Up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport for a relatively early flight (09.30). It was interesting to see Sydney wake up, the odd cross over of early workers and retiring hookers made for an eclectic picture. The airport hopper we were on seemed to take an age getting to the actual airport, this was possibly because half of the pick-ups were not at their hotels when the bus arrived and the Eastern European driver then decided to go back and check for them before actually heading off out to the airport. We took breakfast in Sydney airport so you can imagine how healthy that was.
Sydney also has an amazing choice of duty free, including a massive 4.5 litre bottle of Jack Daniels that comes with it's own cradle to sit in and two fantastic "jugs" of Jim Beam (one black and one regular) that would have looked cool in my house.
Unfortunately Asiana / Korean authorities, I'm not sure which, deem that even if you are transferring airplanes you still can not take more than 100ml of liquids onto the planes. We saw some people have to give up their perfumes on the way over. We left the delights of the duty free and boarded our flight, another 10hr flight that was pretty normal and boring, and later we touched down in S Korea.
It was cold in Seoul. Very cold. We caught the bus into the city as Incheon airport is about 50km outside the city. It is a vast sprawling city that has a massive 24 million people in it now that it has absorbed some of the outlying suburbs (10 million people live in the "old" city itself) and took us about an hour to get to where we needed to get off the bus. It then took another 10 minutes to get the driver to actually agree to stop the bus so we were at least another stop down the road. This would be the first of our first of numerous language barriers that we would face in the capital of South Korea.
We finally got off the bus and decided to walk back to the stop we were supposed to alight from to get our bearings. The lady at the airport had basically said "get off the bus when you hear this word and the hotel is 5 minutes from the stop", now which direction was not specified and she had lost interest in us by that point and moved on to someone she could communicate with. So there we are stood in the middle of the "business" district of Seoul at about 19.30 at night with no one understanding a word we were saying or being able to read anything we put under their noses. Now, my friends, here is a tip for you: If you decide to go to a South East Asian country or more specifically, city that does not speak your native tongue, try if you can to take vital pieces of information (Your hotel name. The address of your hotel. A note that says "I am a poor traveller who is not worth killing, robbing and dumping in the river" type of thing) actually written in both English and the local language as most Asians, especially in Korea it seems, can not read English at all. Nor should they need to really but in hindsight this would have helped us find the hotel a lot quicker.
I digress though. So, as I said there we are stood like two beacons of helplessness in the middle of the business district - this is local business though not international "I can speak English" business - if we wanted a big assed bag of dried fish or some puppy kebabs we would have been as happy as little Fido right up to the point the pot is put in front of him. We asked in a jewellers but they did not understand a word and then saw a beacon of western decadence, a Starbucks, now they must have someone that speaks English as everyone that works in Starbucks is a student. In we go and order two coffees (well one coffee and one tea as Paula had not learned from Japan and Thailand that tea is not the same out here but she will learn - eventually) and asked very slowly and calmly "do you know where this hotel is?" Not a glimmer of understanding but a bit of hand gesturing and our very helpful host running off to the Internet in the back and we had a little map with lines drawn on it that had the word hotel written in a Korean/English hybrid but that did not matter it was apparently only 3 minutes walk away and off we went.
Well it turned out to be the wrong hotel but the 'vertically challenged' chap that came out and his equally strange chappie companion seemed to know where the hotel was and would take us there, brilliant, sort of. Off we went following this chap who spoke very little English. He took us down this little alleyway that was not looking like it would lead anywhere but to a trip to the bottom of the river. He tried to calm us by pointing to a sign of our hotel and it did indeed look close but also unattainable. Well round the next corner we went and there it was. Hurrah! A big thank you to Starbucks boy, Crazy Dwarf man and our guide as we would never have reached the hotel without them.
The next morning we rose, went to breakfast and hit the streets of Seoul all by 08.15 (OK so I got the time wrong and was an hour out but we only had one day in the place). We became very touristy visiting the royal palace, the traditional village and basically walked the length and breadth of Seoul looking at everything and anything that looked interesting, punctuated by lots of visits to coffee shops as it was still very cold. Pictures will hopefully follow in the next few days as I haven't sorted them out at the moment.
We finally got back to the hotel after a pretty long day and watched the news of a Turkish Airlines jet crashing at Schipol(sp!) airport, not the sort of thing I wanted to see just prior to a 12hr flight. Paula then fell asleep and I watched Enter The Dragon which was good and Catwoman which was not.
A nice leisurely train ride to Incheon airport taking in the sights and we are off to the plane. Airports are quite boring so there was nothing much to add here except that there was a heavily tattooed man in the lounge drinking and being far too loud for my liking - my fears were proved right later on. We sat on the plane and looked around the cabin as we were sitting on a row of three which was full and half of the cabin was empty. A quick word in the Stewies shell like and we were moved into an empty row. Take off completed and a quick whisky and coke (or three) later and I was happily dozing listening to Cream (the Eric Clapton fronted 60’s band not the dance pap). A couple more and I really needed a pee so off I go and when I get back said tattooed Italian is lying on the cabin floor with stewards and passengers lying on him. It turns out that this chappie had “befriended” an English bloke and they had been drinking steadily/heavily from Australia and had had a bit of a disagreement that resulted in a couple of punches being thrown and the Englishman departing to the back of the cabin whilst the Italian (who was by far the more aggressive) needing to be restrained in a seat. This caused mucho chaos in the cabin as people had to be moved so that the prick could be restricted in a clear area. The captain came up to try and reason with the belligerent man and when he would not cooperate basically thumped him to calm him down. Once he had been cuffed and tied, a wishy washy, do-gooder, social worker, stick my nose in where it is not wanted came up from the back of the plane asking why the man was being restrained and that she (in her "expert" opinion) didn’t think he needed to be tied up. It was explained to her by the captain and some passengers that her opinion was not needed and she could promptly fuck off. The next two hours, this had taken about 1.5 – 2hrs to get this far by the way, were a constant barrage of obscenities aimed equally at 1) the English chap whose name was Byron apparently, 2) the Korean crew and 3) other passengers that just happened to be on the plane. Therefore for a full 12hr flight I managed to get NO sleep at all with maybe 20 mins dozing at the start. Once we landed at Heathrow we had to then wait for the police to escort our annoying little friend off of the plane.
So landed, back in blighty and off to the hotel to meet a couple of Paula’s friends and then a good nights sleep.
Holiday over and all back to normal again.
