Hotness

Here it is hot again, and the koreans continue to demonstrate their imperviability. Its been well into the thirties, but many are sticking to jeans and other long hot outfits. Quite astonishing for us who are sweltering to death in shorts. Fortunately the school does have efficient air conditioning. Most places keep their air-conditioners much warmer than in Canada, which I do think is a good idea, since in Canada you go from HOT to freezing your ass off. Here it just makes it bearably cooler inside.

Seoul Again

Seoul this time around was better than last time, chiefly because it was warmer, without being too hot. Here in Daegu it has recently been starting to earn its reputation as Korea’s number one hotspot, much to my dismay. We’ve cleaned out the airconditioner as an acknowledgement. Our apartment seems to defy all physical laws and refuses to cool out naturally, no matter how long or late we leave all doors and windows open, which is quite surpising considering it is a small box with no insulation.

Anyway, back to Seoul. We travelled with Jason from work and his girlfriend Eunji, as well as Mark and Jen and Candace, and her visiting boyfriend from Canada, Ryan. We again had problems locating a suitable hotel, something above crack-den, but below the level of the “Grand”. Eventually after many subway trips and taxis stuck in dense traffic we found the Primero, which was good and relatively cheap, though uninspiring when compared to Busan’s offerings. I guess that’s the sacrifice we make for visiting a world capital.




We spent most of the weekend searching for ethnic foods of one description or another, though we failed somewhat on our second night, and wound up eating at “Johnson’s Pork and Beef” which basically served weiner soup. We were very tired that night and could not be bothered to travel miles in search of goodness. Other nights we did have good Mexican (we almost got the waitress fired when we complained about a screwed up order!), Lebanese, and Indian, in addition to some scattered Korean. Itaewon is the area with the most ethnic since the American base is right next door, and they are very much catering to them. It has also become an attraction for various other westerners such as ourselves, and we actually heard non-English speaking foreigners. They are quite rare elsewhere. Its a very strange area though since it is full of Marines who look exactly like they just left Los Angeles.

The American military presence is very much in evidence in Seoul. I imagine it must have some effect on the local culture. All of the men women and their families live there, so they just go about their business throughout the town as if it wasn’t Korea. The funny thing is that there’s only 38,000 in the whole country. I can’t imagine the impact of the 2 million or more troops in southern England in 1943-44.



Other than that we did some usual touristy things, saw the palace, Insa-dong, an artistic shopping district which was interesting, I briefly visited the Seoul olympic park which happened to be quite near our hotel. It was funny to see Seoul’s river-side bicycle paths, which looked exactly like Ottawa’s only a lot busier. We also wound up watching Star Wars at Asia’s largest underound shopping centre (which truly was large). Eunji fell asleep but all others were well entertained. Star Wars is not a very big phenomenon, although this movie seems to be getting fairly wide play. Very few people have seen any of the original movies, and most of the kids have no idea what Star Wars is. A real difference from their Canadian counterparts.