my order for a western-style omelette with the resident chef. There was lots of Korean food available as well — the closest I got to it was this yummy Korean-style pork.

Who needs bacon when you can have this?

Pictured below is United Airlines Flight 892, waiting to be boarded at Incheon International Airport. It’s one of the newer Boeing 777s, and while it looks small on the outside, inside every seat has a personal LCD screen in front of it, even in economy!

Speaking of economy, I shouldn’t be too surprised that Air Canada has tried to fuck me over with the points accumulated on my trip. I checked my balance on the morning I left to find that my flight to Korea hadn’t shown up on my Aeroplan account. Apparently United switched the first and last name on my reservation — “Andrew, Currie” instead of “Currie, Andrew” — in any case it’s a good thing I saved my boarding passes, as I now have to mail them in to get the mileage credit for my flights.

I should really be pissed of United I guess, but on this leg of the trip they treated me better than Air Canada ever has. As soon as I boarded the plane and took my economy seat a purser came up to me and told me I’d been upgraded to business class, free of charge!

I had to think about it for half a second as I was sitting beside a rather attractive young lady. I really should’ve stayed put but figured she’d eventually tire of me anyway (they all do), so I grabbed my carry-on crap and moved on up. Funny thing about business class, though… Passengers there aren’t nearly as friendly– in fact a lot of them are pretty much freaks, like the guy who chose to do his calisthenics for about twenty minutes in the middle of the aisle, making sure the whole cabin could see him.

The food was great, though, and no complaints about the extra legroom. I arrived in San Francisco for my stopover feeling fresh enough to scope out my dream girl at the baggage claim carousel, but I guess she was wiping her tears in the ladies room, no doubt still broken up over me abandoning her.

Wouldn’t you know it, on my last full day in Seoul — the one I put aside seoul-ly (hyuk) for souvenir shopping — I woke up to a raging snowstorm.

Thankfully it lasted until only mid-afternoon, but I find it kind of strange that I had to travel half-way around the world to see some of the white stuff. Chalk it up to global warming, I guess…

And last night I said my goodbyes to Jen and her man Jeremiah in Bundang, the posh suburban neighbourhood they call home. Just so you know, wealthy Koreans tend to dine out on Italian, not street food as the skewer in the photo suggests.

Being from a city with a tower of its own, I had to see how the N Seoul Tower stacked up. I’ve seen it pretty much every day I’ve been here, and figured that at the very least I could walk to the cable car that takes people up to the tower base.

Well, I managed to do it but the entire 20-minute hike was up an extremely steep hill, and though I appreciated the exercise by the time I got there I was dripping with sweat. To make matters worse there was no time for me to towel off — as soon as I bought my cable car ticket one had just arrived, and they squeezed me in to the dismay of the other passengers. If any of them are reading this, my apologies.

A bit of ancient Korean history sits at the base of the N Seoul Tower. This signal station dates back to, well… Before telephones, anyway. Smoke by day and fires by night provided a message that was readable the next town over.

Here’s another view of the signal station, from the tower’s observation deck.

Had I wanted to I could have walked through Namsan Park the entire way up to the base of the tower. But I clearly hadn’t wanted to…

And here’s the view of Seoul that I paid the big bucks for — actually but a quarter of the 360-degree panorama that the tower offers.

You can click on the photo if you want to see where my hotel is…

Sky Restrooms dominate the landscape atop N Seoul Tower and a spectacular aerial view of Seoul awaits those who want something extraordinary.

Extraordinary or not, I used one of the stalls as I didn’t want all of Seoul seeing me pee…

Gonna have to combine two days of sightseeing into one, as I’m falling behind on my posts… You may not think so if you’re East of the International Date Line, but I know better!

In preparation for my pilgrimage to the DMZ yesterday I visited the Korea War Memorial on Wednesday afternoon…

Hopefully you can appreciate that there’s quite a bit more to this story than what we all saw on M*A*S*H* back in the day. For a good start, I’d recommend the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

As luck would have it, the famous War Experience Room was closed on the day of my visit, but the rest of the exhibits gave me a good foundation in the basic history of the war. Maybe the only letdown for me was that towards the end of it all it was starting to feel just a bit like a recruitment ad for the ROK (Republic of Korea) armed forces…

The next morning I was picked up at my hotel before dawn by the good folks at Grace Travel Company, Ltd. After filling up the van with more tourists and then transferring to a bigger bus we headed out to Imjingak, where this photo of Freedom Bridge was taken. On this site, some thirteen thousand POW’s were exchanged immediately after the Korean War, but lots of people on both sides are still separated from their families on the other.

