Seoul

I often describe Seoul to those who ask me as a "Tokyo Lite." Like Tokyo it is modern, clean, blessed with an extensive and easy-to-navigate subway system, and full of lighted signs. It's also very crowded, fairly expensive, and difficult to get by speaking English. On all these points, Seoul is similar to Tokyo, but I would say Tokyo is more extreme on all counts. Less quantitatively, Seoul feels a little more relaxed.

I definitely enjoyed the food. Korean BBQ is expensive even in Korea, and I indulged on my first night. They fill your table with dishes. I also ate the standard bulgogi and bibimbap many times. I was surprised to find that restaurants almost never had any English translations on their menus, nor picture menus (both are common in China). This had the unfortunate effect of limiting what we would order, since the staff rarely spoke English. We lucked out on our first meal without our local guide Young when our waitress turned out to be Chinese.

At one restaurant, a tiny hole-in-the-wall in the basement of a building, we were the only guests serviced by an old lady who was hostess, waiter, and cook. We pretty much let her decide what we would eat. She would make small dishes, bring them out, wait and watch us while we had the first taste so that we could show our approval. Only then would she smile and go back to make the next dish. I ordered a beer; she said something I didn't understand, left, and came back with a beer she had bought from the convenience store upstairs. A very local experience.

Unfortunately it wasn't until our last night that we discovered a food street near Gangnam station, which had dozens and dozens of excellent looking inexpensive restaurants.

We saw a few of the standard tourist sites, some with Young and her husband Moe. The one that really stood out to me was the Changdeokgung, one of several palaces in Seoul. In structure and scale it is similar to the Forbidden City in Beijing, though I found it much more beautiful and friendly. In particular it has a Rear Garden, which was stunningly beautiful and very relaxing. Touring the palace took almost two hours, and the experience was tainted by the requirement that you go as part of a tour group, and generally have to keep up with the group rather than viewing things that interest you at your own leisure. Nevertheless I was captivated by the melding of natural beauty with traditional Asian architecture.

The other major tourist thing I did was visiting the DMZ. The tour is run by the USO, and because it involves going on US military property, some nationalities are not permitted to take the tour. China is on that list, so Jessie couldn't go with me. Besides seeing the DMZ itself, we got to visit a series of blue UN huts which actually straddle the dividing line between north and south, so that in walking from one side to the other, you are crossing the demarcation line. The huts have one door on each side, and the policy is that the hut may be used by either side by entering and locking the opposite door. The huts were meant to house negotiations, which have never taken place. So in a strictly technical sense, I've been to North Korea while inside one of the huts, though I don't actually make that claim.

The DMZ tour also included visiting tunnels deep underground, dug by the North to act as a conduit for soldiers to invade the South.

The final noteworthy event was the excuse for coming to Korea in the first place: Young's wedding. It was held in a large banquet hall in a hotel. The guests numbered somewhere between two and three hundred. The whole event was pretty quick, maybe two hours for a ceremony, some speeches, and a quick meal. Afterwards there was a private ceremony where Young and Moe dressed in traditional wedding attire and did a tea ceremony. Jessie and I got to watch for a few minutes.

Letter Published in The Economist

I had a letter to the editor published in The Economist this week:

Kinky Kindles

SIR – One of your readers urged us to “remember the lesson of Betamax video” when considering which e-book reader to buy (Letters, January 9th). One of the factors in the demise of Betamax was the availability of pornographic movies on VHS.

I bought a Kindle. Perhaps I should have waited to see on which e-book reader Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt choose to distribute their magazines.


Gabriel Nell
Seattle

Well, I can check that one off my life's to-do list. I noticed there is a slight undercurrent of sexuality to some of the writing in The Economist. For example, they felt obliged to explain tea-bagging in an article this week. I traded on that tendency in this letter, and maybe that was part of why it was published. Besides it being extremely witty, that is. :)

China's Southwest: Yangshuo

After spending so much time in Asia, I've realized that most of it has been visiting large cities, following that modern-day Hitchhiker's Guide, the Lonely Planet. It hasn't exactly steered me wrong, but it does put you in the same place as every other Western traveler. So, I decided that my last days in China (for 2008) must be spent in natural and rural splendor.

Step one: purchase Lonely Planet's China's Southwest.

Sigh.

But really, what else could I do?

I took some time to decide between Yunnan province and the areas surrounding Guilin. I settled on the Guilin area because it seems that the interesting stuff was all clustered within a few hour's bus ride of Guilin, whereas Yunnan is rather spread out. I booked a flight a week ahead of time, and booked my first hotel the day before I left. This trip was going to be one where I shoot from the hip, with the Planet only providing maps and advice on accommodations.

I arrived at Guilin and wanted to go directly to Yangshuo. I stopped by the travel service desk at the airport to find out how to get there, and there I met two others who were trying to do the same. One was David, a Chinese oncologist living in Houston, the other was Florian aka Flo, a German journalist taking the long way back after covering the Olympics in Beijing. We decided to split the 300 kuai taxi ride into Yangshuo.

I knew this trip would be interesting when we discovered that the road to the airport was unpaved and full of potholes. David (who speaks fluent Chinese) negotiated with the taxi driver so that we could take a bamboo raft down the Li river for a price not too much more than we were going to pay anyway. So we agreed.

As with every other travel plan in China, we would find out that we had not asked the right questions beforehand.

