Day 203

Day 203 - 26.05.10

It's nice to see these yellow spots in the grass. Soon they'll be gone though.

\o/ for making travel plans.

Finland did not make it to the ESC finals. People who did not vote for them suck. Yep. Now that's the update about that... I have no idea who they were up against but as I said, a girl playing the accordion gets a thousand extra points. I have no biases. And now for the spazzing! The book finally got to my house! I already have the dates where I'll be... first two days in Seoul, three days in Jeju, two days in Busan and then a week back in Seoul.

Now, unless you've been living under a rock, you will know that not everything is super duper calm between the two Koreas. People ask me if it worries me and honestly it doesn't. Maybe it's because I'm careless, maybe it's something else but unless it fully escalates into a terribly violent conflict, I doubt there is much to worry about. Sure, I'll be a few hundred kilometers from one of the craziest regimes in the world but just how much of that is intimidation strategy and how much is real? Back to the spazzing. I already booked a lovely guesthouse room in what appears to be a traditional environment for my week of bumming around Seoul. Like no beds but sleeping "Korean style" and everything is wooden and all. Hopefully it's not too far from everything... we'll see. I'm so terrible with reading metro maps that I couldn't really tell. I think the metro system is bigger than in Paris and I still get lost in Paris, thank goodness Helsinki only has one line. In Jeju, there are many places where to rent a bike and I'm going to be do that, if it's not rainig too much. The problem is that my plan to go there by boat seem a tad more annoying than a plane... they have a huge number of low-cost airlines with webpages with everything in Korean and GoogleTranslate isn't helping because almost everything text is written in images rather than plain text. But hey, I now know how to properly spell the names of the Korean airports in Hangul. This morning I also heard about a local speciality which is something along the lines of "milk-crab porridge", basically you take a small live crab, crush it in a bowl, cook it or something with milk and voila. I think I'll skip that one. Busan is going to be awesome too. I can already feel it. I've only allocated two days for the city, hopefully that's going to be enough. They have beaches there and they have the biggest public baths in the world (apparently). Oh yeah, so going there. I'll be going back to Seoul by bus, it's only like 4 hours. Wheee! So excited! I do have to admit that it's weird going somewhere for two weeks and not know that I have this and this company/factory/university to visit. I almost feel the need to contact someone from the local unis and visit their mechanical engineering department or organise a seminar to present a few ptts about my work. It's sad, very sad. PS: The 365days project has been updated in the background (back-dated entries). Up to Day 202 now!