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.

Lonely Planet comments that the Koreans are the most kind and generous people and it has been our pleasure, and wonder actually, to experience this generousity to a somewhat bizarre extreme.

We began noticing immediately that our new hosts tended to take the kind gesture to new levels. For instance, when we inquired about a place for dinner from our hotel manager on our first night in Seoul, she not only recommened a place but walked us there, placed our order for us to the non-English speaking staff and virtually tucked us into our table and made sure we had everything we needed before leaving us on our own. If we could have hired her as our official restaurant translator for the duration of our touring we would have as, just as we expected, most restaurants have no English menus or even food pictures. However, no need to survive purely on 7-11 seaweed wrapped rice three times a day for these travelers! We have met plenty restaurant staff more than willing to flick through the bilingual food section of our Lonely Planet to point out which of the dishes listed they serve.

Busy commuters in the subway not only stop and offer to help us but often accompany us to ticket counters and translate for us. While waiting at a bus stop, a cute old couple shared their cookies with us and while standing in a crowded metro train car, another elderly woman kindly patted the empty seat next to her in the ‘Reserved for the Pregnant and Elderly’ section, inviting me to sit down.

Seattle is very much a tourist destination and our tourists may be experiencing the kind of language barrier we’re experiencing here and would surely appreciate a random act of kindness from a local. But in my oh-so-busy day to day life, I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t always offer help to couples agonizing over street maps and I certainly don’t share my cookies with tourists at bus stops. These few examples may, indeed, offer Koreans as viable candidates for the honor of nicest citizens but an interesting blog entry they don’t necessarily make.

We aim to entertain here folks so watch as I up the anty a bit. An innocent trip to a Baskin & Robbins took the generosity thing to a whole new level. Firstly, I should note that we have seen very few westerners outside of Seoul and despite their TV having CSI Miami and Law & Order, we have been gawked at like aliens in nearly every town we’ve visited. Mothers will urge toddlers to wave to us, hoards of field-tripping middle school kids will yell ‘Hello’ to us and then giggle hysterically when we respond. And even adults will plant themselves in our path to say hello. I’m beginning to wonder if they think we actually star in CSI Miami. So we may have been a bit embarrassed but not altogether surprised when, as we entered the B&R, all the patrons turned to stare, adolescent girls covered their mouths and whispered to each other and braver pre-pubescent boys practiced their Hellos to see if they would work. On our way to order, we passed a table of 3-4 couples, perhaps in their early fifties, about to finish off an evening out together with ice cream cones. Before David and I knew it, one from the group, a quite handsome distinguished looking gentlemen had come over, was shaking David’s hand and was welcoming us to Korea. He then insisted on giving us an ice cream cone, a lovely huge waffle cone filled with scoops of B&R’s best. I tried to politely refuse but it was clear that the polite response, the only acceptable response was to accept the ice cream cone with a ‘Kunsamida’. The man was then so happy that we had said Thank You in Korean that he gave David a great big hug. Then his wife and their friends all cheered, everyone cheered, and David and I went to a nearby table to enjoy our waffle cone. It doesn’t take a lot to do something nice for someone else and maybe, I dunno, maybe the next time you see two backpackers outside an ice cream shop counting their pennies, maybe you’ll buy them an ice cream and make their day, too. This next story, however, still has us perplexed.

One fine day, David and I took a city walking tour that led us through alleyways and up hillsides to a lovely and remote temple high above the city from where we enjoyed the splendid views…..of a storm coming in. Before we could scurry ourselves back down this hill, the heavens opened. We hopped from tree to tree for protection but eventually ran out of trees and were huddled underneath a Buddhist gate that was barely keeping us dry when, just as Mr. Big always greets Carrie, a beautiful shiny lovely black sedan pulled up along side us and a rear window lowered. Another handsome, older gentlemen in the driver’s seat offered us a ride down the hill and without hesitation we accepted. I felt positively sloppy and dirty in this man’s car, it’s been a long time now since we’ve ridden in such finery. During the drive down the hill towards the metro station below, he apologized for not speaking English and we apologized for not speaking Korean. He stopped to let us out, we thanked him with the only Korean word we know. Only this time, instead of earning us a hug, the man handed David $10. David, a bit shocked and confused, tried to refuse, of course, but just like a grandfather, he shoved the money into David’s hand with a kind of, ‘don’t be silly, boy, just take the money’ expression. We were flabbergasted. We ran for the shelter of the train station, watched the man drive away and stood for several minutes contemplating what had just happened. It was a very bizarre feeling, as if we had just met an angel. Or a very nice and wealthy Korean grandfather.

