It’s 6:17PM localtime, which means it’s 5:17AM EST on Friday. Good morning.
I left for South Korea on wednesday to go to my older brother Harold’s wedding to his fiance Soyoung who’s family is Korean. Our flight was scheduled to leave DTW at 3:30pm and made a pretty good effort at keeping that. 12 hours of time in the air brought us to Tokyo, and another 2 brought us to Seoul. My legs atrophied and dropped off.
Bri and Erik hooked me up with games for my new Gameboy Advance SP, which made the flight tolerable. Tolerable, at least until I got stuck in Metroid Fusion, but I’m going to look up a walkthrough after I finish writing this. 13 years ago I got an original Gameboy for christmas, to keep me busy on an 8 hour flight to London. Plus ca change, I guess.
I also read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in flight, which was a pretty quick read. It’s kind of depressing, but in retrospect I should have gathered that from the title. I have Good Omens for the return flight, which should be good.
Our movies were perfect airline movies: Catch Me If You Can, Daredevil and 2 Weeks Notice. All that was missing was a Steve Gutenburg movie.
We arrived in Seoul at around 10:00pm localtime and after getting through customs Harold and Soyong’s family picked us up and whisked us off to Lotte – the fanciest hotel I’ve ever stayed at. They put Wega-style TVs in each room, and have the separate bath/glass-shower dealie. I stole slippers from the room.
Tangent: In DTW they tell you to take your fucking shoes off. In Tokyo, they asked if we would kindly remove our shoes and step into slippers while they checked the shoes for bombs. Cultural differences are neat.
After getting to the hotel room, I crashed for 7 hours or so of sleep, which is surprisingly little for being up for 25 hours. I didn’t sleep on the plane because I wanted to acclimate to the local timezone quicker. That’s also why I didn’t take a nap on the busride today, which is why I am incoherant and not spelling words correctly. William Gibson posited in Pattern Recognition that when you fly you move so fast that your soul can’t keep up, jetlag is your soul trying to catch up. If that’s the case, then my spelling and grammar are religious experiences.
Back to the narritive, I woke up and got my day on around 6:00am localtime. Continental breakfast at 8:00, on the tour bus around 9:00ish. Soyoung’s family (who are the Lees, so I’ll just call them that) arranged a tour bus to take us around for the day, then deliver us to Kungnung (close enough) where the wedding is tomorrow.
First stop for the tour was the Emperor’s Palace / Folk Art Museum. The architecture of the palace was very cool, I haven’t dumped my pictures into iPhoto yet so I don’t know if they accurately portray the place. It was amazing, like something out of a movie. The Folk Art Museum had a lot of good exhibits on Korean history and culture.
We then went to Seoul Tower, which overlooks the city with an awesome (proper use of the word) view. Search for a QTVR, I can’t imagine that anyone who saw that view wouldn’t want to make one. Just an amazing view.
Gotta leave the PC Bong (the cybercafe) soon for dinner so here’s the elevator pitch:
Shopping for tchockes
Lunch at traditional korean restaurant (beef and rice in cabbage leaves, yum!)
Bus ride to Kungnung
Found PC Bong
Won’t find out how to find the boss in level 4 of Metroid Fusion
I’ll try to post pictures, but I can’t right now. Also, the Korean keyboard is screwing with PuTTY so I can’t check my email. That said, if anyone has and IP over DNS gateway setup email me. I’ll be able to use it in the fancy hotel tomorrow night, so that would let me post pics.