A man after my own heart...

The traffic in Seoul is a lot better nowadays than it used to be. However, in my opinion it could be a lot better still because I think a fair few of the traffic problems are caused by selfish drivers being caught in the middle of junctions when the lights change (ever heard of box junctions??). There are quite a few hot spots like this including the South West corner of the Express Bus Terminal (avoid the road between Seocho Station and Express Bus Terminal at all costs on the weekend). I was in the area today and noticed one of those traffic greeters working at the Songmo Hospital just beneath the Bus Terminal. His job was to enable South-bound traffic to turn left across the North-bound traffic to enter the hospital and to enable traffic leaving the hospital to turn left out of the hospital across the North-bound traffic to heard South.

Although he was not one of those ornamental greeters whose sole job is to welcome you to the store or wish you farewell, I still kind of expected him to give a nice pleasant greeting. Instead I was assailed by a stream of invective against any Northbound vehicle that was blocking the hospital junction when the lights changed.

Hey Motherf***er, move your f***ing vehicle, you're blocking the f***ing junction you stupid f***wit.

It didn't half work though and he kept a good stream of sick people entering the hospital.

I still think that each junction should be a giant set of trapdoors and when the lights change the trapdoors open and any f***wit that is still on the junction is immediately sent to a gruesome death...

Catch Up: Regret of the Year

My biggest regret of this year has to be my failure to make the most of the quarterly Hi Seoul Festivals (website on the blink right now?).
I completely missed the Spring one (I forgot). The Summer one offered a rather entertaining programme, to which I took the wife and kids but which was pretty much rained off the day we went. The Autumn one I was away for and I'm not sure what the dates will be for the Winter one.
Anyway, here's a rundown of the Summer one to entice you to attend next year. The first event was the Inaugural Han River Birdman Contest (offering $100,000 to anyone managing to cross the Han River). I actually umm'd and ahh'd with some colleagues for a couple of weeks about whether to enter or not (we figured it might be relatively easy to win a prize in the first one) until we finally missed the deadline.
Hope this guy wasn't pinning his hopes on the $100k for sending his kids to college as he pretty much dropped like a stone from there...
The evening included a JCV ballet with characters such as this... and the other evening event was some kind of aerial ballet/acrobatic concert which was pretty much abandoned as it was too dangerous for the musicians to be playing electronic instruments while suspended 20 feet in the air in a thunder storm...the first few minutes looked great though...I'd advise you to bookmark the website (if it ever starts working again) and check out the wide range of events they have on each quarter.

July Catch Up: Dubai

Towards the end of July I went to Dubai for a week on business. I managed to grab a day during the week to actually see a few of the sites. Dubai is a bit of a strange place. During the daytime it looks like a giant building site (which I suppose is in truth what it is) yet at night it looks quite pretty. During the day it is very dusty and hot (although not as bad as I expected) and at night the dust is less noticeable but the heat is not.

Dubai: like an ugly girl, not bad-looking in the pitch black...
I got to the see the original 7 star hotel...
I got to see the partially constructed tallest building in the world (note the yellow dust)...
I managed a quick dash out to the desert...
and realised that although my point and shoot camera is quite good, sometimes it just can't handle what I want to do...eg. trying to take a photo of sand bloeing of the rifdge of the dune...
Watch out mate!!
Finally, I even managed to squeeze in a few hours on the slopes...
Although if you're any good at skiing, then Ski Dubai is really only good for the novelty value of saying you've been...

July Catch Up: Korea

A review of photos taken in July reveals that we don't appear to have done much at all. The highlight was taking the kids to a collection of bouncy castles in Ilsan. This was great for me cos I could indulge my inner child while pretending that I was just being a fun dad...

Grandad, I thought you were in England...
Trying out some camera trickery...

Holiday! Celebrate!

Madonna once sang

If we took a holiday,
some time to celebrate,
just one day out of life,
it would be so nice

and I'm sure we all echo that sentiment. Well unfortunately we're going to be doing a lot less celebrating in 2009.
Whereas this year we enjoyed 11 mid-week bank holidays, next year we'll only have 6 as five of them (March 1 Independence Movement Day, Buddha’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day and National Foundation Day) will be on either a Saturday or Sunday in 2009. Moreover, one day each of Lunar New Year and Chuseok will be over the weekend so you miss out there if your company is not in the habit of giving you an extra day instead. Finally, Chuseok coincides with National Foundation Day although since both are on a Saturday, we're not really missing out any further. Anyhow, don't be looking to book that long weekend to South East Asia cos you probably won't have any long weekends....

Catch up: June 08

June, for me, was sandwiched by a trip to the UK at either end as I flew the kids back to spend a month with the Grandparents and then went to collect them. I was lucky enough to be able to schedule a couple of meetings on the first trip to grab a couple of days break but the return trip I was out of the country for only 65 hours with 25% spent flying to England, 50% being in the UK and 25% flying back to Korea. And my 30 odd hours in the UK included 2 nights.

Anyway...some photos (click each photo for larger versions):
Somewhere over Russia and someone's in my seat!!!

Just enough time to eat a couple of meals and take in a sunset...

...then back to Korea for our monthly hike in the mountains.

Went to see Korea again and regretted it again...

and got back from England for the second time just in time to celebrate my birthday.

Vot a load of VANK...

A german company has produced a map where place names are displayed in the English translation of the original etymological meaning of the name. However, they're likely to get in trouble with VANK for they have translated the sea to the East of Korea as "Sea of the Sun's Origin" and they have left Dokdo off altogether. The places from Korea that do make it to the map are Capital (Seoul), Mount Cauldron (Busan) and Land of the High Serenity for Korea itself.


I expect VANK to use the Land of the High Serenity's superfast "between mesh" to do some damage to the atlas-maker's "woven fabric place"...

Catch up part one of ??

Long time no see. After much nagging from my mother, it's time to start updating this again. Scanning through my archives I noticed that I pretty much stopped blogging in May and so over the next few days or weeks I'll make a few posts so you can catch up with everything I've done in the past six months...

At the end of May I went to the Philippines on business. We were quite busy so I see that I only have pictures of sunsets...(click on the photo for a larger version)


Tomorrow, back to the UK.