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.

Getting lost in Seoul

After our market and mall explorations, we started to walk back home. Went down the underground, which runs the length of one long street, and contains dozens of shops (as well as the tube). Thought we knew which exit to come out of, and did. But even though it seemed as though we were in a place we recognised, it turned out not to be. So we crossed the road (via the underground again) and came out on the opposite corner. Went along the road: gradually realised this wasn’t an area we recognised either. Scary, since the streets don’t appear to have street names (unlike most of Europe where signage is very good, and usually on the corner buildings). We looked at our map, but it’s a tourist map and shows buildings and places rather than streets. Tried to work it out from the underground map but it was just as confusing because we couldn’t reconcile streets with the area above us. Went above ground again and found a bus map which had streets on it, but it didn’t seem to match up with our map either.
Finally, a man came along and offered help. The only trouble was he didn’t speak any English. Consequently, somewhere along the line we had a misunderstanding, and he led us two blocks in the wrong direction!
It was quite cold at this point, and, against all our best principles, we went into Starbucks and bought some very expensive cappuccinos. In there, I met a young lady (I think she was one of the staff, but was off duty) who spent quite a bit of time trying to help. Even she couldn’t figure out from our map where we were (!) but she finally offered to go and look on the Internet (in the staff quarters) and print out a map.
After some time she reappeared, with the map. Great relief.
We thanked her and set off in the right direction this time. Crossed the canal we shouldn’t have crossed before, crossed the square as marked on the map, and before we came to the street where we should have turned left on according to the girl’s map, we found the fish market! Having been caught out several times before in terms of thinking we knew where we were (previously we‘d two or three times seen what we were sure were shops we‘d previously passed but they weren‘t), we weren’t completely convinced this was the same fish market we’d seen before, but we decided to go through it anyway, and gradually realised it was the same one. Enormous relief.
In Europe, for the most part, I could figure the language, but of course here, even though there’s a lot of English signage around (particularly in advertising) the majority of words are in Korean.
I meant to mention, in my post about the shops here, just how small many of them are. Many stalls cover a very small area, but the shops aren’t much better: some are so crammed with stock that there’s virtually no room for anyone inside. Some shopkeepers work outside on the footpath. All your competitors are likely to be within spitting distance, selling exactly the same items. And the tiniest shop I saw had a man sitting in what must have once been the doorway to an upstairs apartment. He was surrounded by keys and his key-cutting equipment. He wouldn’t have been able to stretch out either arm, let alone both. There was no room behind him, and presumably he could only get into this ‘shop’ by taking out the little barrier that was in front of him.
Celia made some rude comment about just how much room we’d ‘demanded’ at the bookshop.

Shopping in Seoul

Slept really well last night, in spite of being woken at 3 am by someone trying to get into our room when they were supposed to be going next door.
Breakfast wasn’t quite up to the standard of our other Korean hotel, but it was still fine, and the room itself is very comfortable. So far, that first hotel has set the bar for all others.
Korean traffic is interesting: there’s plenty of it, but no one seems to be hassled, and there aren’t horns blowing all the time. Italy was the worst for city traffic: it was dangerous for pedestrians there, quite apart from the speed everyone drives at. (I nearly got run down twice by cyclists in Italy, and motor scooters paid no attention to pedestrian crossings.) Here in Seoul they drive fast enough (our taxi driver was doing 80 kph at times) but they don’t give pedestrians so many frights, even though motor scooters drive on the footpaths as well as the roads.
We decided to go walkabout this morning, and investigate the markets. Went down the road and found the fish market - or what we call the fish market: the stallholders sell fish almost to the exclusion of anything else. Sardines, fish like whitebait, herrings, all that sort of thing as well as bigger fish. But there are thousands of them, boxed or strung together on strings. The place smells very interesting. And it’s packed: the stalls all run into each other, and go off down other lanes on either side. There are real shops, but even these tend to have stalls outside. Many of the stallholders were sitting watching mini-televisions while waiting for customers.
After this we turned right, intending to go towards the Dongdaemun Market, which is held within the Dongdaemun Stadium. This wasn’t so interesting, because many of the stalls were still closed. I don’t know whether Monday is a holiday for many or whether they just start late. But again the place was packed with stalls, and with stuff. Koreans don’t go for the minimalist look: quantity is everything. In a European or British department store, you’ll have plenty of stock, but it’ll be laid out with some breathing space between items. In Seoul, the shops are stuffed full. We road up the escalator in one clothing shop (about eight storeys high) and every floor had mannequins standing row upon row, and clothes taking up every bit of available space.
We had lunch at a roadside stall - it had seats, some of them on the road itself. It was a wonderful lunch, a thin soup, noodles with a spicy sauce, and chicken kebabs. The lady didn’t sell coffee, but gave her mate along the road a bit a wave and she brought a couple of small coffees over. The woman was very friendly and helpful and we really enjoyed the meal - until we had to pay. It was 25,000 won, which is about £13. A lot more than we thought it would be, because food is very cheap here.
It’s been very overcast and misty today, and even rained a bit. It’s even cold, which we didn’t expect!

