Seoul, South Korea (2/8--2/11)

It's my first trip to South Korea. I wished I had more spare time. However, meetings took almost all the time. I don't have time to walk around other than spending one and half hour in the COEX mall.

Seoul is a big modern city. Skyscrapers are everywhere. Dozens (?) of bridges link both sides of Hangang River tightly. Blow is a picture taken in my hotel elevator. It seems there is another world under the surface with subways, shops and restaurants. We went down at the north side of the COEX mall and walked past shops after shops and finally came out at Hyundai Shopping Mall blocks away. Hyundai shopping mall has ten stories. It's sort of ten sears stacked up. I bought some Korea Ginseng there.

Public transportation is really impressive. The limo service from Incheon airport to our Riviera Hotel, a more than one hour drive, only cost $8. Using City Air Limo service, one can check in more than 50 km away from the airpot in city center. Taxies are easy to find and relatively affordable. Unfortunately, not many taxi drivers speak English. They tend to talk to me using Korean language since I look like a Korean.

Food is EXPENSIVE even using USA standards. A bowl of noodle could easily cost 7 to 8 dollars in a restaurent. Cloth, at least luxury cloth, is very expensive. A Levi's engineering Jean costs 180,000 won, which is about $185.

Hotel Riviera is nice. My room has a nice LCD TV. There are 3 chinese channels. One for news, one for Chinese MTV and another is HK TV series. The toilet is really fancy. Maybe better toilet could improve hygiene and therefore greatly lengthen people's life expantancy.

I just don't have time to take pictures. Maybe next time I could do more things there.

City view in the morning outside my hotel room