Goodbye, China-Hello, Korea

Monday, February 22, 2010

Goodbye, China, you contradictory giant of a country.

We love your raucous kaleidoscope of sounds and sights.

In your cities, elegant young women stroll the sidewalks in furs and fashionable tall boots while a pickup truck with 2 live hogs drives by.

Luxury cars park on sidewalks, horns honking to clear the path of pedestrians. Meanwhile men disgustingly clear their throats and spit on the sidewalks.

You're building high-speed trains that travel at 400 mph, but bicycles loaded six feet high travel your superhighways.

Your skyscrapers rise at an astounding rate, built by migrant workers who live on-site in crowded shacks that are freezing in winter and blazing hot in summer. They see their families, who live in villages hundreds of miles away, once a year.

Your people are kind, helpful, and welcoming. They are also pushy, ignoring rules, lines on the highway, and often common sense.

China, you are impossible to describe. You must be experienced. But that might take years, and by then you would have changed, for you are changing so fast.


Hello, Korea.

The lines to get into Korea are long, longer than those to get into China. Of course we cleared customs in China at 2:00 a.m. and it's 4:30 in the afternoon here in Seoul.

It's nearly an hour before we get a taxi from Inchon airport to our hotel.

We're fascinated by the cab's GPS. Besides displaying the buildings, landmarks and streets in great detail, this GPS allows you watch TV. While stuck in traffic, we watch the news and some of the Olympics on the 5x7 screen.

The ride to the foothills of Namsan, or south gate, where the Hilton Millennium Seoul is located, takes another hour and a half through rush hour and it's dark by the time we arrive.

This hotel is a pretty fancy place that gets fancier when we decide to upgrade our room to secure the next night-Tuesday-and Thursday. We'd been unable to reserve those online. For Wednesday we've reserved a night in a traditional Korean guesthouse.

With our status upgraded, we turn in our silver key card for a gold one and have access to the Executive Lounges. As it turns out, these lounges put out a small but adequate buffet each evening and we enjoy dinner and free cocktails there and a full breakfast each morning.

Since it's too late to go out we tour the hotel and the gambling casino attached.

There are six restaurants and two bars in the hotel, not including the Executive Lounges on the nineteenth and twenty-first floors.

Restaurants include Taipei Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, an English pub that serves prime beef and another that covers everything the others may have missed.

The hotel is beautifully decorated, with original paintings, a multi-level fountain, flowers, and cozy seating groups.

The casino, by contrast, is far from elegant. The smoke here makes it hard to breathe and the gamblers aren't the swanky high rollers we see in movies, but men and women who look as if they shouldn't be here because they can't afford to lose. More than a few seem tense, as if they desperately we'd to win.

We walk back down the hallway and take the elevator to our room, wishing the smell of cigarette wasn't clinging to our hair and clothes.