Seoul Curry, lots of Kimchi and people touching my feet

Ok, I'm sure you think I'm getting way ahead of myself when I say that people touched my feet. To be really sure if I'm kidding or not, you'll just have to wait for a bit and read along :-)

I was in Seoul (South Korea for those who don't know) for a few days helping out my counterparts in that part of the world with a customer who needed particular expertise (which we have in India). Naturally, I wanted to see the city and what it had to offer outside of Kimchi, Shoju and, as I had heard a lot about before, the prettiest women in all the Asian countries.

We landed at the Incheon Airport and a good hour later, mainly thanks to the ridiculous traffic in Seoul, we had reached the Intercontinental COEX (the tower you see on the right). After checking in, we decided to check if there was a decent place to eat, mainly because I was famished from not having eaten most of Tuesday and very little on the flight. The last thing I wanted was to be sleep deprived AND hungry during my meetings that were to start the next day.

So we walked around, finding Sushi and seafood places, but nothing that meant wholesome tummy filling food. And we definitely did not want to go and order something we did not know anything about. We did find this tho (apparently everything here is Samsung) :-)

The meetings in the office were very nice, cordial and very halting. A few of the people in office had trouble communicating fluently in English and they would frequently switch into Korean and then someone would translate the same to us. It made the meeting look remarkably long. The local team there was very nice to take us for a traditional Korean dinner where we all sat at low stools and ate what I thought was a hell of a lot of food. Not to mention way too many types of Kimchi to be seen on one table! The conversation was very nice, in a halting sort of a way.

The next day was the most bizarre of them all. We went to meet the customer where, for two and half hours, everyone in the room spoke rapid fire Korean to discuss the problem statement and the possible solution. Every now and then, I would lean over to one of my Korean colleagues to check if I was following the conversation correctly, mainly picking up on the technical terms that were in English. It was the most bizarre meeting I had ever been a part of. After a long time, they distilled the conversation to 5 questions that I was to answer. "Speak very slowly" advised my colleague. Wise woman, that one. So I slowly recited my answers to them, which were ultimately translated in Korean anyways for clarity. And after a bit, the meeting was over. Everyone bowed and said "Kamsahamida" which is Thank You in Korean and that was that.

We had what my Korean colleague termed as 'Military soup' for lunch. It's called Bulgogi and literally means sweet meat. It was cooked right on our table and was DELICIOUS! Absolutely outstanding. I would recommend it to anyone who's going to Korea. It's marinated beef cooked with herbs and vegetables and noodles made from sweet potato (these noodles look transparent

and are a little more difficult to eat as compared to regular noodles). The entire combination is really yummy and I ate till I could not eat any more.

That left a little bit more work and then a trip around the city to check out what it had to offer. So we worked around the schedule and used the subway system to get to the City Hall station. It's quite easy to use the subway system, mainly because signs have English on them as well. Even the ticketing machines have English as an option and they have single journey tickets to every place. City Hall station was closest to Seoul Plaza and the Deoksu Palace. So there we went.

The pins tell you where the pictures are taken.

You can see all my Seoul Pictures here (tho I guess you have to be my friend on Facebook to see them…which I am assuming you already are, since you're reading my blog in the first place).

All thro the subway ride, people kept staring at my Vibram FiveFingers, everyone very curious about these shoes that they had never seen before in their life and this strange dark skinned man who was wearing them. And then they would look up and see my Joby Gorillapod attached to my Nikon D90 and they would have an even more curious look on their face. 'Where did this man come from?' While walking around the Deoksu Palace compound, I had a couple of Chinese gentlemen walk over and ask me (in broken Engrish) where I got my tripod from. Another Korean gentleman asked me how he could get shoes like mine ('They rook so comfortaberr!'). I quickly realized that both these items on me were great conversation starters.

The Seoul Plaza was hosting the Friendship Festival and there were a lot of colorful performance going on. We stayed for a few (the Russian troupe was fantastic), but could not stay long as we had to get on with the itinerary. So we headed down the street from the Plaza to take the Seoul City Tour Bus (we took it mainly because it costs the equivalent of USD10 and that's a great price to roam the city while having the ability to hop on and off the bus at any stop).

