Hi all,

Thought I'd let you know what Al and I have been up to so far.

We arrived in Seoul, South Korea last night after a plane ride that took almost 10 hours, with about the same amount of time spent preparing for it and waiting around at the airport. It was boring as, and the plane had tiny little seats. Fortunately, Al and I hadn't slept the night before so we managed to sleep through most of the trip.

When we arrived in Seoul airport, we realised three things; there are a lot of Korens here, not many speak english, and we don't speak korean. We tried to organise a train to our hotel, but after looking at the train timetable (all in Korean) we decided to catch a taxi. This was one of the easiest decisions I've ever had to make. We found a taxi driver that spoke english and he took us to our hotel. It took about 45 minutes and costs us the equivalent of around $90 AUD. After dropping that much cash on the taxi, Al and I decided we needed to live cheap for the next few days.

We headed up to our room to check it out, and I noticed a sign in the bathroom saying "Please put toilet paper in the trash can". This seemed easy enough, but I don't know why they couldn't have done it themselves.

We then went for a walk to find something to eat (cheaply). Almost every menu out the front of the restaurants was in Korean, so we had some difficulty finding somewhere we'd like. Until we came across this store;

Perfect! Our waiter came over and hesitantly asked whether we spoke Koren, we didn't even need to answer. He let us know that he only spoke a little English (if he knew one word of English that's more than we know in Korean). We ordered by pointing at the menu, and soon enough he brought us some Chicken and Beer (surprising eh?). He put our food on the table and told us to "eat deliciously", so we did.

The food was good, and cheap. After finishing we left to see if we could find somewhere to drink deliciously. There didn't seem to be a lot of pub type establishments, only restaurants. The mini-marts here sell beer, so we found one to see how much it costs. The answer to that question is "barely anything", as in a beer is like 1 australian dollar. That's a saving of about 5 dollars per beer. We figured if we bought enough beer, we could easily make back the money we had spent on the taxi.

We bought our beer and walked back to the hotel, where Brun decided he wanted to go to the toilet deliciously. Things got interesting from here on, as Brun advised me that we may have mis-interpreted the "toilet paper in trash can" sign. This simple mistake caused the toilet to fill to almost overflowing everytime it was flushed.The water would slowly drain away, so we figured we could use it about every fifteen minutes without overflow. Then we started drinking our beer...which made the toilet timetable difficult to abide by. Then it was time to sleep deliciously, which we did for almost 12 hours.



The following morning I went into the bathroom to use the toilet. I figured over night the water would've drained away to about normal levels, and I was about half right. There was absolutely no water, and it seemed to have been replaced by some interesting material from the depths of Korea's sewer system. Not sure whether to let the hotel management know, we went to the foyer and didn't.

That's our adventure so far. We fly to the UK tomorrow and I'll update this blog if there are any interesting stories to tell.

Take care!

Dan and Brun