Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 44 - Wednesday June 22nd 2016 - Ovation of the Seas - Seoul, Korea

So here we go again another new country to visit but first to get through immigration.

It’s fair to say that immigration on a cruise ship is never easy unless they do it days in advance and bring the countries immigration officers on board the ship days before you arrive there. This was not the case for our visit to Korea so all the passengers on board have to go through a face to face meeting with an immigration officer before they can get off the ship.

We had booked transportation to take us into Korea with Royal Caribbean so this was meant to help prioritise our processing through immigration, well I’m here to tell you I’m not sure it did.

We were up earlier than we needed to be as our meeting time at the music hall for the trip was actually at 10:30 yet we were down there by 09:45. Again experience has taught us that if you are on a trip you need to try and

get allocated one of the early bus numbers when there will be multiple buses heading out otherwise you are at the back of the queue for getting off. This worked for us as we were allocated badge / group 52, the first bus of the trip we had booked and there were about six other bus loads behind us.

Eventually we were called and we headed up to the queue for an immigration officer. The queue was manic, it snaked in and out of the theatre, along corridors and in and out of doors and staircases. To be fair it did keep moving and it took us about half an hour once we joined the queue to finally get a face to face with immigration. They only stamp a photocopy of your passport to go ashore and take your original passport away from you so we won’t know until tomorrow whether we get a Korea stamp in our actual passports or not.

The queue around the boat was also made a little bit more difficult for the crew as they were all on drills, some practice, some real. A fire had broken out in one of the ships rubbish incinerators (the ships PA system tells you all). It was obviously a manageable fire as there was no panic and eventually the captain spoke to all the passengers to reassure them that everything was under control and there was no need to worry.

Eventually off the boat and feeling a bit bruised by the immigration queue we headed to the coach and waited for our fellow tour goers to make it through the chicane of people. We didn’t actually set off for Seoul much before 1130 and the whole coach was anxious that we were still going to be given the allotted time to explore the city we had all travelled a long way to see. We needn’t have worried they actually gave us five hours in the city (an hour longer than advertised) so we had no complaints at all.

Our tour guide taking us into Seoul was a really charming girl called Esther. She was fascinating and gave us a real insight into the Korean people and what goes on here. Seoul is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, not far behind Singapore and Tokyo. From what we saw and from what Esther said they also have an unhealthy obsession with Skin. So they are obsessed with applying sun block, they even do it inside their houses! When you walk around the Myeong-dong area of the town (this is where we got dropped off and its reportedly one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world) it is full of skincare and cosmetics shops. They are everywhere! Esther also told us that the Korean women are obsessed with aging and do everything that they can do to fight this natural process. Plastic surgery is big here. There are whole roads full of plastic surgeons and the biggest surgery that they perform is on the eyes. The Korean women do not want the narrow slit eyes of the oriental woman, they have the skin cut to make them wider (Esther had this done) and they also bleach their skin to appear whiter than they are despite all that sunblock! I have to say though that some of this craziness does work, I mean when you look at the women they really don’t look their age at all. Esther was in her mid-thirties and could easily pass for a young twenty. She told us stories if using Botox cream (apparently according to her its only available in Korea) and more extreme measures that the woman go though, like I said earlier, it’s a real obsession here.

The other fascinating fact that she shared with us is the art of romance. So in Korea marriages happen one of two ways, either arranged by your family or through matchmaking services with the later now being the most common.

The way it works is all based on your family’s financial status. So if you come from a normal family, with a normal education and a normal income you will be banded, say a grade B match as you are not poor, but if you want to upgrade from your match poor and say date a doctor or a lawyer who would sit in group A you have to pay about US$300 per introduction. Esther told us the story of her sister who had done exactly that and met her husband through a matchmaking service but had paid nearly thirty times to meet a band A man (so this cost her a lot of money!) She married him but Esther laughed saying that he is rich but fat and short…. Fatness is also apparently a no go area in Korea, Esther told us that they do have fat people but they will not venture out in public as they are too ashamed…. really these were her words!

Her romantic story was sweeter though than that of her sisters, she said she married for love but that she had to fight with her parents to do so and that this in fact is very unusual.

So the drive into Seoul was going to take about an hour and a half from the port and on first impressions it was nothing remarkable and everything you would think it would be. The motorway in was lined with more huge residential tower blocks just like we saw in Xiamen and Hong Kong. The difference here though was that they all had huge numbering and lettering on the side of the tower walls identifying the block. It made them appear prison like or something out of the George Orwell novel 1984, a real big brother type feeling.

The traffic is notoriously bad getting into Seoul and today was no exception. As you get into the centre of the city you start to see some of the older more historic buildings but to be honest these are few and far. The Japanese occupied Korea for a period of around 35 years and they built the infrastructure, the train lines and such and it is these Japanese buildings that remain in small numbers. Esther again explained that there is a real love hate relationship with the Japanese here in Korea because of the warring history but they also accept that they bought some good things to the country, her parents don’t like the Japanese still but her generation and below are all fine with it, they never lived those wars.

