Tom and Jan Journey East 2012

Hello Friends,

Welcome to our travel blog 2012.

View from our back row seats. Everyone is tune in.

This year we have traded desert Baja beaches for tropical Asian  rain forests. As I write, I'm looking out past the deck of my brother Scott and Jamie’s apartment into the lush green of forest beyond the golf course.  A black bird with a blood red eye is looking at me from the railing, and past it I can see the Twin Towers above Kuala Lumpar (Malaysia).
    Our trip started last week in Seoul Korea.  It was a long 12 hour flight from Seattle, but with our own TV screen in back of the seat in front of us (3 movies watched in flight), pretty Asian flight attendants in blue uniforms, and hot towels at dinner,  Korean airlines made it pleasant, easy traveling. 
     After arriving at the Seoul airport, which was an hour out of town, we decided to be adventurous and take the subway train into the city. Unfortunately, it was a big mistake because it wasn't easy figuring out how to buy the tickets or how to transfer lines, which we had to do three times. Fortunately, most of the subway signs in Korean also had an English translation, but the trip was a comedy of errors. However, we met several Koreans who were very helpful, including one guy who literally walked us to our hotel when we couldn't find it. By the time we got settled for the night it was about 4 am Pacific Coast time, so we were pretty weary.

Seoul: mixing the old with the ultra new

   Seoul seems like a very clean, modern city with huge sky scrapers and a first world appearance.  Most of the people dress very metropolitan except for a few of the older men who are Buddhist Monks and wear gray pants, wraparound coats and a felt cap. Everyone else seems to wear mostly black  and Tom has noticed an inordinate amount of Buddy Holly type black glasses. Of course every person under the age of 30 is plugged into some electronic device.  It seemed strange to think that this space age city exists just across the border from North Korea, which must be the antithesis of it all.

Changing of the guard at the main palace

Tom checks out the wears at a street market

Traditional Korean Hunuk (house in a compound)

  We did a lot of walking around the old city looking at traditional houses, visited the main Palace for a colorful changing of the guards, and hopped on and off a city bus to check out some of the tourist attractions: (Cultural museums, huge mall shopping centers 10 times larger than the ones at home, street markets with 30,000 vendors etc.) 
Our last stop was the N. Seoul Tower atop one of the high mountains in the middle of the city.  From there you could see the extent of highrise buildings stretching out as far as you could see in all directions. There are 10 million people within the city and 20 million in the outlying areas (second most densely populated city in the world next to Tokyo, although you wouldn’t know it,  as the streets didn’t seem very crowded to me).  It was a pretty amazing sight to see the sea of buildings flowing out all around us. On the top of the hill  there was  an area  where tens of thousands of people have left padlocks locked to a large fence.  It is a tradition for lovers to put a lock, with a promise for everlasting love written on it, locked onto this menagerie .  It was a pretty amazing sight in itself, and I’m sure made some lock stores very wealthy.

Locks a foot thick on a fence.

We spent quite a bit of time hanging out in coffee shops and restaurants between visiting sights because it was cold outside (a blip in our trip planning). It was 28-32 degrees most of the time, but we brought enough clothes to be mostly comfortable.  There were a lot of quaint, traditional restaurants in the area where we stayed. The Korean food Is good, and is sometimes served from a low table on the floor where you sit crossed legged for the meal, Ouch!  And, of course, there are only chopsticks and long handled spoons to eat with (we are a little chopstick challenged, but we are working on our techniques).  It took us a while to figure out what things to order, as mostly, you looked at pictures and pointed at one to let the waiter know what you wanted.   There are a lot of flavorful soups, some with meat, some with seafood, some with soybeans and tofu. These arrive at the table, sill boiling in a ceramic clay bowl. We mostly ordered this soup or bibimbab: boiled rice with lots of thin sliced vegetables, greens, soybeans, sprouts and sometimes a raw egg thrown in.  We appreciated that it came in a sizzling hot ceramic bowl, because when you stirred the whole thing together, the egg would cook.

Bibimbab with condiments at the one restaurant offering a fork (poku)

Along with each entrees, there were a lot of little side condiments that came to the table in small bowls.  There was the ubiquitous Kimchee, fermented greens, fermented soybean paste,  asparagus fermented in a plum sauce, little crunchy dried fish in a sweet pepper sauce and once we had hard-boiled quail-sized eggs (brownish, gray) in a vinegar sauce, .  All very interesting and spicy.  I can’t say that the Kimchee is my favorite.  It’s made by salting Asian cabbage until it becomes limp, then draining and layering it with red pepper sauce and a hint of fish.  It’s all rolled up and put in a big urn to ferment.  It comes to the table cold, limp, spicy and fishy tasting.  Hummm.  One thing for sure, is that there doesn't seem to be an obesity problem in Korea.  We rarely saw anyone overweight.

Typical traditional restaurant

 

All in all, we were pretty impressed with Seoul and  the Korean people who seemed very friendly.  It would be fun to return sometime to see the rest of the country (I’m guessing it's very different from Seoul)  We returned to the airport by bus, which was much more convenient than the subway, and we saw a lot more too! Surprise. I left my long Goodwill down coat at the airport information desk with a nice, though bewildered, attendant who said she would find someone who could use it.  Then we were off to tropical Kuala Lumpar.

   This morning we woke up in the apartment about 6:00 to a call to prayers  coming in from a loudspeaker on a post across the golf course (Malaysia is a Muslim country), also to the sound of strange whistles and chirps from forest birds and a whoop, whoop from the Gibbon monkeys somewhere out there.  Amazing...
     We are traveling with an ipad, and will be checking our email if you would like to write. Our old tcope@pobox.com address will get to us.  If you would like to see our November posting of our trip on the Klickitat II with Bill and Katy in November, check our old blog: tomjanbaja.blogspot.com
Till next time!
Jan and Tom