I have just one final anecdote to share.  It doesn’t contain an act of generosity, exactly, but it does contain love and cheer.  There is a train that runs up and down the east coast of South Korea.  It is called the Sunshine Train and it is painted in bright happy scenes of a sun and the ocean and happy birds.  All the seats on the train face out to the ocean and the staff all dress up like giant chipmunks.  It’s a regular service train, David and I simply needed to get from one town to another and found ourselves happy recipients of the Sunshine.  You can’t help but feel happy as the televisions in each car telecast the next car’s passengers to you and you wave to each other. 

We leave Korea today for China where we think we’ll meet up with our old friends barter, barge, spitt, shove, elbow, cheat and overcharge.  However, Lonely Planet warned us that Never-Smile and Reserved Stoney-Face live in Korea and we never met either of them so we’ll have to just wait and see.

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.

Now, before the more prudish of you start worrying, these are not (on the most part) seedy, nasty dives of places. They are generally the best of what was built for doing the worst and have found themselves a nice side-trade catering for the needs of the budget minded traveller.

As I type this I’m sitting in our room in the Sky Motel in Gyeongju. For $35 ($5 more than we usually spend but we were tired and it was close by) we get the following:

• A lampost decorated as a palm tree that lights up neon yellow – complete with coconuts
• An exterior that looks like a castle including battlements
• Free DVD and video rental in the lobby with real titles as well as titles your mother wouldn’t like you to have (depending on your mother of course)
• A little check-in package containing his and hers bubble bath, shampoo, soap, face cream, and toothbrushes.
• An en-suite room with a huge, comfortable bed and lots of red mood lighting. The sheets are crisp, white, and spotless.
• The room has a free partially stocked fridge, DVD player & VCR (both fully stocked, if you get my drift), a water cooler/heater, a UV sterilizer for the mugs, free tea and coffee, a 48″ flat screen TV, a computer with free internet access, heated floors and lots of mirrors.
• Free condoms. I was late spotting these because they were next to the free tea and coffee and the small silver wrappers looked like sweetener. Who keeps their condoms next to their condiments anyway?
• Free: hair gel, after shave, hair spray, hair combs, shampoo, conditioner, body lotion and toothpaste. All in big bottles, already opened, used and perhaps abused.

The standard of furnishing is cheap but serviceable and the bathrooms are usually a little dated. But the main bedroom is always squeaky clean and well appointed. There are about fifty of these motels in every town we’ve visited and because we’re out of season we can have our pick. We can, of course, rent the room by the hour but usually we’re asleep within the hour. Haven’t heard any noises from the neighbouring rooms yet although I have seen some couples checking in who are obviously intent on making something that’s not holiday making.

If you ever find yourself in Korea you could do a lot worse than the love motel. A little common sense would steer you away from the more reckless establishments towards amazing value for money. For our remaining days here we’re going back to the hostels where the conversation may be better but we’ll miss our room bathed in the glow of red light and a 48″ porn machine.

As she said: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”

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.

Seoul is big. Really big and it sprawls like a giant sprawly thing across the valley. Above the valley are mountains (else it wouldn’t be a valley but a plain) and those mountains look just like the hills in Hollywood where they filmed M*A*S*H. I’ve watched every episode of that damn show and always felt the set looked liked the back-lot of a film studio. Now I know that it looked like Korea or, perhaps all of Korea looks like the back-lot of Warner Bros, Burbank. There are plenty of westerners in Seoul. Tourists and English teachers. They all came out the woodwork when we happened upon a rather nice lantern festival. The guidebooks warn that outside Seoul nobody speaks any English. This is true. It’s enough to keep the tourists in Seoul which is their loss and our gain. Unlike the other Asian countries I mentioned earlier, having no English around when you’re in the boonies can be tricky but here, in this modern country, everyone understands that we all have the same basic needs and communication seems to be quite easy. Of course, we need our guidebook like a sinner needs his bible and the train people all know their English days of the week and times of the day but restaurants, shops, hotels and other services have all been performed in a language I call ‘point-a-lot’.