Here’s me with two members of the ROK Honor Guard at Dorasan Station. The South Koreans built a railway right up to the Northern border with the promised from North Korea that trains would be able to continue on through — but then they apparently changed their mind.

And yes that is indeed my hideous white parka, which I ended up not even needing for the afternoon dress code, as the temperature got downright balmy.

Around noon I parted ways with the wusses on the half-day tour and was treated to a Korean BBQ lunch with (surprise!) some more English teachers — these ones from Osaka. When lunch was through it was time to enter the DMZ proper.

After entering the Joint Security Area (JSA), transferring to a blue United Bus and a quick briefing at Camp Bonifas it was finally showtime. We were led to the JSA Conference Room, which is bisected by the border between the two countries.

Outside, the ROK soldiers stack themselves up partially hidden behind buildings, presumably to give the enemy the finger without them knowing it.

And this is as close as we could get to a North Korean guard, who was stationed maybe a hundred feet away. Of course my only picture caught him in mid-sneeze.

Interestingly enough, if a North Korean tour group had been chosen to visit the Conference Room at the same time as us, our tour would have been cancelled on the spot, with no refund.

Here’s me in North Korea! That concrete slab running into the next building over marks the border between North and South — as you can see, I didn’t venture North very far.

If those pesky ROK guards weren’t all Tae Kwan Do Black Belts I would have tried to smuggle home some of that sweet “freedom gravel” on the right.

The first order of the day was to visit my local Tourist Office to book my tour of Panmunjeom and the DMZ. I got a bit of a surprise when I was told over the phone that I couldn’t wear a leather jacket on the tour — maybe Kim Jong-il is a vegan? Anyway it put a bit of a damper on my afternoon, as job one was now to find a cheap jacket to wear but for one day.

It was probably a stupid idea to set out for the massive COEX Mall, but I wanted to see it anyway. No sooner did I exit the Samseong subway station when I was confronted with this huge CYON DMB phone, taunting me with it’s Korea-only full-screen broadcast video.

Anyway, like I said it was dumb to think I could get a cheap jacket at one of South Korea’s most prestigious shopping centres, but the window-shopping and people-watching were fun. Korea, it seems, loves kids. The little munchkins are everywhere, and it seems you can’t walk five steps without coming across a kid-friendly photo opp in use. Teddy bear picnic, Christmas Village, Teddy bears making toys in Santa’s workshop… You get the idea. As a bachelor I guess I should be pissed off by all this, but even I must admit that they’re pretty damn cute — especially when they’re yelling “hello!” while running up to me in that awkward kid way where they have to think about every step they’re taking.

I had also asked the kind young lady at the Tourist Office to write down the following phrase for me in Korean:

Will you sell me one of your display phones? Yes that’s right — not a working one… A display model.

Armed with this I marched back through the doors of Techno Mart, but the best price I could get was the equivalent of fifty bucks Canadian for this hiptop-esque handset, so instead I took the brochure with me for free.

My thrift was rewarded immediately outside the Techno Mart building with a street vendor selling a hideous white P-Diddy knock-off parka for twenty Canadian dollars. It was large, meaning the Asian version of large, meaning that I could barely do up the zipper around my waist. No matter, I knew I wouldn’t find any better, and I’m quite sure that I won’t be shot at by any North Korean border guards tomorrow — they’ll be laughing too hard to properly aim their rifles at me!

On the way home I decided to try out my first Kraze Burger, a decision based in part something I’d read on another blog. Pictured here is the matiz — it was okay, I guess, but really nothing special. The sauce tasted a bit like fish, and the huge white bun made it more than a little hard to eat. The pickles were good, at least!

But then I ordered this salad, which was awesome! It was the same price as the burger (about $7 CAD) but was everything I had been craving since my last serving of greens on New Year’s Eve.

In case you’re wondering, I realize the inherent lameness of raving about a salad at a burger joint. I just really liked it, is all…

Or why Itaewon is so very wrong…

Apparently there were scores of South Koreans up at dawn to greet the first sunrise of the new year; my first day of 2007 began with a walk down Jongno Street to Dongdaemun Stadium, home to Seoul’s famous flea market. Every possible thing you could think of is for sale here, including this laser disc, for the man who has turntable. At one point I thought I had a bead on some dummy mobiles, but as it turns out South Korea has a thriving market for used but working handsets. I’m still looking…

I figured it would be good for a laugh to check in on my hungover wae-gu (foreigner) brethren in Itaewon. Dubbed a “special tourism zone” because of the nearby U.S. army base, it has all the scuzzy nightclubs (and clientele) of home with almost none of the culture specific to Korea. And as you can see I was none too impressed.