Flying home...

The flight from Heathrow to Seoul left at around 8.45 pm which should have meant we could fall asleep naturally and spend some of the flight in slumberland. Well, some of us did, but not me. Tired as I was I remained awake and finished up watching three movies: Oceans Thirteen, the latest Die Hard and, for my choice from the classic movies, The Grapes of Wrath.
I’d slept a bit on the coach coming from Attleborough to Heathrow, so that helped, but I would have been happier to have slept some of the night as well.
When we got to Incheon airport in Seoul, it was 3.35 local time - but about 6.30 am England time, which is what my body was still trying to run on in spite of my efforts to convince it otherwise. So I’d been awake all night.
On the coach into Seoul itself I slept a couple of brief times, and again since we arrived at our hotel. Which means my sleeping clock is completely out of kilter.
We were at Incheon for quite some time in the end, firstly through trying to find somewhere to park our two large suitcases for the two and a half days we’re here, and then trying to find the right bus to catch to get to our hotel - a hotel virtually nobody seemed to know about. When you see the size of Seoul city, it’s probably not surprising.
Finally we caught a 5C bus outside the airport, but as time went on and the bus seemed to be travelling forever, we asked a couple of guys behind us, Koreans who spoke good English, if they could help. One of them finished up ringing up the hotel to check where it was, and wrote the address down in Korean. And then when they suggested a stop to get off at, they helped us get a taxi as well. Meanwhile, three black English-speaking women in front of us on the bus got in on the act as well, and discussed at length the fact that they didn’t know where the hotel was.
However, the taxi driver drove with confidence (and considerable speed) to the hotel, and was enthusiastic about finding it. So were we!
The Korean man at reception, when I wrote that our home address was Dunedin, cried with delight: Dunedin! I stayed there four years ago as an exchange student. If he hadn’t liked us before, he certainly thought we were wonderful after that!

We're off! We're off!

Twenty years or more ago, I began writing a children's opera, in which the children sang a rousing chorus, We're off! We're off to the Fantabulous Mountains.
The song is buzzing round in my head. This is the last post I'll be writing from Attleborough (certainly in the foreseeable future), and in an hour we catch the bus to Heathrow, and not long after get on our plane for Korea.
The phrase, mixed emotions, doesn't cover it. We had a family tea here last night with all the family connected to the people we've stayed with the most, plus another of Celia's brothers and his wife. Last Tuesday we said goodbye to another couple, and Celia's just been on the phone to both her sisters. We're feeling keen to get off yet know that we won't see any of these people again in any hurry - in some cases we may not see them again at all. (The older members of Celia's family are getting up round the 70 mark.)
Four of the great-nieces and nephews were here last night, and two of them went home in tears, apparently. One of the little g/nephews did an anagram puzzle of his family's names for us, as well as a kind of poem of the important things he's done with us, and a maze, in which I was stuck at one end missing the flight, while Celia was on the plane. Help Mike get on the plane, was the instruction.
Both the nephews were here this morning for an informal breakfast, so we said goodbye to them again; one of them prayed for us as well. We're going to miss all these people we've got to know while we've been over here, as well as those we've known before.
There have been times when we thought we hadn't had much of a time here, but in fact, when we look back and remember things, it's been a great time. The bad days are nothing compared to the highlights and the general times of just enjoying other people's company. We've been very well cared for by the family, and we've met dozens of people both here in England and on the Continent who were friendly and helpful. It's been rare to be rebuffed by anyone.
How much longer this blog will carry on after we get on the flight is a question. No doubt my inveterate writing fingers will insist on adding some more, and no doubt we'll have other things to say about our travels.
Meantime, we watch the minutes go by and keep breathing.

Countdown

Well, it’s a week today till we head for home. We’ve changed our dates without difficulty from early December to the 24^th November, meaning we’ll be home before the end of the month. That gives us a bit of breathing space at the other end, before we head back into work.

