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Sarah says:

We have been taken under the wing of the entire country of Korea. It’s not just the Love Motels that have kept ‘On the Wings of Love’ painfully stuck in my head for the past three weeks. Now, I know that everyone always says about the places they travel to, ‘Oh, the people were so nice.’  Heck, tourists have even been known to say that about New Yorkers, maybe to the chagrin of the New Yorkers? Or is that just me buying into the NY image myself.  In any case, Koreans take the cake, or more appropriately, the kimchi.

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Dave Says:

Love Shack baby! Every country provides challenges when it comes to finding suitable accommodation. In Korea the challenge is which motel will have the best porn.

Normally, the humble backpacker’s hostel provides warmth and shelter for our weary bones but for some reason Korea has this strange glut of affordable accommodation in the form of the ubiquitous Love Motel. I’m not entirely sure where these originated and why, but I’ve never seen so much red flashing neon in my entire life and please bear in mind I spent seven months of that life living a quick walk from Amsterdam’s Red Light District.

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Dave says:

I must say, this is quite the civilized country. I don’t mean that in a demeaning way, a suggestion that perhaps the Koreans are still bashing people over the head with large tree branches, I mean it in a ‘civilized compared to the Asia we’ve come to know and love so far’ way. There’s none of that frontier town feeling that Vietnam or Cambodia exhibit or any of the well oiled tourist veneer that blights Thailand or the underlying oppression that is obvious in Malaysia. No, South Korea is a wealthy, balanced, um - dare I say ‘nice’ place to be. It’s almost that perfect balance between Asia and the West. A crossroads of the known and the unknown, and to boot, we appear to be the only westerners here.

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Dave Says:

We write a blog entry about food and drink for every country we visit. Why this is we don’t know, we are not gluttons, it just happened that way. Here comes the report for Taiwan: If you can kill it, you can fry it and if you can fry it, you can eat it. This may sound a little unfair and had I written this entry before we left the country it may have sounded a little different. Sure, the egg burrito things (gently fried) were nice and the dumplings (gently fried or abrasively steamed) were good too. However, nothing we ate in Taiwan appeared to be much better than cultural fast food. Their hotpot concept is quite good though - an all you can eat buffet of fresh veggies, meat and seafood that you cook yourself in a pot of broth at your table. However, much like poor Chang’s Mongolian Grill on Broadway, the excitement of creating your own custom soup wears thin once you realize that it all ends up tasting the same no matter how custom you make it.

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