mindstab's posterous

Seoul, Korea: Awesome city in the future

Why do we like Korea so much?:

  • While we were in China, at meseum's they had audio guides, devices with headphones and a key pad, and each artifact that had audio had a number that you punched into the key pad to hear. I told Daniela that soon with RFID or other new coming wireless tech these audio guides would be replaced by ones that just detected where you were and just started talking. Then we got to Korea and they ALREADY HAD THEM in their meseums! Welcome to the future.
  • Korea likes us. Both Canada and Colombia (only latin american country) sent soldiers to fight for South Korea in the Korean war. As we learned at the war museum about 500 Candians died for the cause and over 200 Colombias died for the cause. They remember and still appreciate us. This is the first country Daniela has ever gotten into with out a Visa (she has a Colombian passport), which was totally cool! Also, they have both our (and the other 14 countries who pitched in) flags all over the place. It's cool, I've never seen so many Colombian flags or even Canadian flags :P
  • They restored this cool river right in a busy part of their city and it's nice and fancy so we were walking along it when suddenly *bam* laser and music dance show. They had a mist wall generator in the river and a laser that could paint onto it and they had a visual show and music! It was crazy awesome, and surprisingly good visuals and frame rate. They had lots of neat visual effects of shapes and stuff doing things and then a person dancing to the music. Haven't seen anything like that in Vancouver... :P
  • Their Metro System: 15ish lines, huge and gigantic, but thats not all. They have nice money cards, you just sit them on the machine and put money in and they "charge". They just way them at the toll gates or in front of the panel on a bus and bam, you can get in and it shows you on the panel screen how much money you spent and have left. And we found out these are working with more things too when Daniela found out it worked with pay phones too!
  • English, again, like Shanghai, many people here have some basic English like numbers and a few other basic phrases which is great for us!
  • It's just a nice modern city. It agrees with us well. And the food is great! And no massively filtered internet... :P etc etc. It's good times.

So far we've seen some Buddhist temples, the giant tower on the mountain,
a couple old palaces in the middle of the city, a jail, tons of awesome
restaurants, some neat malls, the museum, the war memorial museum, the JSA
(DMZ area between North and South Korea) and today we went to a wicked
amazing amusement park with really cools rides!

More notes from the road

So, first, random anecdotes. While in Hangzhou visiting a tourist
attraction, a chinese family asked if they could take a photo with us! 0_o
Ha! We of course let them, but wow, funny.
I forget the other one for the moment...
Anyways, Nanjing was interesting. We saw lots, took a 1/2 hour "ski lift"
trip up a big mountain, saw lots of touristy stuff including the Nanjing
Massacre Museum. Wasn't our favorite city overall due to a bunch of
random little glitches including our hostel being closed because
"something happened" and the hotel we switched to not having WiFi (0_o?)
and two taxi drivers taking us for extended rides to milk us a bit for
money and finally actually getting puke on my bag in the bus depot as we
were leaving. Ha yeah. Still glad we went and saw all we did, but these
random things did dampen the over all city for us a bit :P.
Ah well, already we're feeling a lot better back in an International
Hostel in Huang Shan, which we bused to today. The staff in all these
hostels are so nice it's incredible! And we have WiFi again.
Ha there were some funny parts in Nanjing though. I got Daniela the first
book in the Earth's Children series "The Clan of the Cave Bear" as reading
material for our bus trips. We've both been looking in the few foreign
book stores for the next books in our book series (I finished Red Mars). Anyways, I've said the Earth's Children series is ubiquitous in book
shelves, the world round, and really proved it when we went to the "Swede
and Kraut" restaurant in Nanjing and on their book swap shelf we found
"Ayla und der klan beren" and also the second book in the series, also in
German. Hilarious!
Tomorrow we head back to Ningbo to pack up Daniela's room and hopefully
then I'll get a proper chance to start uploading some photos.

Travel Diary

So we stayed for two days in Suzhou. We found a cute hostel on this
beautiful old tourist strip by a canal, it was gorgeous. We saw a couple
of the gardens Suzhou is famous for.
Then we grabbed a bus to Hangzhou and found another great hostel, this
time on the edge of a small mountain in the city, and only 3 blocks from
the giant lake the city is build around. We hit up the foreign language
book store and got a few new books, saw the silk market and the night
market and the pedestrian markets. Yesterday we rented bikes (soooo
cheap) and biked part of the way around the lake. We stopped and climbed
Leifeng Pagoda (a tower-y thing) and looked out across the lake, and then
elsewhere stopped for tea on the lake. Then we returned our bikes.
Today we are off to Nanjing for 3 or 4 days.
Internet access isn't super fast out here and we have other things to do
so we'll probably wait till we get back to Daniela's dorm in Ningbo next
week before uploading photos.

Toodles!