It took a bit of organising to make sure we still had somewhere to stay in Seoul, Korea, on the way home – the travel agents in NZ must have started to tear their hair out a little when we changed the dates not once, but twice. However, everything is all organised now – we just have to figure out how to get from the airport to our hotel and we’ll be fine.

We’re also trying to sell the car, that great little Peugeot that’s served us so well. We’ll be sorry to say goodbye to it, really, because it’s very economical; far more so than our Mitsubishi at home. But trying to take the Peugeot home isn’t within the possible budgets, so it’ll be staying here, hopefully with a new owner very soon.

The only thing I don’t like about it are the bucket seats (typical of most small cars, of course). I get back ache very easily in them, and that, combined with the neck ache I got from the stress of driving on English roads I wasn’t familiar with made life a bit unpleasant for a while. I think I’ve learned how to deal with both, as I’m certainly not getting the problems now. I suspect we’ll find driving on NZ roads a breeze after the English ones.

Back to London again

We travelled to London today, partly to box up the extra stuff we’re sending home separately, and partly to catch up with one or two people (and London itself) who we won’t see again for a while. And thirdly, to check out with Korean Air as to whether we could alter the dates for our return. We’ve decided we want to come back a bit sooner. Korean Air was very helpful, and will do the alteration for free! So we’re going to leave England on the 26th November, rather than the 2nd of December.
Korean Air is situated in Piccadilly, so after we’d been there we wandered back along the street looking at the shops, including one extraordinary place (called Andy and Tuly) that supposedly sells waistcoats primarily, but had nothing but cufflinks in its windows, hundreds of pairs of them. And all of them priced over the £100.
Crown Relocation, who are sending our extra stuff home, couldn’t have been more helpful. They provided everything, were very pleasant with it, and best of all: we managed to get everything we’d taken with us into the two boxes.
We’re staying in a rather unusual accommodation: it’s over a Café in North West London - South Ruislip, to be exact. The café obviously caters for drivers and other blue collar workers and its food is good old-down-to earth English; the room we have isn’t the best we’ve had (!) but for three days it’ll be okay. The leg of one of the beds ’broke’ when a certain wife sat on the bed after we arrived, but the leg has obviously been broken for a while. I told the owner, and he feigned surprise - I say, ’feigned’ but it may have been genuine. The room has a tv, fridge, microwave and a kettle - the latter item is something that’s always been missing from European hotel rooms.
I drove all the way into Ruislip today - a first. I haven’t driven in London at all before. It certainly wasn’t as bad as the previous two times we came when we got stuck in long traffic jams and the brakes heated up and failed.
The Indian community is apparently celebrating Diwali - or else there are a lot of people using up unused fireworks out there. One enthusiastic lot let a whole pile off while we were standing at the South Ruislip station this afternoon - it was a bit pointless since none of the lights could be seen. However, there was a much more timely display later on, when it was dark, while we were sitting in a café in Shepherds Bush having milkshakes (with NZ icecream in them).
We had a meal in the West End, at a some sort of noodle house in the Haymarket. The food was great: I had a chicken satay and Celia a large noodle soup with chicken. This was after we’d spent some time exploring the five storeys of Waterhouse’s - good grief. Too many books, but I finished up buying one on Alfred Hitchcock and his movies anyway, by Patrick McGilligan.
Then we got the bus back to Shepherd’s Bush, pointing out well-known places as we passed them, checking out the Christmas lights in some of the major shops (Fortnum and Mason’s is celebrating its tricentenary and have done the Twelve Days of Christmas as their window display. Hugely detailed and wonderful conceived.
We also stumbled on the Orlando Chamber Choir rehearsing for their performance tonight of Handel’s Jephtha. It was a bit bitzy, as you’d expect, but worth sitting in on all the same.

