Korea again - Incheon - Daegu - Busan - Gwangju - Seoul - 2015 - Page 1

Its me, out front of my house, at 4:30am, making sure my camera is charged. Also practicing my patented pose.
Brace for many similar pictures, most will be darker than this one.

Its me again. I look about 12. Since vanity is high on my list of commendable qualities in an individual, it pleases me to take on the appearance of someone much younger than my ageing self.

The now very familiar Qantas first class lounge in Sydney, for breakfast. Although I dont have much time as I have to type this whilst I am here.

For breakfast I had fruit and yoghurt. It was very good. For the next 2 and a half weeks I will only eat fried spiders and similar items, so this was the last chance for good healthy eating. Important due to my involvemnt with the live strong movement, and my hero, world champion liar Lance Armstrong.
I can learn so much from him.
I went off on a tangent already, get used to it.

Also, got to board now, just a 10.5 hour flight. They only have squatter bathrooms on board, so I better go use the last western toilet I will see for weeks.

The excellent bibimbap with above mentioned pepper sauce toothpaste tube. It was spicier than the packet ones they seem to carry in the Korean grocer in Australia, but then again I never thought to buy it in toothpaste form factor.

Its me, waiting for the airport train, looking pleased.
Apparently they are building a maglev that goes around in a bullshit circle for tourists to go on for no good reason, but its not finished....otherwise I would be on it advising that its useless cause the Shanghai one actually goes most of the way to Shanghai.

This is the inside of the normal subway train. I like trains. I stood up because I was excited to be on a train.
Why arent trains in Australia like this? I think the Perth ones are. You can fit a lot more people on when its busy.

View from my hotel room - in the other direction is an Imax, Homeplus which is like a Walmart, and about 10,000 restaurants selling dog meat and other such things.

Last pic today, my hotel room, because my mother likes to see photos of hotel rooms. I live in a hotel when in Australia, so yay, a hotel!
The internet is ridiculously fast. Check in like Japan doesnt need a credit card or deposit of any kind. I just showed my passport and they handed me the electronic key. Didnt even sign.

Typical workwear for professional women in Korea. This particular shop specializes in uniforms for comfort girls employed by the Japanese.

A nearby apartment building complex. Dont worry, the novelty of these sort of photos will wear off fast.

My breakfast, it wasnt good. The coffee was ok, they had non fat milk. I now have bananas and similar stuff so I wont need anymore cake related items.

The local citibank building has numerous pointless sculptures they are paying for entirely with interest on my money.

This seems to be a sculpture for the 1988 Olympics, which were held in Seoul, not Incheon where I am. I presume that little black thing was the mascot.
I can remember the opening ceremony, they had a tae kwon do demonstration with lots of wooden board breaking, but due to over exuberance a guy got kicked in the face, hard, and had to be stretchered off.

Big tobacco companies have infiltrated the far east, and found some guys with beards to get the kids hooked on vaping so they can later decide its far easier and cheaper just to absorb nicotine through smoking it.

This is my local street, alongside the 'Arts Square', hence the vaping stores.

At the base of the local climbing hill is a compressed air gun station. Why? I dont know. I presume the signs are warning people not to shove the guns up peoples asses, because thats fatal, it really does happen, including at the Holden factory in Adelaide that since closed, because of bills over fatal anal compressed air explosion law suits.
Koreans (and Japanese) have a socially acceptable habit of doing that. Google Kancho or ddong chim. I am here to educate.
Back to the compressed air gun, they really do work, and all I can think of is that in summer you use them to blow dust off your boots?

Its not much of a hill but I had a good time. Its also very dead looking due to winter. New growth was starting to appear on things in some parts of the city.
Enough botany, the path got muddy in places, I am glad I had my boots. I now will clean my boots in the hotel bathroom sink using the free toothbrush they put in there.

The view back over Incheon from one of the lookouts. That is not Seoul, which is about 40km away (I think).

A unique feature of this lookout is the free open air library. In case you want to sit out in the freezing wind and read some sort of nationalistic saga about how Japan was defeated.

Like all hills / mountains / slight changes in elevation, there is a temple. I decided to photo the sea of buddah. There were a group of old folks sitting eating their little tomatoes (no. 1 hiking food for old people world wide).
One of them asked me where I was from, Australia I said, he said oh! why come here, Australia much nicer than Korea, want to have some of my Soju?
He handed me his flask, but I told him I dont drink. He asked if I was a priest or monk.
Yes, Yes I am.

