I took a raft of pictures today, but haven’t had a lot of time to process them. I will update them as I can, but will be out in Daegu tomorrow afternoon and Thursday. I’ll take the camera but not the computer.
When I moved over to the other hotel, I decided to be smart and save carrying an extra item by putting the laptop computer into the large suitcase. Big mistake. After hauling it up and down several flights of stairs at various subway transfer points, I soon regretted the decision.
The new hotel, the Uljiro Co-op Residence is much more up to date than the previous hotel. That hotel had a large Japanese clientele, so there was no fourth floor. Well, of course, there was a fourth floor; there was just no floor labelled “4,” because the Japanese word for that number sounds like their word for “death.” This place has both a 4th and 13th floor. So there. The other hotel also had 110 volts, which is what Japan uses. This one is 220 volt, which is what Korea uses.
I couldn’t check in until 2 PM, so I left my luggage with the front desk. As I stood outside contemplating my next move, a small bus pulled up and out came the Busan High School baseball team (sorry, no picture of them; didn’t have my camera out).
As to the hotel itself, here is the commentary on the following pictures.
Before checking out of the old hotel, I wandered over to the area of the bookstore and the US Embassy. I passed a bakery that had a special on a cake in the form of the Korean flag. As near as I can translate it, the headline reads:
Time to raise the flag cake
Republic of Korea
Cheer(?) the Big Festival
Further along the way was some nice small landscaping. A bit past the bookstore was a shrine; here are some pictures of it.
It seems as if everyone in Korea is going crazy over the World Cup. They’ve even built immense statues of some of the players. If you look at the bottom of the picture, you can see a real human to establish the scale. Apparently there’s some sort of dance that goes to a tune I’ve been hearing repeatedly the past couple of days. Note that only one of these cartoonish characters even remotely resembles a Korean human. Note also that this is a “twelve-step” dance.
On the way to breakfast, I saw window washers on the Samsung Financial building.
(Yes, I tried the green tea doughnut for breakfast. Its taste was so alien that I can only classify it as “edible” rather than good or bad.) I also spied these wreaths down an alleyway. No, it’s not a Korean Mafia funeral; it’s typical to place these outside a business that is having a grand opening. I also saw the motto for “Mr. Pizza,” and it baffles me entirely.
This golden pagoda is behind the Samsung financial building.
Yesterday I made e-mail contact with Patrick Durusau, who is in Seoul for a meeting of the ISO committee that is working on the OpenDocument format. He said I should meet him at the Lotte Hotel Seoul at 1 PM, so I took off for there. I had plenty of time once I got there, so I decided to look around at the department store. The entire store is a monument to conspicuous consumption.
I was looking for a tie for one of the people at work, and went to the men’s department. In every culture there are people with more money than taste or sense. Rarely have I seen such hideous, tasteless, overpriced ties. I’m talking ₩110,000 to ₩200,000 here. Dad wouldn’t have used the word hideous; he would just have shaken his head, laughed, and asked, “Who the hell would buy crap like that?”
Afterwards, I met Mr. Durusau. Just as described in his email, he had shoulder length hair and a full beard. He looked a bit like a mild-mannered Old Testament prophet in a business suit. We may get together to compare notes about OpenDocument later this week.
I had to go to Seoul Station to buy a train ticket for a trip to Daegu on Wednesday, and decided to walk from the Lotte Hotel (near City Hall) to the train station. I asked three guys where the train station was, and they didn’t understand me. This was something of a surprise, given that everyone else had understood my broken Korean. It turned out they were Japanese tourists, and had no clue as to what I was talking about.
So here are some pictures from the walk. Bear in mind that they are pictures of whatever caught my eye. Note the Korean obsession with excessive cuteness. (You can hover the mouse over the pictures to see my comments).