The bamboo boat doesn't quite start from Guilin. It starts at Xiangping, a good distance downriver. Ok, whatever. But by the time we get there, we're hungry. So we make our second mistake and go to a restaurant recommended by the taxi driver. Inside I had my first experience actually picking out a chicken to slaughter for our lunch. I went with a server into the back next to the kitchen, where a number of caged animals, including snakes and rabbits, awaited their fate. I selected the smallest chicken, which the server pulled out from the cage and rather preposterously tried to weigh it using a peasant-style scale, literally a stick and some weights. Preposterous, because the chicken was flailing wildly, making any decent measurement impossible. In the process the chicken escaped, and the server ran in circles trying to recapture it. As feathers flew mere feet away from the kitchen, my thoughts couldn't help turning to bird flu. Eh, whatever. If it happens, it happens.

The meal was quite good, but when the bill arrived we found that the chicken and the fish both were priced per jin, a chinese unit equal to 0.5kg. Our lunch ended up costing over 400 kuai (almost USD $60), which is absurdly expensive.

I brushed this classic tourist trap off and we got onto our "bamboo" raft.  The boat was made by lashing several painted PVC pipes together and attaching a lawnmower engine on the top with a prop at the end. The float down the river was very pleasant. The place had a unique beauty to it, with a very Chinese quality. We even stopped to take some pictures standing in the river after the raft ran onto a sandbar.

The raft trip didn't quite end at Yangshuo as we expected. Instead it arrives somewhere approximately in the middle of nowhere, with someone who owns a double-sized tuk-tuk waiting to drive you to the bus station for 30 kuai. The Yangshuo bust station? Hah, of course not ... it's the local bus station in the middle of nowhere that takes you to Yangshuo in a brisk hour. We opted for the tuk-tuk ride, given that we had no alternative.

Basically it took us 8 hours to go about 100km, having traveled by taxi, raft, tuk-tuk, and bus, with an overpriced tourist lunch for good measure. I wasn't too put off by this, because I've become used to it, but Flo was fairly annoyed. This was one of the few times when I have traveled with someone more irritated by circumstances than myself.

Yangshuo is a very strange tourist oasis ... it attracts mostly Chinese tourists but enough Westerners visit that there is a thriving trade in stupid hats and ridiculous clothing appealing to 22 year old spoiled hippie backpackers. On the plus side, coffee is readily available, as well as bars. The bottom line is Yangshuo is not a village in China, it is a tourist attraction in and of itself, and quite comfy.

So, we wanted to get away. Flo and I decided to rent mountain bikes and explore the villages and countryside outside the city. We left with only a vague notion of what was where; we only knew that it might be nice to see the Yulong Dragon Bridge. We biked through dirt-poor villages, the kind built of mud and stone, with chickens and other farm animals wandering around. We got lost a number of times, but anyway the point was to get lost. We biked through villages and rice paddies, marveling at the scenery and the fact that we were actually passing through it.

We had gone a while in the direction we thought the bridge was in, but we were sure we'd passed it. Eventually someone drove by on a motorcycle, and I flagged him down. I was glad that my Chinese had progressed to the point where I could explain where we were trying to go and understand his answer for how to get there. I'm not really good at Chinese, but I guess I can survive with it.

We reached the bridge and chilled out there for a while. The bridge was built in 1401. We decided to bike back on the other side of the river. Again, we got lost and ended up on the other side of the mountains (hills, really). The road really sucked, it was a gravel road meandering beneath and next to a brand new highway. After a rather long time on this really poor road, we came upon a house where some people were digging a well in the front yard, and I stopped to ask them how to get back to Yangshuo. It was not an easy conversation but we did establish that it would be faster to keep going rather than double back.

So, we kept going on the gravel by the highway, which was about 10m above us on an embankment. We noticed that only one car every few minutes was passing by. We decided it would be better to bike on the highway. We carried our bikes up the embankment, over the rails, and onto the highway. It was brand new, and had not even opened yet. It was wonderful. We biked for probably a half an hour on the best conditions you could imagine: a newly paved highway with beautiful scenery and no other car or bike in sight. It was really fantastic. We could have never planned it and after that highway opens no one can do it again. This is what we had come for.

Eventually we came to the not-yet-opened toll plaza and the highway became populated with cars and trucks. It took much longer riding back on the highway than I expected, and it was probably the hardest exercise I had in the past six months. But we made it back to Yangshuo just before dusk, which was a great relief as I didn't want to be biking on an active highway at night.

Back in Yangshuo, we went on two different occasions to a bar owned by an Englishman, the primary attraction being one of the only billiards tables in the city. Flo was particularly interested in playing pool. The Englishman told us he loved living here; that he'd lived here for ten years and was never going back. He did mention that the financial side of things was not so great; he was barely breaking even on his bar and renting out a few rooms upstairs. But he had a pretty girlfriend who cooked delicious dishes for him, and so I guess there wasn't a lot to complain about.

We ended up finding another billiards table at a different bar, and played a few matches there. A group showed up, a westerner who taught English and a few of his Chinese students. The westerner struck me as a kind of creepy guy. Another group of young Chinese showed up, eager to play pool. One girl, who brought her own cue, had an extremely serious air about her. She won a few matches, and then Flo's turn came. The match was very competitive, both were pretty good amateurs. At one point the girl sank a ball which was clearly not intentional, aka "slop." She started to set up her next shot when both Flo and I objected -- slop doesn't count, your turn is over. She tried to argue something about "Yangshuo rules" but we overruled her. She was clearly embittered by this. The match continued, and Flo managed to eke out a victory, at which point the girl began to storm off without saying a word. Again we both objected - "Hey ... HEY! Good match!" She looked at us with a mix of confusion and resentment, spat out "good match" and left.

Altogether Yangshuo was a lot of fun. It felt nice to get out of the cities after spending months in ones with 10m+ populations. Where I went next, Ping'An, was even more remote, though I couldn't quite escape touristy things there, either.