Wednesday
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...The forums started on Monday morning and all went smoothly. The venue is huge. Our 'office' is located near the press room which is at least a 10 minute walk and 3 floors away from the rooms were the sessions take place. Consequently, I have walked miles and miles. In fact, on Tuesday, I woke up feeling like I had run a marathon. Monday went well. We made some films, got the press releases out and did general meeting-y things.

The place where the meeting is being held is built above what is reported to be the biggest underground mall in Asia. Once the day was over, we decided to hit the mall to buy a microphone for the camera because the one that I bought for it did not fit. arrgrh. Of course, in a mall that big, finding anything is a nightmare and we didn't manage to get one. We realised that the 'welcome dinner' had started and we hurried back. I was expecting the dinner to be some sort of buffet affair but no, it was a three course sit-down dinner for 500 people. Wow. I have never seen so many tables in my life. Amazingly, the entire thing took only just over an hour and the food was great. They tried to split us up stick us randomly on a table somewhere but we found an empty table right at the end of the hall and commandeered it.

Wot no hangover?
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The organisers had nicely placed about 10 bottles of traditional Korean booze, mainly rice wine, on our table, with little cards explaining what they were and where they come from etc. One of them guaranteed no hangover. Unfortunately, although it tasted pretty good, it smelled so bad that it was rather unpleasant to drink (the reason why you don't get a hangover is because drinking it isn't much fun)! There was some pretty cool entertainment in the way of loads of girls playing traditional harps while a DJ played together with a beat box boy and the breakdance world champion team performed.

All of a sudden, I realised the hall was empty and the only people left guzzling the free booze were of course, me and my colleagues. Surprise, surprise. None of us were really sure whether we should take the bottles home...so we did anyway. We sat and had some more drinks in the hotel and then Philip decided to finish one of the bottles of the stolen-booze. Unfortunately for him, as he realised the next morning, it wasn't the anti-hangover version.

Tuesday
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The actual ministerial meeting started today. Protesters lined the hotel. There seemed to be two protests going on and the protesters were intermingled and shouting about the president of S. Korea being a dictator and about stopping beef imports from the US. Koreans eat a lot of beef. The police lined up three people deep around them so they were pretty much hidden from view. After a hard days work I decided to venture over the road to the visit buddha in the Bonguensa temple I can see from my window. I thought it would be nice to get some fresh air too, but I soon changed my mind when I tried to breathe in the thick, wet air. The temple was really nice, and felt like it was a million miles away from the noise and mayhem on the street only a few meters away. I wandered around a bit and then headed into the city.

My dinner is moving!
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So, I randomly picked a place to go, which turned out to be Itaewon and was full of hookers and expats, KFCs and Pizza-sluts, and got us there on the subway, only taking the train in the wrong direction once. Hurrah! The subway system is HUGE. The trains are LOOOOONG. It's really CHEAP! But the last trains go around midnight, which is not very handy.

Random fact: the subway stations have a cabinet containing torches and smoke hoods incase of EARTHQUAKE!

We tried to find some Korean food and a young boy and his girlfriend stopped to help us when they saw us with a map and pointed us in the direction of some Japanese restaurants (after telling us he'd leave his girlfriend here and drive us to a good barbeque restaurant...er, no thanks). We ate at a tiny Japanese place and the food was amazing, except the raw abalone which is the most bizarre and disgusting thing I have ever tasted and should be banned, or at least force fed to evil people. Talking of bizarre, take a look at this video...



Yes, I ate it, and no it wasn't alive. It was wafer thin makerel shavings that were curling up in the heat.

Wednesday
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Pishy!
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At the "closing lunch" today, the Minister for Communications for Russia sat next to me and we had a random conversation about Cuba and not understanding the language of the "youth of today". Very bizarre. Blaise told me he'd seen him on TV a few times. I had a sign on the table that said "fish" so that the waiters would know not to serve me any meat. A plate full of shrimp was placed in front of me. Yummy, I thought, until a boy whisked it away from me, gave it to Blaise (after I'd half poked around at it and squeezed lemon on it) and then gave me two huge crab legs instead (squeal, GET THOSE LEGGIES AWAY FROM ME!), pointing to the sign and saying "Pishy!". He did the same thing with the next course, after I had eaten half the bowl of brocolli soup! The wine I consumed made the rest of the day hard bloody work and I was really glad when it was over and went to have a nap. Later that evening we realised that Koreans are not really night-owls when we tried to get some dinner at 21:00 and found it pretty hard to find anywhere open. Went to the sky bar for a few more drinks and found that someone had flown in my little guppie fish as a surprise.


Thursday
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For the first time ever, I slept through an alarm and didn't get out of bed until almost 2pm, screwing up my body clock good and proper. I had had a vague idea to go and visit the DMZ between S. Korea and N. Korea, which is 50km away, but realised that my concept of distance and my estimation of the time it takes to travel distances is way to warped to consider anything so foolish! I decided to make my way to Insadong. I spent about 10 hours out and about and I saw less than five other westerners, which surprised me because I thought there were lots of Americans here. I am not sure whether Koreans are friendly or not...they just seem indifferent to me. A tiny old man wanted to help me when he saw me looking at my map on the subway, asking where I was from, but the lady in the cafe I went to for dinner did not seem very pleased that was there at all.

Tea for one please, I'm so Rooooonery
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I wandered around Insadong and bought useless crap as I do (handmade paper...yes, like that's really useful) and then found myself a tiny traditional tea house, where the lady barked "TEA HOUSE TEA HOUSE" at me when I walked in, and where I sat for about 45 minutes and drank jasmine tea. It was lovely, and quiet and very, very relaxing. I ate funny tubes of rice with sesame seeds and a distinct bubble gum flavour.

I am obsessed by smells (and toilets, but not smelly toilets) and I'd been wondering what the ever-so-slighty floral smell with an underlying hint of disinfectant was every time I was near a Korean person and realised, when I went to the toilet in the tea house, that everyone must use exactly the same soap. Seoul does not have the same intensity of smells as Hong Kong. Restaurants generally smell spicy and there is the odd waft of stinky drain, but other than that, the smells are quite pleasant.