Sunday 26 July 2009

Does Korea have a soul or just Seoul?

Ah, my third visit to the beautiful land of kimchi has begun.
We arrived on the boat from Dalian and disembarked into a different world, where we truly felt like foreigners. With no language skills and little chance to develop much cultural understanding, we relied on the kindness of Koreans to help us reach our destination. The general good manners in Korea are a welcome change after so long in the etiquette wilderness of China. But after feeling fluent in the language of your present country, it was challenging to be totally incompetent in the language of this one. Even the simplest tasks, which we would take for granted in China, became a complicated issue in Korea. Nevertheless, we successfully and smoothly navigated our way from Incheon Port to a bus station containing buses that would take us to our final destination: Jinju City. Four hours and some beautiful Dunkin' Donuts later, we'd arrived in Jinju. A tricky taxi ride took us onto campus and we landed up outside our dorm room. The campus of Gyeongsang National University reminds me a bit of Exeter Uni; clean, green and pleasant. But GNU has a exciting special feature, WiFi everywhere! I was able to use Skype to call China from the middle of the grounds. Korea is rightly known as one of the most wired countries on the planet.

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