This is the Rocky Mountain Tavern. I had heard about it from Jen and friends who had gone a few days before for a greasy Canadian breakfast so I decided to check it out. I walked up a narrow flight of stairs and peered through the doors to see a bunch of yahoos cheering on some insignificant hockey game on satellite, and the bartender looking right at me with a smug ear-to-ear grin, undoubtedly for bestowing upon the world another sports bar that it didn’t ask for. I immediately turned around and walked out.

One more thing… This is the sign outside the Hamilton Hotel, the place I almost booked for my trip to Seoul, and thank god I didn’t! I was able to walk back to The Koreana from the City Hall New Year’s Eve festivities in less than five minutes; the Hamilton’s best selling point is that it’s attached to a sleazy massage parlour. Apparently the barber pole-type thingy has a slightly different meaning over here — it denotes an establishment that offers the “happy ending”. If you don’t know what that means, Google it. But you can probably guess…

Happy 2007 everyone! I don’t want to brag or anything, but I did ring in the New Year some 14 hours before any of you in Eastern Daylight Savings Time. Here’s how it went down…

It didn’t exactly start out like gangbusters — after my hotel breakfast I headed back up to my room to write yesterday’s post and to wait for the call from my English-teaching friends, which didn’t come until almost 4 in the afternoon!

We were to meet at a nearby subway station, and as I headed out onto the street I could see that huge masses of people were already descending on the centre of the city for the evening’s festivities. The four of us — Jen, Jeremiah and Stacey and I — headed to the Gyeonghuigung Palace for some traditional culture — and of course it was closed.

Not to be deterred, we headed north and east to Insadong, Seoul’s artsy-craftsy neighbourhood. Here I was told all about pondegi, a street dish popular all over the country, especially with kids. And when we saw — or rather smelled then saw — a big vat of the roasted silk worm larvae for sale of course I had to try one.

I’m not gonna lie to you — the smell is pretty off-putting, but if you can get one past your lips they don’t actually taste so bad… Like crunchy lima beans, really. But don’t be too impressed that I ate one — I certainly couldn’t finish the cup!

We got a lucky break at Tapgol Park, where a kind monk let us in to take pics of the many lanterns on display. We were also invited to join a circle dancing and praying around the pagoda, but passed on that.

By dinnertime we had walked as far as Myeongdong, and my new-found friends took me to the Korean version of T.G.I. Friday’s, called (I think) Kooster’s. Hey, if you’re going to go slumming you might as well go local!

Okay, so about these balloons… Apparently you’re supposed to write your wish on them then set them free at midnight — can you tell which one is mine?

You feminists can take comfort in the fact that I set my balloon free about an hour prematurely while fumbling for my camera, so no New Year’s wish for me.

And if you’re wondering how Seoul rings in the New Year, take a look at the most insane fireworks display that I’ve ever seen!

A day of highs, lows and a little bit of home…

If you’re not familiar with the concept of “losing face”, it’s basically about status — folks over here in Asia don’t want any of their shortcomings exposed, in public anyway.

The staff of my hotel are friendly enough, but out in the world I get the sense that people are a bit terrified of me — or at least terrified that I’m going to ask them something and their lack of English communications skills will be exposed for all to see.

So imagine my surprise and delight when two little girls run up to me on the subway yesterday to say “hello”. The conversation didn’t really progress much beyond that (entirely my fault), but the gesture got my day off to a pleasant enough start.

I was on the way to Yongsan Electronics Market, one of two high-tech meccas in Seoul. As soon as I got out of the station I found myself at the entrance to I’Park, a huge mall with the top floor devoted entirely to — you guessed it — mobile phones!