Sarah will be posting an upcoming entry that details the wonderful warmth of the Koreans so to counter or compliment that, here’s some of their oddities. They LOVE the outdoors. And why not, the outdoors in Korea is truly beautiful. However, they do seem to insist that any pursuit outdoors requires a tremendous amount of technical clothing and equipment. This was first brought to my attention on the subway in the middle of downtown Seoul. A simple amble around the city park brought out the locals in their North Face technical hiking pants, full Merrel hiking boots, Mont-Bell gore-tex jackets, Leki walking poles etc etc. These are the Versace, Gucci and Channel brands of outdoor gear. No cheap Chinese knock-offs, these are the real deal. Oh, and it’s all brand new too, I’m not talking about the Pacific Northwest shabby-tech look. Every great adventure we have we see Koreans dressed as if they’re having an equally great adventure except they didn’t take hours of trains and local buses to get here. They pulled up in their Hyundai Sonatas, walked from the car park to the temple and back again dressed ready for both a freak snowstorm and an instant monsoon.

And on to gadgets. They love ‘em. Around the necks of these very technically dressed people are the latest, greatest and largest digital cameras I have ever seen. Not one either, usually two and a tripod and they photograph absolutely everything. I realize this used to be a Japanese stereotype but the Koreans hate all things Japanese (something to do with an invasion and 35 years of oppressive rule) so have probably reclaimed this stereotype for themselves and are likely stating they invented it in the first place. The lockers in the train station read your fingerprint to open their doors and every car has at least a sat-nav and usually a TV capable flat screen mounted just above the speedometer. In Korea, road safety appears to be at the forefront of every driver’s mind.

Hair. There must be some law in Korea that all women over the age of forty are required to have exactly the same hair-do. It’s a fairly tight perm in fairly short hair and they all, without exception, have it. All the girls have beautiful long silky Asian hair but at some point at age 39 and three quarters it must fall out and be replaced by the perm. To test Darwinian theory once and for all, Sarah and I spent a good part of the day trying to spot an evolution in action; could we see any half perms. Not perms that needed re-perming but hair that was just about to become permed whether the owner wanted it or not. After many hours we spotted several ’sporty cuts’. Post 35 but pre 40 the women must get bored with long hair and cut it shorter, say just over the collar. This must be the biological clue, the catalyst for the perm because next thing, wham, their hair is curly.

Love is in the air (not hair) in Korea. Young Koreans love each other so much they insist on wearing matching t-shirts. They walk hand in hand down the street wearing ‘Snoopy says I heart you’ type pink T’s. As you know, I’m not much of a man but I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing such a declaration. However, I have spotted the best way for Sarah and I to show our bond for each other. Many of the lingerie shops sport matching underwear. Right there in the window on manikins that are holding hands. It’s not cool matching black undies though. These are flowery pink and yellow affairs, which look rather nice on the western breasted manikin but offer further assault on the dignity of the western packaged male.

The Koreans are Krazy. They are also extremely forgiving of us. Always ready to smile when the communication breaks down and always happy to see us in their towns. And, as you will read in Sarah’s forthcoming post, they are generous to a fault.

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.

The trick to Taiwan is to go to the harbour and buy the fish straight from the boat. Thanks to Ed and Sue we had the chance to do this. Not far from their vacation home is a harbour and fish market. We purchased about US$60 of crab, shrimp and fish, marched up the hill to a restaurant and paid them $10 to cook up the whole lot. Now, we realized that $60 sounds like a lot for backpackers but Sue negotiated a good deal and it took two of us to carry all the seafood away. OK, we are gluttons.

From a drink perspective Taiwan fares a little better. Ni-Cha is milk tea. Delicious hot or cold it is black tea with condensed milk and lots of sugar syrup. It’s cheap, good and too addictive. Starbucks, of course, is everywhere yet what is more pleasing to the eye is all the Starbucks clones that have sprung up. This is great because these are all domestic companies emulating the success of the big conglomerate. This provides the young people of Taiwan somewhere to hang out and meet friends, semi-decent coffee and, most importantly, employment and business opportunities. Starbucks isn’t all evil and although we have yet to succumb to our home brew, we are happy to drink from the fountain of their competitors when the need for the familiar arises.

