South Korea

Tomorrow, or Saturday I will leave Seoul for somewhere else. It will be near to Seoul, partly because for it to be otherwise would involve me leaving the country. There are a few conveniently located towns/cities around the country located near at least 3 places of interest. It feels very odd to call a city of 3 million (e.g. Busan, 3.7 million, 2nd city) a city given that in China the smallest place I went had 800,000 and after that the smallest was a few million. This size difference also goes some way to explain the proximity of multiple sites of interest near to each of the potential cities to visit – even from Seoul many places of interest could easily be reached.

The plan is to go away for a weekend with Chi-Hė, then I'll go on to Gongju and Busan during the week before meeting up with Chi-Hė again the following weekend (possibly in Mokpo?), again going somewhere else before heading back to Seoul for my final weekend away. So we'll see how that works out!

So far Korea has been very pleasant. After a lot of historic site seeing (the sites were historic, not my seeing of them) I decided a trip to a modern art gallery might be a pleasant experience. I'm happy to say that in contrast to the Shanghai art gallery, it was indeed a pleasant experience – no doubt influenced by my avoidance of the school group in there too. The gallery houses a permanent collection by a Korean artist which was a set of quite nice fairly traditional paintings. The rest of the building was full of modern art related to the senses – many of which were interactive. You could throw butterflies like dried leaves, you could move a Snow White statue and evoke a set of 7 dwarf shadows to follow her around (clever set of lights and sensors I guess), and you could move a bright red ball behind a massive semi-transparent screen imitating the sun/a light and prompting the moths on screen to follow you around. Amongst other things that is. After that I went for a fairly long walk along a city stream which has been restored to create a very pleasant pathway with various bits of art along it, stepping stones over the river (and occasionally fake rocks/false river beds in the water which look interesting and create an interesting flow) and fountains.

Today (my second day) I went to Bonguensa Buddhist temple. A fairly large temple complex, a cultural centre which aims to teach people about Buddhism, and a teaching centre training Buddhist monks. The area itself is over the road from one of the biggest malls in the world (irony) and is actually a bit of a building site at the moment. The buildings are rather nice traditional wooden buildings with the same colourful painting style seen in China. The complex also houses the tallest Buddha statue in Korea. It's quite tall.

Unfortunately when I was there were rather a lot of people who looked like they were actually Buddhists and were listening to the chanting being piped out and praying...so I didn't want to go into the buildings full of these people and take photos. Interesting to see an active Buddhist community though as I hadn't seen one since Thailand. On my way out of the site I was approached by a middle aged woman “Do you speak any English?” she asked; “I certainly hope so” I responded. She then handed me a booklet “The Way To Meet God”. Nothing like people trying to convert you to Christianity in a Buddhist temple. This makes me a lot less angry than in Cambodia and similar places where the allure of Christianity's foreign money partly in the shape of school and health care (no hidden agendas there!) and of course a church draws people from their traditional religions.

Food news (because I wrote this first and then decided to write other stuff and I don't know where to put it now):
On my first night Chi-Hė and I went out for a Korean grill meal (you griddle your own meat) eaten with rice and various vegetables and so on which was very nice, and a pleasant change from Chinese. Last night we met before Chi-Hė's Korean class...and had very nice Western food – which was a pleasant change from pretty piss poor Western food.

By way of a final China piece:
A few experiences all Westerners commented on in China were:
1)Bare faced price inflation
2)Children pissing in the street
3)Spitting
4)Everyone I asked had the experience that prior to coming out, various internet forums and people had warned them to expect to be treated rudely, to expect officials to be brusque, unhelpful and often rude. In contrast, I and all those I spoke to felt that people were generally very friendly and helpful – including the officials who are happy enough to smile at you and be friendly, and have also been helpful to fellow travelers along the way. I'm sure things change over time, and things may well have improved but I'm also sure that many of the stories are a combination of racism, and annoyance at being a novelty. But I'm sorry, when you point at pictures on the wall of a restaurant you do look ridiculous, either get over it (as I did) or learn the language – don't complain that people might smile at you as you do it. All in all, it is certainly a country I'd happily go back to, aside from anything else I've seen so little of it and I'd love to see more of the inland areas.