So then I headed to my Church. Yes this building seems to be a church / TV station / money collection centre for the Korean catholic church.
Wisely, they have constructed it of a material that appears to be fire proof, so as to resist my god given right to church burning.

This is the local Shinsegae department store. Theres also a similar sized Lotte and a couple of others. All have excellent food courts, restaurant floors, just like similar ones in Japan.

The Shinsegae food court has an excellent ordering system. Theres about 20 stalls selling stuff, with basically no signs. Instead theres a few centrally located touch screens, and you can browse through what you want, with pictures.
The only English on the screen is a number, so I ordered the number 42 from the centrally located cashier by miming 4 fingers on one hand and 2 on the other.
She loaded up the same picture on the cashier, and we came to a mutual agreement that I would pay for the goods.
The only problem, when my buzzer went I had no idea which stall to get it from, so I had to wander past them all playing snap, looking for something that resembled the picture on the touch screen.

My lunch was again, Bibimbap, and was excellent. So healthy. Theres other things there I would like to try, things I would nore likely have for dinner, dog meat skewers are best eaten just before bed, for maximum virility absorption benefit.

Second coffee, epic disaster. No non fat milk, but I agreed to proceed. I got a cup of only froth, so hot that the plastic stirrer melted. I dont know how you can make froth as hot as they did.
Ediya espresso is now firmly on my list of places to avoid.
As I was leaving, the boss man decided he could speak English, and said 'best coffee in all Incheon!' I pretended to speak only Russian, NYET!.

Just one of the kilometre long criss crossing corridors of confusion that forms the Bupyeong underground fashion market. It is genuinely famous for getting people lost.

Above ground, and the fashion market is more of a ghost town. Except you can see the fashion being made, out the back, nannas are strapped to desks, whipped, and fed only bean sprout soup (thats a real thing) until they have produced their quota of jeans with the crotch almost at knee level (also a real thing, unfortunately).

I was hungry, and one of the two Lotte department stores nearby seemed like a good option for a food court extravangaza.
No such luck. The food court was all western style pizzas, hamburgers, pasta and fried chicken.

Luckily I headed down a laneway, and found a place with pictures.
The first dish was a beef soup. It looked like beef anyway, in reality I had no idea what I had ordered.
I am fairly sure it was beef. Some sort of flesh that had been boiled for days. Boiled so long that pretty much anything might taste like beef.
The side dishes were nice, I like kim chi more and more. Maybe thats because I know what kind of meat is in kim chi, none.

Next course was mandoo. Thats Korean for dumpling. These were delicious. Now for these I really have no idea what meat was in them. They were top on the menu so I presume they were one one of the most popular things.
Probably Pork. Could be donkey.

Random neon, the further you go the less stores, the more bars, and then the love hotels start.
This is how the world works. You buy some poor girl something, you get her drunk, then you have her trapped in a room for an hour.
I dont make the rules, it is what it is. (work people - my use of 'it is what it is', is specifically for you, because I despise when anyone says that).

Looks a lot like Japan really. Perhaps less Yakuza, real or otherwise.

This is some kind of protest for the Sewol ferry disaster. I think its the people buying yellow ribbons to tie on zippers as a protest to make the government investigate the catholic religious cult that owned the ferry that sunk.
Look up Yoo Byung-eun, who ran the company that owned the ferry, and a cult church that had power over the government. Poor Yoo died mysteriously soon after the ferry sunk!
They like to make everything a huge drama in Korea, I will be back at some point to explain the nut heiress drama.

On the hunt for the train office, where I need to pickup my bullet train tickets at some point, I came across this cheaper food court on like the 8th floor of a 15 level building for no good reason.
This ones an interesting hybrid. Each place has its own seating, but not enough seating. Everything here was cheap, and many of the people eating here looked like they struggled to pay the bill.

Saving the best until last, here I am in my awesome new hat. Purchased from a surprised and slightly frightened lady at a random stall in the fashion market. So Fashion. I promise not to say so fashion again on this visit.

Just after the dawn, looks cold. I stuck my head out of my 12th floor window to see how cold. Cold.

