Gyeongju / Busan

Dear friend,

Don't bother to reply this message if you have no time.

It is quite difficult to get on line here (Busan Gimhae Airport) despite the free service. There is a coding problem so I can't really read anything containing any Chinese. And I can't log on to the office webmail either.

Gyeongju (Hing Chow in Cantonese) was quite good, but not as good as I had expected. Gyeongju is one hour from Busan so I use the Busan airport. Gyeongju is in fact one big cemetary with earth-moulded graves everywhere. People live around those graves, and walk upon them. The moon was very bright and the sky very clear the last two nights. It was kind of odd to appreciate the moon in the open with all those graves around. And there were few people on the streets after 7pm, and the streets were not as brightly lit as in HK.

Yesterday I got chat up with a man in Busan who offered to take me to a remote park close to his home on his scoopter. Such things do happen when they see you are alone. He did warn me that the place that I'm going to now had been damaged by the typhoon a couple of weeks ago (the guy on the lonely planet site also said this) and the recovery was still underway. I will not change my itinerary as everything has been booked. But I will see just what there are to see.

I've made a smart choice to skip Busan. The place seems to be very busy preparing for the Asian Games but is not very interesting to me.

Bye now.

Jeju

Dear friends,

Hello, I am now using the free internet service at Jeju airport. Seems that every airport in Korea offers such service, which is great. CLK should follow suit.

I joined a full-day tour yesterday to tour around the east side of Jeju island. It was quite a great outing, with fine weather and nice companions. Most of the other people in the group were American-Koreans. Since there was a US-born kid (28-year), they tend to translate everything for him, so I also benefitted.

We visited the place where old sea-women still dive to pick up shellfish, and these people, out of sympathy for their poor business, ordered to eat the very fresh seafruits raw, and invited me to join them. I didn't eat any but was quite happy.

Korea food was great. Each time I got into a restaurant randomly, and ordered quite randomly (what else could I do), I was served great food. And they are cheap.

Got to catch my flight to Busan now. I wonder if you all would get my message.

Seoul

Dear friend,

A quick hello from Seoul. I'm now at Gimpo Airport waiting for my flight to Jeju, which will depart very soon.

The trip so far has been uneventful. The biggest problem remains the language. And because I didn't know how to order my food, I was starved to half-dead on my first day here (the other reason was that there were simply no places to eat around the place I visited). Everything is very cheap here. Plus there is nothing to buy anyways.

Bye now.