Monday, October 1, 2007

Korea!


Finally! I have arrived. The first thing that comes to mind when I got here was the word "busy". Korea is a busy place but it's beautiful, smelly at times, and all around awesome. I can't wait to explore this country more fully. Here's what I've got so far. I'm going to have to break this entry down into chapters.

A confession: I haven't been good at lugging my camera around for the first few days here so I haven't been taking many pictures. But that will no longer be the case. Promise.

Sights

As I said, Korea is beautiful. Peep for yourself.

Mountains
Seoul National University

Seoul Neighbourhood
A neighbourhood on the mountain in Seoul

Uncle's Neighbourhood 2
Up the street from my uncle's house. He lives in one of the older neighbourhoods of Seoul. They don't build them like this anymore. Now all they build are high rise apartment complexes with giant numbers on the sides.

Food

I haven't had much to eat out yet, but here's a couple of pictures anyways taken in the last couple of days.

Chajangmyun
Chajangmyun. Those noodles are hand-made.

Hand Made Noodles

Chicken Soup
Samgae Tang. Chicken stuffed with ginseng and rice.

Hilariousness

Okay, this is the most amazing part of Korea: all the cool funny things. Here's just a few things I've seen so far.

First off, there are no laws regarding signage on commercial buildings and this is the result:

Advertising on Building
Just try to imagine a whole street to buildings like this

I read Korean at the level of maybe a four-year-old. So there's no way I could read all of this as I'm driving by. I doubt even a Korean native would be able to distinguish one sign from the next, especially in a whole neighbourhood of buildings like this. Eventually, it all blends together into visual white noise so the attention grabbing effect each business is trying to achieve is pretty much wasted.

The first time I went to the bathroom (to pull a Davies) I was confronted with this:

Electronic Toilet
In case you were wondering, the seat is heated

Here's a closer look at the controls.
Toilet Controls
The button on the far right is the history eraser

I haven't tried the bidet and I don't think I will.

The awesomeness of Korea will further be explored in future posts. I'm tired and I want to rest. That's it for now.

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3 comments:

Laura said...

I remember being intrigued by all of the signs there too! And there is so much more!!!

sol said...

Martin!
you just made my day!!!
i love what you write about korea and it's strangely all very true!!
keep it up! i'll come visit your blog more often!! ehehehehe

you can picture me studying in one of those hak won!!! i probably got lost getting to one of those cause there are like 10 of them in one building... with similar signs like that.. ehehe

Unknown said...

I wonder what it feels like to use the toilet when it's warm...hmmm...I wonder...