Could it be so! Australian coffee chain Gloria Jeans exist in Korea (as they do in China too). And they made me a great coffee.
I can now drink coffee here guilt free, as the Hillsong church, whos dead founder was recently found to be like all other cult leaders, running a church in order to recruit children to abuse, sold it off some time ago to the same people that own Brumbys bakeries, Michelles pastissassieeierrry and various other similar establishments.
That sentence was long and confusing.

Arriving at street level from the Gaesan subway stop. No idea what to expect. Turns out its a bustling neighbourhood. Lots to see, no time, mountains to climb.

On the way up the hill there were many schools, it seems each student gets to make a tile of their own.
If this was attached to the outside of an Australian school I cant help but feel it would be destroyed in an hour.

Now for many mountain pictures. Half way up or there abouts. There were actually 3 ridges to go up and down before the ascent to the summit.

Looking back from the second ridge at a hazy Incheon.

And onwards towards the summit.

Ancient concrete pagoda.

View from pagoda.

Very near the top, there were a lot of tunnels such as this. Presumably this was a military look out during the war. Also, note the ice.

Cats hanging out with the hikers stopping to eat their mini tomatoes.

And now, the view from the top. Mr Song was super excited to see me.

Yep. Me. My antics caused much amusement amongst the various old folks, who were posing on one leg giving the peace sign.

The path down. Actually one of the nicer sections. After this it was a real scramble and I needed both hands, so had to put my camera away. I only slipped on my ass once.

Part of Songdo special region for the economic ecology of glorious Korea.

The zombies come mostly from the swamps, mostly.

Cenotaph glorifying all those who died constructing the magnificent unfinished Songdo.

This is the NX Cube mall. Note theres absolutely no one here.

My excellent lunch, cost about $6. Basically the same price as a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Final photo for now, the polar bears felt right at home as it was again cold. I think they have eaten all the shoppers.
I probably could have taken my pants off and pretended to ride one of them for this photo without anyone noticing.
All the stores are open and have really bored looking workers sitting reading their phones.
To be fair, there are heaps of very nice apartment buildings just alongside this long mall, they are not yet open but look very close to finished.
Landscaping of the grounds around them was going on. It seems they are following the Chinese model of suddenly declaring a city open, and bussing in 50,000 people that day to their new lives.

Much like Japan, vending machines are everywhere. However there are no beer vending machines.
This one is mostly hello kitty. Adelaide now has a hello kitty cafe, but instead of being pink, its brown. No one seems to know why.

Korean engineering at its finest. From the people that brought us Daewoo (now Holden) and Goldstar (now LG), comes wall reenforcement technique using metal poles and piles of concrete.

This is an entire street of BBQ places.
I wanted to go, but I dont think it works with one person.
The better ones have no exhaust vents, just rooms full of delicious carbon monoxide.

This dude dressed up as a cat wouldnt give me one of the pamphlets he was handing out. So I taunted him with the camera. Eventually he stopped trying to get out of the frame.
He still wouldnt give me a pamphlet though. Must be some top secret Korean only information. Perhaps its plans to assassinate all amabassadors tomorrow.

This is a street restaurant. To operate in winter, they all erect tents around their cart, and burn lumps of coal in pots to generate heat.
Most of them therefore catch fire. Its all part of the fun and excitement of eating on the street.

My Pho. Not too bad. Broth had not enough flavour and the beef was not raw.
Once I loaded it up with fresh chilli and chilli sauce, it was good.
The super hot soup was appreciated, along with hot tea.
I observed Koreans eating theirs, they dont add the bean sprouts, chilli sauce or herbs to the soup, instead they delicately place some noodles and beef in the spoon, then put a few bean sprouts on top, a tiny bit of mint or coriander, and a squirt of sauce.
This whole procedure takes about 3 minutes per mouthful.
They must look at me tip my plate up into the soup and simultaneously shovel soup and noodles into my mouth like I am some kind of animal.

Later on this trip I need to take a bus from Busan to Gwangju. I happened to be going past a bus station tonight so stepped inside for a look. No English.
I stared at the board for ages waiting for it to turn to English like they do in Japan or China, but it never did.
I better learn the Korean text for Gwangju. Either that or convince myself its a walkable distance of 200km.

This hairdresser has a guard dog. A racist guard dog. It did not like me at all. Jokes on the dog though, I dont get my hair cut by a hairdresser, my mother does it!
Yes really. Thats just one way I save money compared to normal people.
This could change though, I might get a perm and some blonde streaks.

This pictre appears here for future income tax claim justification purposes.