Tomorrow's World in Korea

The end of our time in Korea is getting close and we haven't really mentioned much of the crazy technological approaches Koreans have to solving problems. South Korea is the home of LG and Samsung, and therefore you can expect to see a lot of clever little gadgets that are nowhere to be seen in the western world.

We will start with the yogi-yo button. This is prevalent in about 75% of restaurants and is a button that you push to get the attention of your waiter, who then comes scurrying over to see what you need. This saves the hassle of shouting or trying to catch their eye as they whiz past.

This is a more advanced version, with 4 different buttons, representing 4 different requests. Note that "soju" and "beer" each have their own buttons.

Mini-toilet – Katie saw this and it’s brilliant. Not exactly high tech but everyone loves a portable piss pot.

For cars, planes, ships, tents and wheelchairs?

Carousel Car Parks – I’ve mentioned this one before but it has to be brought up again. When space is tight, building a car park that acts like a fairground ride is just genius.

PS3, Wii and Xbox Rooms - Pay about 80p an hour to play a huge selection of games on any console. These are amazing and it's a shame that I have only just discovered them! The rooms are kitted out with dozens of huge plasma screens and comfy sofas, making them a great place to chill out with friends.

They have snacks and drinks as well. No beer unfortunately.
Probably a blessing though or I would skip travelling and live in one of these for 5 months.

Hand towels in pill form – Just add water to these tablets. Again they exist in the UK but when do restaurants give them to you instead of a normal wet towel? In Korea, it happens often.

Phone Charger

Korea is more than a little obsessed with mobile phones so it doesn't come as a big surprise when you are climbing a mountain and come across a phone charger...powered by cycling...

Or power it by milking a virtual cow.

Disposable umbrella covers – Koreans use umbrellas more than any other nation on Earth, so it is no surprise that most stores will have one of these at the entrance.

Store your umbrella in a disposable plastic bag so you don’t get everything wet as you walk around the shop. Don’t worry environmentalists, when you exit there is a box to put your carrier so it can be recycled / re-used. My only issue with them is that they happen to look like horse condoms...

As well as ingenious gadgetry, there is also an abundance of useless tech. For every Dyson vacuum, there are dozens of pairs of umbrella shoes.

Korea’s obsession with umbrellas takes new heights!

Here are a few of my fave useless / pointless inventions:

TVs Everywhere - We start with an expensive way to advertise. Adding a little TV on the majority of payphones so that they can display an advert – so pointless. Especially when you consider that almost every Korean now owns a mobile phone. Who uses payphones anymore?!

Some sections of the subway even have TVs full of advertisements that you can watch as you speed past.

Kinda cool but very pointless.

Supermarket TV

Brightly lit shop – If the mini TVs don't work, you can always have the brightest shop in the world. I took this photo from a moving bus (hence the bad quality) - I was snapped out of my commuter-stare-into-space by this ridiculousness.

Luckily electricity is cheap in Korea or he’d be out of business. I wonder if he has a sideline hobby of collecting moths…

Dancing Robotic Statues
To advertise your shop, what works better than a dancing robotic bear!? This is the craziness that is South Korea and it's strange stance on advertising.

Oh my...please excuse the face! This was
taken at the end of a long night!

I even found the shop that sells the dancing bears.

Ironically it didn't use a dancing bear to advertise.

My School's Printer
I put this in because it makes me laugh every time I use it.

I have never seen a colour printer that is connected to jars of ink before - maybe I have lived a sheltered life...

Arcade Games - Don't get me wrong, I love arcades with a passion. What I think is a little strange is that outside EVERY convenience store, there is some kind of arcade game. Normally just a "swallow your money while you try to win a cheaply made stuffed toy" game and I hate those. Give me a Tekken or tennis game any day.

Outside a Shop

Outside a Restaurant

Outside a Light fitting shop??

Tekken!!

I took all 4 photos on my walk from school to the subway station. In other words - there is a shit-tonne of old arcade machines.

