Wednesday 27th August– Saturday 30th August 2008
And now we're off to Seoul!
Tim has to go to South Korea on business every few months, and this time his trip has coincided with the summer holidays so we've decided to all go together.
Luckily the flight goes from Haneda airport which is much closer to home than Narita, so it's not a mega trip to the airport. The flight was awful! I've never been on a plane flying through so much turbulence as that (the return flight was the same too). It was not fun but rather scary. Tim said it's usually like that!
We arrived at the hotel just as an enormous crowd of people began gathering in the massive square outside our window. Unsure what this was all about, prudence kept us inside while Tim went to work. A closer look at the crowd revealed them all to be monks, robed in all colours.
I found out later that 200,000 Buddhist monks gathered in protest. "The monks denounce episodes of discrimination and violation of religious freedom on the part of state officials and leaders. They are calling for an official apology from the Korean president and equal treatment, denouncing "inhospitable" attitudes toward them."
As Tim was only expected to be in work for a couple of hours, I took Rhiannon swimming in the hotel pool until his return. Then we went out for dinner with some friends and later we went to a huge computer complex so I could buy a new laptop. It's easier and cheaper to buy electronics here as they are more English compatible. Japan keeps their electronics purely Japanese. And very expensive. To get something that will work overseas or at least with an English operating system, you have to go to Akihabara and pay double.
I searched for ages in this hangar-sized store. For once I didn't know quite what I wanted and kept getting distracted by fascinating new gadgets unavailable elsewhere.
South Korean currency is amusing – UK£1 is the equivalent to about 1800 won, so we have huge piles of notes to lug around with us. I can't recall how much the laptop cost, but I do remember the pile of money I had to pay for it with was nearly a foot high! The shop owners have automatic counting machines to speed the payment process.
And now I have a dinky shiny new HP laptop which is far more portable and warp-speeds faster than my brick of a 10 year old Dell. And now I don't have to borrow Tim's laptop any more.
