Seoul

Many thanks to Glen, our Seoul tour guide. Glen lived in Seoul for several years before I met him, and suggested, given our limited time in the city, the neighbourhood of Insadong. Our room is furnished in that ghastly french provincial style (to capitalize french is to do France a disservice) but is located in the midst of shops, art galleries, restaurants, mostly packed onto tiny meandering alley ways. Surprisingly, we wake at 8am local time. We arrange to leave our bags at the hotel and for a cab to take us to the airport at 4 pm. And we set off.

Our morning coffee is at the Lime Tree, a tiny café, mostly for take-out, with only three tables. On one wall is a tack board covered with kudos, in Korean and English. One English note extols the virtues of the coffee, staff, and service, then cheers on the Ottawa Senators.

Though this is only day one of about 120, we both buy T-shirts, a mug by a local potter we meet, and an oil painting. We laugh at our extravagant shopping, though I insist we probably won’t keep up this pace for the four months. We will, after all, only spend two days in Seoul, today and one on the way home. The T-shirt I buy is handy. Our luggage has gone on to Phnom Penh I hope (my friend Bruce has told me there are only two kinds of luggage—carry on and lost) and I am sweating up the one shirt I have. Later, at the airport I will bird bath and change shirts. The mug is well made and will add to our collection of hand-made mugs back home. It will also be used while in Phnom Penh, so seems a good investment. The painting is original modern Chinese factory painting, small, of a pig offering its throat up to a young girl with a knife.

Lunch is fabulous, at a vegetarian restaurant run by a woman who lived in Canada while her sons went to university there. Her sister serves and we ask her to choose for us. Sixteen dishes arrive, plus soup and rice. They run from the slightly familiar to the exotic.

Later in the day we head off to find the Rice Cake and Kitchen Utensil Museum (mostly in hopes of finding kitsch & humor but the museum is impressive and part of a large culinary institute devoted to traditional Korean food). A large group of very young children are there at the same time as us, and we feel sympathy for the hard-working tour guide who has to work extra hard to keep this gang focused on the tour when they seem much more interested in watching us. En route we encounter a protest outside a court house, complete with riot police and 27 buses to transport them, and perhaps those who may be arrested. Everything seems quite peaceful, though, and the cops, who look like bored teenagers, sit balanced on benches made of helmets and shields.