Musical Toilets - We have already shown you the digi-bog and its features, but here is something I found on the back of a cubicle door. This is one for the ladies. It's is an unnecessarily bulky sanitary bag dispenser with a built-in boom-box. Ok, not quite a boom-box, but it played music (rather than the usual flushing water sounds) to disguise your tinkling and the whole thing took up way too much space in the already cramped cubicle. Having said that, I prefer it to the mirror that is usually there. It amazes me that Korean women have the balance and poise to squat, wee, smoke and put on make-up at the same time. I'd be more impressed if all this didn't mean I always have to wait ages to have my turn!

Tablet computers – Now I know that iPads and Galaxy tabs exist in the western world but only in Korea do you find entire carriages of trains using them. You often get bumped into by people who are walking while watching TV on their screens. They get TV straight to their phones as well to fulfil all their Korean soap opera needs.

Everyday occurrence

What I found interesting is that on the subway in Tokyo, a city that I imagined to be far more technological than Busan, almost everyone was reading real life books, with pages and bookmarks! There were hardly any smartphones or iPads in sight.

Styler – For 300 pounds you can buy a high tech wardrobe.

It doesn’t have an entrance to Narnia at the back but it does have some useful features.

In order: Reduces Creases (by shaking), Keeps clothes fresh (good ventilation??), Sterilisation (Antibacterial sprays??) and dries clothes (hot air??).

Expect this bad boy to be hitting your shelves next Christmas.

I also doubles as a mirror… ooooooh shiiiiiny!


Happy 2012 and hopefully we'll see some of these technologies when we return  to the UK in July!

Freezing Up Jangsan

You might recall that in the spring, Katie and I hiked up Jangsan Mountain and got the most spectacular views of Busan. Well it was so spectacular that I decided I would do it again. Last time it was so humid that we were sweating buckets like the guy from Airplane, so this time I decided to hike it at night and it was the opposite. We all froze like Jack Nicholson in the Shining.

There was no way I was going to go with Dave. I stayed home in my nice warm bed, with wine and a film. I had a great time!There were eight of us who climbed that night, and we did our best to stay warm.

I even brought a thermos flask full of hot chocolate, and then decided that spilling it on my legs would make me even warmer than drinking it would.

The mine field seemed even more ominous at night time.We wanted to hit the peak about 45 mins before sunrise but actually made it to the top 2 hours early. This meant a long wait in the freezing weather and we all got a bit of a chill on.We did get a nice view of Busan at night though – it was just a shame that Gwangan Bridge had turned off its lights at this point.

We waited around in the cold and even walked down the mountain a bit, so we could walk up again in an effort to stay warm. Finally dawn came and we were treated to some breathtaking views.

As the Sun was emerging, we were treated to a strange sight for about two minutes where the sun was being reflected off a cloud and then off the water, resulting in a pink rectangular shape in the sea.

As the real sun emerged, we all started to warm up a bit and the reason we had done this became clear. Some Koreans arrived at this point and one man was shouting at the top of his lungs “Go Home” or a Korean phrase that sounded exactly like that. Either way he managed to slightly damage a beautiful sight with his incessant shouting.

It was a great night hike and a real success. I would recommend this to anyone thinking about it and suggest you leave around 3:30am because the hike took about 2 hours and we were waiting around for far too long. Check out this short video that shows the view in HD.

Finally I got this panoramic of Busan as the Sun was rising in the sky - my fave photo of the lot!

Our Future Plans and a Visit to the UN Memorial

Katie and I have decided to leave Korea at the end of our contracts in February. This may be a welcomed relief to our families (and students) but the time of worry is far from over as we will be travelling for four and a half months (137 days, to be exact) before we return. We have planned our trip roughly and we would like to share so you can come and meet us during our travels. I only really expect Dan to come visit as that is the sort of guy he is but please don’t hesitate to contact us if you fancy meeting up at any of our destinations.

The dates are saved on the map under the description if you follow the link and view the larger version. You can also see a simple table of information here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gY-OPJfcqQbIViODMcq3_TllEOGQBwjNwiVsMFsL3K4/edit
And there is a facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/272633589446339/.

View Proposed Travels in a larger map

Anyway before we go travelling we have about a million things to talk about so I would like to share what I got up to one day not so long ago.

I went to the only UN memorial cemetery in the world and I would like to say that it was an honour to see a memorial to all the brave servicemen of the 11 nations. The entrance to the memorial forces you to walk through a park with various pieces of “art” that these nations donated to the cemetery. I wonder if some nations just had some spare bricks and thought they could donate them in the form of a tower.