Beer comes courtesy of the Taiwan Beer Company who produce a local brew unimaginatively called Taiwan Beer. $2.50 for 600ml is a fair price to pay and its taste is also fair. Not as vicious as Chang beer in Thailand and not as refined as Kingfisher in India, it does what you want it to do and probably what you bought it for in the first place.

What prompted the kill it, fry it, eat it remark was Korea. By comparison, the food here is great. Even without the comparison it is a pleasant and welcome surprise. It may even be good for you having the highest protein to fat ratio of any Asian country we’ve visited thus far. It’s also reasonably priced and most importantly tastes fresh and natural. Long gone are the hopes of finding a dinner for a dollar as in India but $8 buys you a finely prepared dinner here. The meal is based around a central dish. Perhaps a soup, or a bowl of tofu or even BBQ’d pork. The central dish is basic and perhaps a little bland but don’t worry because your table will soon be overloaded with anywhere between five and fifteen side dishes. Some sides are there to add into your basic dish and some are there to give your palate a little burst of life when it’s time to take a break from the spice. All the tastes are monochromatic, even the fiery hot dishes are just chili hot not curry hot. There is not the complexity of spices that are found, for example, in Indian food. Think of having a table of dishes like paints on an artist’s palate, primary tastes that can be blended to make an almost infinite array of secondary flavors.

The centerpiece of the Korean meal appears to be the DIY table barbecue. It used to be either pork or beef based but there currently seems to be some trouble with American beef and the Korean government have stopped imports from the US. This is putting up the price of US beef here to around $35/lb. The Koreans are very upset by this and just like the Iraq war we (Sarah and David) are personally asked/blamed for it. Not surprising I guess because I doubt the US government cares what the Koreans think when the domestic market is all that really matters. The BBQ is fun. Pig meat and table flamethrower. The natives let the waiter start cooking the meat and then take over but we are considered too inexperienced to handle cooking for ourselves so the restaurant staff do it all including using scissors to cut our food into more manageable chopstick sized pieces. It’s like being five years old again and I feel like it – the chopsticks are flat, not round, and are almost impossible to use with any grace. Secretly, I think the Koreans have a hard time with them too because a spoon is always provided and used by everyone. The Japanese, probably the most adept chopstick users I’ve seen, wouldn’t be caught dead with a spoon in their hand. The BBQ comes with lettuce leaves to wrap the cooked meat in and, again, many various side dishes. I mentioned earlier that there is practically no fat in the Korean meals, well, the BBQ is where they make up for it. The belly of the pig is considered to be the best part. Apparently a fat animal is a healthy one and a week’s worth of careful eating vanishes at the mercy of the cracklin’.

Kim Chi is the national dish. Basically it’s raw cabbage pickled in vinegar and chili and comes with every meal. I read in the newspaper that a Korean Tourist Board survey of foreign visitors revealed that 86% of tourists tried Kim Chi. From this statistic I can only deduce that 14% of visitors must eat exclusively at McDonalds because Kim Chi is served with every single meal in every single restaurant. And, should you polish off the whole plate of the stuff, another will arrive immediately. This holds true of all the side dishes, they just keep on coming, whether you want them or not. Our guidebook mentions the Korean government are trying to encourage restaurants to end this practice because of food wastage but I doubt that will ever happen.

The one thing the Koreans seem to be coming up short on is decent drinks. There are a fair amount of coffee-shops all serving lattes, americanos and whatnot but these are expensive and have the look of bad coffee. Perhaps it’s frothy Nescafe and at $3.50 a cup it doesn’t bode well for a value-for-money experience. Besides these Asian countries don’t really have a cafe culture where you can nurse the single cup you can afford for as long as you like whilst browsing the paper. Apparently their tea is very famous so we tried a $4 cup and it was good and fruity but the cup was small and instead of leaving with the taste of tea in our mouths we left with the taste of tourism. Haven’t tried the beer yet but again, the Hofs (bars) look very unappealing and the occasional Western Bar we run into just says $8 beer and ex-pats. I think we have to wait to get to China for beer again. In the meantime, we’ve bought green tea bags from the 7-11 and because every hotel has a hot water machine and mugs in their rooms we’ve been enjoying cheap tea in the comfort of home.

Breakfast? Forget about it. We’re buying the only box of cereal the 7-11 sells, a carton of milk and eating it from the coffee mugs in our room with our sporks.

Korean cuisine is not the most imaginative but it’s healthy and practical with just a little kick when you need it. A bit like Korea really.