London, part two

On Thursday morning we roused ourselves out of our jet lag and, with our friend, made our way on the bus to Regent St, where our bank is. Suddenly we were back in Korea again, by which I mean that someone directed us to the right floor in the building, told us how long we’d have to wait, showed us where to get a free cup of coffee, where the toilets were, and in general treated us as worthwhile customers. More than that, the person who saw us in due course was exceptionally friendly and had everything ready to go for us. (And she had just been speaking to her friend from Attleborough, where we were due to stay in a few days’ time with our relations!).
After that we made our way to the Southbank, because my friend wanted to show us the refurbished Festival Hall. We finished up having a very nice lunch of paninis with roasted courgettes, humus and mint – interesting combination. After this we had the first of our many long walks around London. I’d forgotten just much walking you have to do: there’s plenty of transport (buses, trains, tubes, etc) but that doesn’t mean you never have to use the old-fashioned process of one foot after another. Anyway, we walked along the embankment remembering places we knew from the past, and in general re-acquainting ourselves with everything.
The Tate Modern was new, and we headed for it. It’s an interesting building – must contain some hundreds of thousands of bricks – and is enormous. Unfortunately, the exhibitions I saw didn’t grab me greatly. I think it was that they just weren’t modern paintings of the sort that I enjoy: lots of stuff that gives modern painting a bad name, even though some of the artists, like Francis Bacon, are huge in the art scene.
The following day we wound up on the Southbank again (after having done a patch of time in Camden Town, which was crowded). We had some very large and tasty filled rolls (handmade, as it were, in a Greek/Italian? place in Camden Town). We watched a guy painting, very meticulously, the railings along the Embankment. I spoke to him and asked how much he had to do – he claimed ‘down to the mouth of the Thames’ but I think he may have been kidding. He said he’d only done two sections of the railings since he started in the morning; that’s how slow the job was. In view of the number of buskers in the area I told him he should have put out a basket for some cash. I felt there was something familiar about his accent, and said so to Celia. She went and asked him where he was from. Taranaki in New Zealand...!
Footnote to the last bit: we went to church this morning in Wymondham (pronounced Windham) with our neice and her two children. Of course, we met someone who was married to a New Zealander, and he turned out to be from Rotorua.

Korea to London

Forgot to say that we came across a chapel at Auckland airport, and sat in there for a while together, singing and praying out loud - since we were alone. There was also a prayer room at Incheon, but it was multi-faith, and had no focus: no cross, no nothing, just a blank wall at the end of the room. It looked a bit like it had been spare space, rather than a designed prayer room. The Auckland one was obviously designed as a chapel. The Incheon prayer room had a few shelves at the back. On them were a very small number of Bibles and Korans in various editions. And a novel by Kathy Reichs. I went in the room first, before Celia, and another man, a Korean, came in after me and bent over to pray. And his cellphone rang. So he answered - quietly, at least - and then prayed a bit more.
Celia told me that in the toilet there was something like gladwrap around the edge of the seats. If you pressed a button the old gladwrap rolled away, and a new lot rolled in! However, the gents weren’t so well favoured. On the other hand, the men’s toilet seats have a gap in the front; something that makes them slightly more convenient for men, I think, as a full toilet seat can be difficult to get everything comfortably situated on (!)
While we were waiting, we came across free internet for transit passengers. Celia was pleased, as I’d been tempted to use the computer in the hotel room, until we discovered it would cost about 20,000 won, which she worked out to be about $40NZ. So we got the same for nothing, and another bonus: I’d sent an email to the kids, and was just writing one to my granddaughter, when my son Ben popped up on the gmail chat. It was fabulous being able to type back and forth, and we did it for several minutes. I think this is a thing that’s making us feel not so far away from home. We have the means to communicate easily,and sometimes surprisingly!

SO Day

Tomorrow is SO Day - Start Off Day. We leave Dunedin about 9.45 am and fly to Auckland, where we'll spend the day with my daughter and her family. They've only just moved up there. Later in the day we'll go to the Young's house and stay there overnight. They'll drop us at the Devonport ferry terminal, and we'll get a ferry across to the quay, where we should be able to pick up a bus going directly to the airport.
We then fly off to Korea and stay overnight in Seoul. We don't have a lot of time there, because we leave again the next day, but we should be able to fit in a couple of hours in the area near the hotel, and get a little feel for the place. After our overnight stay in Korea (courtesy of Korean Airlines, who have to stop overnight, and therefore have to provide accommodation for their passengers) we fly directly to London. We've been told by some friends that we fly over the Arctic in the process, something the travel agent didn't mention. That will be interesting: as long as we're not asleep!
We arrive in Heathrow about 5 pm, English time, and will make our way to an old friend's house. Old in the sense of she's been a friend for a long time. She's the sister of the bloke who was best man at our wedding. Unfortunately her brother died suddenly quite a few years ago, so we won't be able to catch up with him.
After a few days in London, when we'll be sorting out our English bank account - hopefully all the correspondence we've been getting from them means it's all organised and we only have to pick up eftpos cards and such - and then on the Saturday we leave for Norfolk with my brother-in-law. He's coming down to London to pick us up.
On the Sunday we begin baby-sitting our nephew's house while he and his family go off for a holiday. We'll also be baby-sitting their year-old dog, which will be fun - and will assure we get out and do some walking, something we've been badly lacking in over the last few weeks.
That's the current plan; we'll let you know whether it all goes according to Hoyle!