Most people associate Korea with the letters DMZ, but there’s another acronym that even more important to locals: DMB stands for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, and it basically means you can watch full-screen television on your mobile phone and/or wireless PDA. Verizon is rolling out a similar service in the US and A, but it’s only short clips instead of full-on programming, and as my own video below will attest, the quality of DMB is much, much better…

Finding the market proper proved to be a bit of a challenge, so I returned to the subway entrance then followed the crowds through the byzantine path to another multi-story complex with even more computers, mobiles and other gadgets. The top accessory for Korean technophiles seems to be the USB stick. They make ‘em like jewellrey here, and it’s not uncommon to see them dangling from one’s mobile phone like a keitai charm — I guess if you had a DMB phone the USB stick could serve as your VCR…

You’d think I’d have overwhelmed by technology by this point but you’d be wrong… I spent the rest of the afternoon at Soeoul’s other electronics hub — Techno Mart. It was here that I experience my only incidence of Korean rudeness thus far. A shiny new LG handset had caught my eye, and I took a friendly young vendor up on his greeting as he walked by. I was fumbling through my Korean Phrasebook trying to tell him that I didn’t want the actual handset but rather, the much less expensive dummy display phone when his boss came over and, near as I can tell, told me that they didn’t speak English, and I was to get lost.

The bitter taste of rejection was replaced with some tasty street meat outside the mall. I tried to get some additional groceries at a Lotte supermarket in the basement, but the crowds shopping for foodstuffs on a Saturday afternoon at 5pm was about as insane here as any North American equivalent.

After a quick nap I headed one stop north on the Seoul Metro. I was well-prepared for it thanks to a to Jonggak station, where I delivered a care package of salmon, oatmeal and deodorant to Currie School of Comedy alumna Jen Waescher. In return she, her boyfriend and a visiting English-teaching colleague from Tokyo took me to an authentic Korean BBQ joint. We shared a full platter of tasty bite-sized pieces of pork that we cooked ourselves, then wrapped in lettuce with garlic and some other special ingredients. By the time we were done it was past midnight, and though the subway had stopped running I was able to navigate my way on foot back to the hotel, thanks to my intrepid reconnoitering the day before.

Today we’re all meeting up again to check out a palace… Stay tuned!

Actually more of a half-day, but more on that later…

My apologies to the first round of postcard recipients; I wrote them while enjoying my first hotel breakfast and couldn’t really write about anything beyond that.

Much like my first trip to Japan in 2001 I’m finding myself in a pattern of waking up at around 4am. I don’t really mind this so much as it gives me a couple of hours of quality internet time before I have to get ready for breakfast. And that’s just how I started my day yesterday. If you want more juicy details about that meal you’ll have to wait until you get your postcard…

One of my favourite things about travelling is setting out on foot on the first day to survey the immediate neighbourhood around the base camp that is my hotel — I’ll never be an an astronaut, so walking around in a city where I’ve never been on the other side of the world is probably as close as I’ll ever get to the feeling of exploring another planet. And it certainly helps if there’s a Starbucks on every corner!

City Hall, the area of Seoul where I’m staying, is home to a couple of palaces, the famous Cheonggye Stream and thankfully, a tourist information centre, where I loaded up on maps and practiced a bit of my bad Korean on the English-speaking employees there. Perhaps because of this I was directed to the nearby Kyobo Book Center, where I found a copy of the highly-regarded Lonely Planet Korean Phrasebook.

Venturing a bit further afield I found a big Japanese Department Store and a local fast food franchise called Kraze Burger, which I’ll have to try before I leave. At this point it was necessary to get some provisions for my hotel room — specifically coffee, as the green tea in my hotel room is a bit bland. So I stopped in at a nearby convenience store to pick up some single serving instant junk, and of course got the kind with powdered milk and sugar instead of black. Blech.

After dropping off my morning purchases at the hotel I set out for my first ride on the Seoul Metro. I was well-prepared for it thanks to a handy little app on my TyTN, and my journey went without incident. Almost. While transferring at Seoul Station I was approached by a friendly Korean salary-man, who I thought wanted to ask me about my cutting edge handset but instead wanted to tell me that I’d dropped my ticket about ten feet back when I whipped my phone out to check it.

I spent the afternoon wandering the crowded alleys of Namdaemun Market and the Myeongdong fashion district — I took the latter to be a rough equivalent of Queen Street West in Toronto when I saw some Korean slacker dude drive by in a really cool ride. And as it turns out I could have walked the whole way down there from my hotel, which I figured out by walking back.

It was now 5:30pm, and I had every intention of a quick nap and then heading out see the Christmas lights at City Hall. Unfortunately my jet lag had other plans, and I slept peacefully for the next 12 hours.

P.S. A quick note about photos: The reason I haven’t taken more so far is because it’s freezing cold here, and I’m risking frostbite every time I take off my heavy woolen gloves to snap a pic. I’ll try to do better — hopefully the weather will co-operate a bit!