From here, we headed out to Namsong market which is supposed to be the place to buy electronics stuff. It was quite a disappointment as it looked more like a Sim Lim Towers from Singapore. We left in a hurry. On the way back to the Seoul City Tour Bus (SCTB) stop, we were treated to a fashion show in the mall. Pretty cool, watching the pretty Korean women waltzing up and down the runway to Vanessa Mae's music.

Next stop: Itaewan (pronounced Eat-A-Won). This is the tourist beat where there's something for every tourist, from shopping to eateries to massages. And you get to see way more foreigners than Koreans here. It's a nice place to while away your time, but nothing spectacular.

A weird thing happened at Itaewan. While the local were used to seeing foreigners be a bit different, but they sure as hell did not expect a brown skinned man walking down the streets in shoes that looked so different and that they had never seen before. At least 20 people asked me to show them my shoes and then launched into several questions (where did you get them, how much are they for, do you get them in more colours, how comfortable are they, do pebbles hurt). One guy actually bent down to touch my foot to feel the texture of the shoe (see I told you someone touched my feet) and then walked away with animated gestures…my guess is that he was planning his next purchase already :-)

After a bit of shopping, and mainly getting tired of that area, we headed to the Namsan Seoul Tower.

This tower is not that fascinating, and not as tall as the Minara Kuala Lumpur (where you can look down at the tallest twin towers in the world…the Petronas Towers), but still this was something that my Korean colleagues had told me I had to see, so I went. The best part of the trip to the tower was the cotton candy on the way up to the tower and the hanging human wire figures which set out nicely against the blue sky of the Korean evening. Even the view from the top of the tower was average. You could however see the traffic jams of Seoul clearly from way up there.

The thing that I wanted to do most was to visit Dongdaemon Gate, Korea's national treasure #1. So it was off to the subway station and a ride to the Dongdaemon Arts and Crafts Museum station. Even in the subway, people kept staring at my footwear. One guy, with a bevy of cameras hanging off him, asked me more about the shoes and then asked me if he could take a picture. Sure, I said. And so he shot off some 5 or 6 shots of the shoes, then politely thanked me and got off the next station.

The walk to the Dongdaemon Gate passed several malls where there were occasional stage performances with locals gyrating wildly to very peppy local music. It would have been fun if we hadn't been running out of time. So to the gate we walked. And it really was a nice place. Old, traditional and traffic running all around it. I tried to capture a long exposure of the gate and here is the result.

And that was the end of the day…and we had one more day to go.

So the next day started off at Namsangol Village, a small area that has been restored to represent the housing of the aristocracy of the olden days.

Needless to day, the houses look like miniatures of the palaces that we had been to yesterday. I soon tired of the curved roofs. But here we got to see the making of tofu (bean curd) the traditional way, saw a traditional Korean wedding taking place (with a hapless White guy and a Korean (I'm presuming) woman) and played some of the sports that the olden day folk would play. It was a nice tour of the living conditions of those times…and these people sure lived well.

From there, a bit of shopping (I finally found my Tag Heuer Track spectacle frames) and then the last thing…the Bongeunsa Buddhist Temple which was conveniently right across from my hotel.

A temple built on the slopes of a mountain, it very nicely follows the curves of the mountain as you climb higher and higher towards the praying hall. And it has a HUGE statue of the great man himself, the Buddha.

Here, people had put up colourful lanterns (my guess is to remember the loved ones they had lost over the years). It was a really pretty site. But the prettiest site for me was this one below…

And all at once, the trip was over. We were heading back to the airport and back to our desh. That did not stop me from doing a bit of perfume and alcohol shopping on the way :-)

All in all, here's to Seoul with it's beautiful women, it million types of Kimchi, it's Shoju, it's polite people with their broken up Engrish and absolutely beautiful weather. I had fun there :-)