Leaving South Korea, On to Uzbekistan

Our last couple of days were spent doing the cultural thing in Seoul. Steve worked in Seoul a few times when he was with SAP but found it to be very "soul-less" - but he was in the financial district, that had high rise towers and little else. This time we stayed near the city hall and the palaces, which was a beautiful and interesting area. One of the great things about Korea is the food! Gotta love a goodbebimbap or a bulgogi!!

 The Korean war memorial museum was very impressive, both with its collection and presentation and with the building itself. Steve was thrilled to find an old L-19 in the static displays - identical to the one that he & his brother Ivan used to fly with the Royal Canadian Airforce reserves. In the museum itself, the South Koreans never let you forget that they were invaded by the North Koreans in the 50's and three times by the Japanese prior to that.

 Our last day we hiked up Namsan mountain - a delightful forest paradise in the middle of the city. These senior citizens take their daily workout in the outside gym very seriously!

 At the top of the mountain is an observation tower and a collection of love locks. They are meant to seal your love forever. Koreans are totally into anything cute!!

 Part of the walk up the mountain follows the historic city wall. Not as big as the Great Wall of China, but still impressive!

 The Palaces in the downtown core are amazing! They have gone through various incarnations - some were built close to a thousand years ago and have been burnt down 3 or 4 times since then. This tree at  the end of the palace Secret Garden is reputably 750 years old.

 The secret garden was my favourite of all of the palaces.

Did I mention cute? We attended a k-pop concert at city hall. The dancing was amazing! K-pop is a government sponsored industry in South Korea - the government was looking for something that they could export to nearby nations at a low cost & high margin, and one of their solutions was culture. Boy bands, girl bands - the only one that has kind of made it big in North America was Psy with his hit Gangnam Style (at one time, the most watched Youtube video in the world - I think that it is at over 4 billion views now).

So now we're in Tashkent. In South Korea, the people were amazing to us - helpful, considerate, courteous and organized. When we flew to Jeju island, they loaded a Boeing 767 (i.e. a pretty big plane) starting at 1000. At 1020, everbody was on board & seated, and and 1030 we were in the air. Last night, it took an hour & 20 minutes to load a much smaller plane. Part of it was that everybody on the Seoul > Tashkent flight is a business person, and they all know each other and want to walk around & visit. Part of it is that they all have 5 carry ones (not to mention 5 pieces of ENORMOUS checked luggage). I was amazed that the plane could actually hold all of the bags. We were an hour late getting airborne because somebody didn't show up for the flight, so they had to remove their bags. When we landed, everybody RAN (and I mean RAN!!) for the immigration lines. The Uzbeks are not really good a standing in lines - in that department, they're a cross between the Russians (lines only get wider, never longer) and the Indians (you're not in line unless you have physical body contact with at least 4 other people). We finally made it to the front of the line, only to be told that we need to go to a separate counter to get our visas first. And the visa guys are away on a coffee break. They'll be back in 10 minutes. Except that 10 minutes later, we get told that they'll be back in 10 minutes. Yup, relax, no problem, half an hour later the finally make it. And the irony is that only 20 bags had come off the airplane. We waited over an hour and a half for a our bags, and then another 20 minutes for customs (gotta x-ray all of those bags again!). Hey, its all good, and the amazing thing is that even though we were 3 hours late, when we came out the door there was a dude with a big cardboard sign with our names on it!!