I think it's probably a sign I've been in Asia too long when I know the difference between good and bad chop sticks. The past five days in Seoul flew by.
Saturday night was a lot of fun. Had a few drinks with the locals at the hostel and we were joined by a few newbies. We all went out to a night club, (surprisingly only the second one I'd been to in Korea), and randomly throughout the night I ran into four different people I had met in Busan. It was a lot of fun until near the end of the night, one of my mates experienced a little racism. Someone approached him and tried to choke him. He's naturally a pretty calm person and I saw him quite mad that night. Luckily he was calm enough not to retaliate. The police were called and they were escorted to the cop shop. I don't know if the Korean guy will get any sort of punishment for his actions. The Korean police seem to be in my opinion kind of a joke. They aren't shown the same respect as they are in Canada. In fact, there were several times that the police man was in the middle of the street and taxis driving through were held up for a second and they would obnoxiously honk their horns at the cops, I couldn't imagine that happening at home.

At the end of the night, my friend Fernando and I went and crashed at a jimjilbang. If you've never heard of these, they are only in Korea and definitely worth going if you ever visit the country. It defines Korean culture. A jimjilbang is a public bath house that also has a couple floors for people to sleep in. The experience begins by segregated bath houses where you first take a shower and then jump from one of many hot tubs to cold pools, then again to the hot, cold and so on and so forth until you're done. After you're all cleaned up, you put on your uniform that they give you. Men in white and women in pink, they look like peasants clothing or prison uniforms without the stripes. Oh and how did I forget to mention that the whole shower and tubs are done completely naked in front of people of the same gender. It's really not as bad you'd think. Then after all the nakedness, you go to the sleeping floors where they have movies and TV playing, games to be played, books to be read, arcade games to be played, saunas to be opened up and relax more, a cafeteria to eat, an even a gym to work out. And when you get tired, grab a little mat and a soft block for a pillow and shut your eyes. If you take a look at my pictures you'll see that it's essentially a big slumber party but pretty cool. A brief history behind the jimjilbang is that immediately following the Korean war, not every family had a bath to use so bath houses were created to allow everyone in the community to wash, thus the jimjilbang was born and because people kept using them, the tradition has continued all across the country. It's pretty cool!

The day after that was a lazy day around the hostel but I did enjoy some great sushi by Sam who is the owner of the hostel. He also is a sushi chef by trade. I followed his every step during the preparation. It was cool. He filleted the fish the same we do it at home but one exception was that the backbones, head and fins were not thrown in the garbage. He used it all for making fish soup. We also had the chance to eat caviar, fish lung, fish brain, fish eye and much more. It was all good!

The weather is getting a little colder out here. The weather was only 6 degrees today but when dad told me it was - 20 at home before the wind chill, I was reminded life's not bad out here. Because the weather was getting colder, I did take one day off from sightseeing and downloaded a ton of movies. I researched the top 250 movies of all time...so many good movies that I've never seen so I'm taking advantage of my breaks in traveling to watch some great movies. If you haven't seen "12 angry men" you should, it was a great movie.

Here are a couple superstitions I've learned about that I thought might be interesting for you to read. In Korea, people believe in fan death. This is the idea that if you leave a fan running over night in an enclosed room, you will die as the fan absorbs or takes in the oxygen. Can you guess who might have made this up and why? I did after a girl had told me about this. The answer is on Wikipedia if you're interested. In China, the number four is unlucky just like 13 is to us. The reason is because the number four sounds like death in Chinese.

In Korea, I thought there was enough marketing just on the buildings, on the walls, subways, etc. Tge other day I experienced a guy driving a vehicle by me and he started throwing out stacks of papers out his car window. I had seen lots of these papers on the road before but I didn't realize until my mate explained to me that they throw pieces of paper with their ad on it all over the streets and then they go and collect the sheets the next day. Wow!

My last night was awesome. I hung out with Kit and Kari. They were generous Korean hosts (after almost a decade in Korea I'm okay calling them Koreans)
and bought me tickets to Nanta. It was a live theatre performance all to do with food. The storyline revolved around the kitchen and when I wasn't laughing, they were playing music with some sort of bowl, pot, pan, knife, plate, spatula or whatever else they could all while cooking food at times. One more thing I would highly recommend if you visit Korea. Next we had a pork BBQ for the last supper. A few buddies from the hostel joined as well and the fun continued to the hostel with some somek.

I had to say goodbye to my mates and off I went... China here I come!