One country decided to donate the above statue, which obviously pays homage to the naked handstand regiment that lost so many lives during the torrid Korean War.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the cemetery was the pristine nature of the memorial. There isn’t much flat land in Busan that isn’t covered in horrible grey looking skyscrapers so I was shocked to find a huge space that was absolutely stunning inside. The main pathways were lined with trees and some had streams running alongside them as well, and both were beautiful to look at.

There are hundreds of graves in this beautiful park, that act as a sort of reality checker, serving as a reminder of the horrors that war creates in so many beautiful people’s lives and lands.

Full Screen the Panoramic

There were three other main memorials in the cemetery, one was a wall of the fallen and another was a building with a pretty design, while the last acted as a reminder of all the unknown soldiers who had died in the Korean War.

The memorial continued to surprise with a stunning lake surrounded by trees in an area that looked under construction.

I whole heartedly recommend the UN cemetery to everyone visiting Busan or living there as it is a spectacular sight, and acts as a constant reminder of how many people died to bring freedom to Korea and get people like me easy jobs, where I can save enough money to see the rest of the free world.

How to get there:

Get off at Kyungsung University Station (Subway Line 2). Have a look at this map to see how to walk there. It's fairly straight forward to get there and it's signposted in English (look at road signs). Or just get a cab, it's a 10-15 minute walk otherwise.

China-Korea-Tokyo Sobcoe Table

We have been busy updating the blog and coming up with a new feature for everyone to look at. We have attempted to compare China, Korea and Tokyo as holiday destinations for any prospective travellers out there. We have scored the places in a variety of categories from People to Food. The best way I could find of displaying our results is in the form of a google document. Red numbers get subtracted as they are negative attributes! Blue numbers get added as they are positive attributes.

So please have a look at the embedded spreadsheet to find out the winner.

EDIT: Updated Sobcoe Table to include all of Japan. Click here.


*SPOILER ALERT* Tokyo comes out on top. *SPOILER OVER*

Please tell us what you think of the comparison in the comments.

Tokyto-an-fro

So what else did we do in Tokyo besides celebrating false birthdays? Me, Katie and our tour guide Toshi went to Akihabara – the electronic district. We saw a huge queue to an arcade and decided to take a peak…

We then had a look in a temple...

Followed by a little trip to Takeshita street full of funky shops and the nearby bridge full of even funkier shoppers.

Cosplay

Toshi and I saw a Japanese garden while Katie looked at some dresses.

We then went and saw lots of fat men in nappies try to push each other out of a circle of sand – commonly known as Sumo.
Watch in HD!

There are a lot more videos on my youtube account.

If a night of watching fat men grapple with each other wasn’t homoerotic enough, we then stumbled across the most extravagant Hello Kitty store ever. It was fabulous!

We finished the night by going round a Ferris wheel and saw the city at night, (I didn't really see it because I was too distracted by the impending sense of doom that I always feel when I'm more than 2 meters off the ground. It was horrible) which was spectacular… or generic, as all major cities look the same at night. In fact I feel so strongly about this that I vow to never go up a tower or round a Ferris wheel again to see a major city at night. A side note but look at this photo taken by NASA of India at night during Diwali.

We’re gonna finish with a quick sprint of our last two days. We went to another temple, which was really beautiful.
Actually, in Japan they are called shrines, since they are more spiritual than religious, and I personally found them much more calming and contemplative than the Buddhist temples we've seen so far in Korea and China. There were lots of interesting things going on, including a big thing with smoke coming out, that people were patting all over their bodies to get rid of evil spirits.

Katie Got Her Fortune Told

Then we went to a cool market to look for goodies!!

Went to a park with a lake and saw an incredibly strange mime.

After, we had a look around the business area called Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, and it was full of tall buildings.

And we finished in Shibuya to do some people watching…

I would like to finish by saying that you should not fly with a cold. I did and I lost hearing in my right ear for over 10 days. However during the flight, we did snap a few photos of clouds as it was a lovely clear day – helped me forget about my troublesome ear!
And the several free beers that I had helped me ignore Dave's moaning about his troublesome ear. So all in all a lovely time was had by all :)