On to South Korea

Friday I stayed overnight in London Heathrow. Saturday morning I flew to Seoul.

You wouldn't know it to look at a flat map, but London and Seoul are only a 10 hour flight apart. That's about the same length of flight as Melbourne to Singapore, or Melbourne to Hong Kong. It is much shorter than the 14 hour flight from Melbourne to LA, or Melbourne to Dubai. Anyway, my plan was to fly 10 hours over the top of the world from London to Seoul, arriving around 7:30am to catch a train across South Korea.

In London, we got into the jet, and sat for a while. And then sat some more. After two hours of sitting on the tarmac, we were told that the plane had a small problem and we were going back to the airport.

Six hours later, having eaten a nice meal and walked 10,000 steps around the London Heathrow airport, I boarded the new plane once again, and flew overnight to Seoul.

I had missed my train.

I inquired at the service desk about the next train to Pohang, and found there were no seats -- standing room only for the first hour, although I could get a seat for the final ninety minutes. The alternative was to wait another five hours for the train arriving at 11:30pm. I opted to stand.

Good choice! I boarded the train early enough that I was able to secure for myself a fold out seat between carriages. So for my first hour, I was comfortably seated after all. As was my second and third.

And when I arrived at Pohang, I recognised a colleague at the train station, there to pick up someone else who apparently was on the same train with me from Seoul. So rather than flag a taxi and figure out how to give them directions to the university, I got a ride with them. A little spot of convenience after an inconvenient six hour delay.

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There was one other inconvenient thing from the trip to Pohang. The light in my hotel room had a motion sensor, which you wouldn't think would be inconvenient. It would come on conveniently when I walked in the door, or when I woke up in the darkness to use the toilet. But inconveniently, it also came on every time the mini-fridge turned on. Or when someone walked through the hallway upstairs. I was so tired after the flight and train ride that I didn't notice the light until about 3:00 in the morning. But then the bright light turning on with the refrigerator woke me up over and over and over. I tried to wear a mask so I could ignore it, but the mask didn't fit well. I unplugged the fridge, and that helped, but by then I was fully awake. Terrible motion sensing light!

The next night, I climbed up on my hotel chair and took the cover off the light and untwisted the light bulb. Ah. No unexpected bright lights tonight!

But then I couldn't figure out how to get the cover back on the light. So I left it off, on the desk in my room, hoping that the cleaning staff wouldn't fix the bulb.

That evening, I returned to the room to find the cover on the light attached again. But the bulb remained non-functioning. Clearly other guests have had the same problem, and made the same fix. And the wonderful housekeepers had fixed the problem for me perfectly.

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Anyway, my four days in Pohang were mostly spent working and at the conference, and giving a talk that was not recorded. I also had a couple of very nice traditional Korean meals, and one lovely excursion into the nearby area on Wednesday afternoon. Below are a few pictures.

Traditional Korean meal: We took off our shoes, sat on the floor next to long tables, while servers brought more and more and more and more food. Until we all rolled away. 

Me in a museum, centered just under an ancient crown.

 At a Buddhist temple with friendly colleagues.

 J ringing the bell for peace.

 Another Buddhist temple.

 And another traditional meal.

This time I took a picture of the entire spread. And all of us on the floor for a long time. You get to build up your floor-sitting muscles. Except you don't really have floor-sitting muscles. Uncurling after the meal is just going to hurt.

So you see that visiting this part of South Korea was really nice. It was a wonderful conference, with wonderful colleagues, and wonderful meals.

But looking through the photos, I recalled one other small inconvenience of the trip. One of the last mornings of the conference, I woke up a little bleary, still somewhat jet-lagged, and crawled into the shower. With my eyes mostly closed, I rubbed soap all over my body. Then I put the soap down and rinsed. A moment later, the soap slipped off its place and landed upside down on the shower floor, and this is what I saw stuck to the soap:

That insect-thing was about the size of the last knuckle of my thumb. And I had just rubbed it all over my body.

I left the creature and the soap there on the floor of the shower.

Amusingly, at the end of the day the soap was still there for me, but a careful housekeeping service had scraped the creature off of the soap so I could use it again.

I didn't. I left it there when I headed to the airport on Friday morning.