August 10, 2010
10:06 PM
Korea Day 1, Tues Aug 10 2010
Greetings from Korea! Unlike Japan, this time I understand.. nothing. I can't make out what anyone says, and all the words look roughly the same to me. Sure, its not squigglys, but its like Undead trying to make sense of Common. Gotta understand the method to the madness first.
Luckily the country has three main languages in use, in descending order of ubiquity: Korean, Japanese, English. Even without the presence of English, sometimes the signs appear in Japanese. Learning Japanese doesn't just pay off in Japan! But, the occurence of English speakers here is way more common than in Japan. The waitress was able to tell me a certain pizza contained Gorgonzola cheese (that's radioactive blue for you MouseHunters). The only thing the train station manager in Japan could say when I asked if he spoke English was: "Nnn... nnnnoo...".
First day and its all rainy already. Heard there was a typhoon hanging around somewhere in Korea. Uh oh.. but the storm has calmed at the moment. Lets hope it won't screw up the next few days.
Staying at the Hotel Riviera. The room size is huge compared to the Ginza hotel in Japan. You could have practically considered that a luxury capsule hotel. The toilet bowl comes the exact same bidet they have in Japan. Perhaps its standard everywhere in this region.
Unfortunately, the hotel's positioning sucks. Took a walk around the hotel vicinity. Its night, so most of the shops are closed, of which most are the high-end ones anyway (Prada, LV, Chanel?!), so it didn't really matter. Of the remaining shops around, 50% of them were food outlets, 45% of them were bars, and 5% of them came under "Others". Its the central business district, and that's basically all it is. A place for business, businessmen, and nothing else. Yes, shopping and entertainment doesn't come under business. And yeah, I don't consider high-end shopping to be under the shopping bracket.
To make things worse, the hotel's quite the distance away from downtown Korea. Sure I could take the train, but there doesn't seem to be any convenient route from the hotel to the station. Guess I'll try figuring that out tomorrow.