We were dropped off in Myeong-dong, right outside the Ibis hotel and we left the majority of the group and the main commercial shopping centre and headed off to one of the local markets. It was very much like what we had already seen in Hong Kong but with more space and more organised. They sold pretty much the same market type stuff but you didn’t see the mass of fakes on display like you do in other Asian markets. We walked up and down, through and round the stalls, glancing at the wares on display but with the clock ticking it was time to make a move so we headed back to the main shopping area in hunt of the main underground station.

After navigating a few underground subway walkways and some narrow streets we were no closer to the station when the heavens absolutely opened, I mean real torrential rain hammering it down. Trev had not bought his umbrella with him so we rushed into the nearest coffee house for shelter, trust us to pick the only one without Wi-Fi!

After a quick bite to eat and a drink the rain was not letting up but we had to make a move. Trev bought the first umbrella that we saw for sale and with the underground station located we headed off to our second planned stop of the day and another market.

Thankfully the Korean underground system is in dual language so it’s actually quite easy to navigate yourself around the city. We were not heading off that far (we did not have the time on this short day) so with one change of line and about five stops along we left the underground behind as we had arrived at the Kwang Jang Han Bok market.

This is a huge undercover market that is subdivided into different sections of goods. So you had line after line of food stalls serving all unfamiliar Korean dishes. They all looked really yummy as well and the whole place just seems more hygienic, cleaner and fresher than other street food vending places we had been to before. Everything look spicy and we really wanted to try some but after being ill and confined to the cabin earlier we just avoided it but made a mental note to find a Korean restaurant when we get back to the UK as the food looks right up our street. There was a lot of pigs heads and pigs trotters on offer (not trying that at all, but Trev was bought up on this kind of thing so he was actually quite keen), there was crabs marinating in chilli, vegetable spring rolls wrapped in some kind of black vegetation, allsorts.

Other areas of the market were split up into fabrics, tailoring, hardware like pots and pans etc. It really did cover a vast area but the food was the most fascinating.

Tailors were showcasing traditional Korean costume. It’s very oriental looking, all made of silk with big skirts for the ladies with huge bows. The male version is very like a kimono dressing gown, again in the finest silk complete with headwear that is not a million miles away from a turban.

We left the market behind having absorbed what we could and headed back towards Myeong-dong again. We had to make the really difficult decision the other day when we were researching Seoul of what we could do and couldn’t. There are some palaces here to see in the city that really look worth seeing but hey would have taken hours to get around properly so we had to just skip that. The reviews online said that they were similar but smaller to what we would see in China so with that in mind we settled on just absorbing the sights and smells and atmosphere of the city itself.

Myeong-dong is split up into rows, all called the same but you have Myeong-dong 1, Myeong-dong 2, Myeong-dong 3 and so on and so on. Apart from the many many cosmetic shops as mentioned before you had all your normal brands, everything western you could think of was here along with some Korean brands never heard of before. Walking around in the rain even with an umbrella is never easy or enjoyable. We walked to the main cathedral, a red brick construction that looked more like a village church you would find in the UK but on a bigger scale, shopping was really the last thing that we wanted or needed to do (back to that weight allowance again). With not enough time to head off anywhere else we ended up sitting in a coffee shop for the last half an hour waiting for the meet up time for the coach back to the ship.

The drive back was even longer than on the way in, the traffic has really heavy and it took us just over two hours to get back to the ship. Esther filled us with more Korean tales of the royal family and the 300 concubines of the former king here. Turns out the queen turned into a lesbian as the king paid her no attention, now that’s a bit of social history. Esther also inflicted Kpop on us (kpop stands for Korean pop) and its bug business here (think Gangnam style the huge worldwide hit by Psy).

Gangnam is actually an area of Seoul on the far side of the river and its apparently where all the celebrities live, the doctors, the surgeons and lawyers, its apparently very very very expensive to live there indeed.

It was already 19:30 by the time we were back on board the ship and after dropping our bags off at the cabin we headed to Vintages for a glass of wine. Dinner tonight was back in Jamie’s Italian after having such a great night in there the other night. We were really lucky to get Dan Dan again as our waitress, she is just so full of energy and sparkle, she just has that thing and is the best member of staff we have encountered on-board without question. So after eating another big meal and Jonathans second tiramisu of the day we retreated back to vintages for more wine before calling it a night. I’ll be honest her and say that I was a little bit tipsy, Trev was fine and still stopped off for his night cap at the Bionic Bar, long island ice tea this time tough just for a change.

It had been both a great day and night today but time is really ticking away now, one more sea day before the go go go of our tour of China.