Korea, and the return home

On our second day in Korea we left our bags at the hotel reception and went on a bus tour with Seoul City Tours. We’d asked the man at reception if there were ‘hop on hop off’ tours in the city, and he was most intrigued by the phrase, repeating it several times to get it into his head. The SCT was the best bet, though they weren’t quite as hop on hop off as the European tours we’d done. You had to state where you were going to get off, and couldn’t just keep going round the tour when you passed your initial stop. That was okay, we didn’t have time to do too much anyway.
Seoul is an enormous city, full of contrasts in terms of the buildings. There are skyscrapers, modern apartment buildings, little old one-storey shops and multi-storey department stores, ancient buildings (such as the palaces and the original city gate) and winding alleyways full of tiny shops. The streets are so narrow in some places only a motor scooter can safely drive down them, and so wide in other places that there are four lanes on either side of the road. The motorways are extensive and there are several long bridges over the (very wide) river. It takes an hour and a half to get from any of the major hotels in the city to the airport, and for much of that distance there are buildings or industry. We passed a quarry at one point which went on for at least a couple of miles alongside the road. The city has churches everywhere, both ‘foreign’ style designs, and more modern buildings. Yonggi Cho’s church is a great modern building (it doesn’t look like a church on the outside) that rises several storeys high.
And there are gardens everywhere, from tiny ones to huge botanical parks.

Our flight from Korea was longer than the one from Heathrow by a couple of hours, so by the time we got to Auckland we were very glad to get off the plane. I actually slept an hour or so at one point, which was a major achievement, and kept the material shades on over my eyes at another point, just to get some rest from the light.
This time we didn’t have the little tv screens on the back of the seats in front of us, and had to watch whatever was showing on the main screen. One film - which I watched part of without the sound - was Gracie, a rather second-rate piece about a girl who wants to become a soccer player, and the other was the Simpsons Movie, which turned out to be a lot of fun, full of clever lines and crazy ideas.
I managed to read another Ian Rankin book between the time we began the flight and the time we reached Dunedin, but neither of us enjoyed the flight much: Celia wasn’t feeling great, having got a solid dose of the cold I had a couple of weeks ago, and I still had leftovers of the cold itself. Besides that we were both just tired, and couldn’t get enough sleep to catch up.

And then there was the stress that Security on planes causes these days. Both of our main suitcases were large and fully-packed. Apart from lugging them about they turned out to be the least of our problems. In Heathrow, we’d been told in no uncertain terms that we couldn’t carry more than one bag into the plane itself. This meant that we had to try and shove stuff from Celia’s handbag into the backpack she was carrying and the computer bag I had. Both were already full of bits, so it was a major task. Yet Korean Air didn’t have any such restrictions at all, and when we got past security we just reverted to what we’d started with. In fact, they’d taken the third overnight case with the other two big ones without a qualm or any extra cost.
Likewise when we left Korea there was little difficulty; even in their security area, they didn’t worry about us carrying both our handbag and manbag as well as the other two large items - and a stone plate Celia had decided she had to have at the last minute. (We’d been for lunch in a restaurant where they presented the food on utterly hot stone plates, and also cooked meat and vegetables on a little stove on the table.)
However, when we came to leave Auckland, they charged us for extra kilos on the large cases, and told us if we’d come via America it wouldn’t have cost us anything. Weird.
It all adds to the stress of travelling.