The flight was long, but on time. Because I had stayed up until 4 AM on Saturday and gotten only two hours of sleep before getting up again, I was able to sleep about six of the twelve hours of the flight. They served two lunches and a snack, but I only ate the first lunch. I saw part of a movie, The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. It was a decent time-waster.
I got through customs without any problems, shilly-shallied for about ten minutes before deciding to rent a cell phone for ₩3000 (3000 Korean Won, about US$3.25 a day), with ₩100 per ten seconds for local calls, which comes out to about 65¢ per minute.
The bus to downtown cost ₩8000 and took about an hour and a half. I found the hotel and checked in. The first room they gave me didn’t have an internet connection, so they moved me to the eighth floor. The maintenance guy got it all hooked up, but the hotel uses 110 volts (they have a lot of Japanese tourists) and the outlet was two prong; my adapter is three prong. So the guy got a power cord and stripped off the wires, hooked it to my plug and wrapped it in electrical tape. That worked, but luckily, I found Jeffery’s plug adapter when I unpacked, and it does the trick.
I then went out for dinner, and decided on a place that serves kimbap, which is sort of like a sushi roll, except you don’t have to have fish inside. I got one roll with kimchi and one with beef. Total was ₩4000. It was sort of a “self-serve” place; they had menus on the table with pencils, and you filled in how many you wanted of each [for a moment, it felt like I was playing Keno] and then they bring you the stuff. They have a cabinet of metal cups and you grab one and fill it with water from a water cooler. I felt really awkward, not knowing quite how to handle it, but the server was friendly and helped me out a little.
On the way back to the hotel, I got the Korean equivalent of a Nestle Crunch bar. At the hotel, I took a shower and got to sleep around 10:30 PM. I woke up this morning at about 3:30 AM, checked my email, and went back to bed for about an hour but couldn’t really sleep, so I got up to write this at about 6 AM. I discovered that the plug in the bathroom for the electric shaver doesn’t work; I’ll let the people here know, and I may just look for a different hotel today. I’m going to take a shower and head out for breakfast soon.
P.S. I have discovered that Google and Weather Underground “read” your locale (or figure it out from the IP address). I set my laptop’s time zone to Seoul, and Google came up in Korean, and Weather Underground came up with a map of Asia. Too cool.