Part 3: Accomodation

It was early morning and I was walking around some district in Seoul where there were supposed to be many motels. Like most advanced nations, in Korea there is a huge division between the rich and the poor, and a huge price division for tourist-aimed hotels and cheap motels. I hadn't booked my tickets through a travel agency, instead hoping to use the cheap motels which were apparently all over the place. I was carrying my bag, of which the strap had conveniently just broken. I tried walking around several streets, but none of the signs made any sense to me. It was all in Hangul script, which I love the look of. But at this time, I wished Japan had never invaded Korea and forbidden teaching of Korean. See, traditional Korean uses Chinese script, which I can at least grasp the meaning of. When I was in Shanghai, I was able to read a lot of the station names, shop names, and even grasp the general genre of the items on menus. It had logic to it. Once, I was buying illegally copied DVDs of the entire Seinfeld series, but I was sceptical that the package contained enough CDs. The stall owner pointed to the label which assured me there were 5 DVDs inside. I bought them and when I walked away, I realised that the label had of course been in Chinese. Chinese had some logic for me.

But since the end of the war, Korea used less and less Chinese script, and now it is very rare to see it on signs. And now I was lost trying to find a motel with only cute meaningless pictures on them ("which way up do they go?"). I used a phrase book to ask for a motel, but every time people would shrug. I took a break at a coffee shop. I tried again, hauling my inconvenient bag behind me. Amazingly, I found a sign that read "motel" in English. I was quickly dissappointed when I found out it was an internet cafe with a fare of over double of what I was prepared to pay for an overnight stay. Back to another coffee shop. It was now mid afternoon, so I decided to try another district.

It was the same story. It now also began raining. It began looking hopeless. I was now prepared to stay out the whole night, resting at coffee shops or stations until the morning. I wanted to do some shopping in the meantime, so I went downtown. There was an information with English help. Maybe they could help me. I was given directions to two different hotels. I couldn't afford hotels, but I was also told there were cheap motels right by Seoul Station. I took a walk. I swear, by now my arm had doubled in length from carrying my bags. I asked for more specific directions at the station information centre. The stupid bitch looked at me, and without saying anything handed me two brochures. They were both hotels. I can't afford hotels! Especially not ones with their own brochures! One of them was for the Hilton. See, thats the problem with tourism as an industry. The host countries are so focused on "injecting money" into the "local economy", and expect tourists to recklessly drop cash to aid their "national prosperity". Especially someone like me, who is obviously a wealthy American Industrialist. I love travelling, but hate tourism. I walked straight to a rubbish bin and continued my search. Now it was personal.

But soon I was rewarded. My search had taken about 9 hours and 4 districts of Seoul.

So there I was in my own motel room. Actually, it was a little bit different. Japan has love hotels where unmarried-but-still-living-at-home singles can go, but it Korea there is no real distinction between Motels and Love hotels. I was staying at a "theme motel". It was lit by a romantic black light and the checkout and hallways were tastefull decorated with plastic plants and stars on the ceilings. The room itself wasn't tacky, so much as manky. The theme appeared to be a run-down hotel room from the 60s. The waincotting was peeling, the carpet was worn, each wall had a different faded design of flowered wallpaper and there were dark stains on the duvet. All the amenites came in twos. Pillows, cups, toothbrushes and drinks. There was a 3-pack of condoms (empty). It was not the cleanest place, but dammit, I had scoured the entire metropolis to find this place. I was pretty tired and took a rest. I hadn't seen Korean TV before, and I won't be sad if I never do again. It is like Japanese TV except it is obvious that they are on a budget. There exists exactly one type of canned laughter in the entire country, andit is applied liberally. I kept channel surfing until I found some live international womens volleyball. Korea got beaten. CNN. Then, on more channel surfing I was reminded on the type of accomodation I was staying at. One channel was overseas adult entertainment which made me miss the Japanese tradition of blurring out the naughty bits. The other channel was obviously Korean adult entertainment (i.e. it was obviously on a budget). It was simply a bad-ass looking guy hammering a girl from all angles, to the soundtrack of early 90's euro-trash techno-pop. I used to love euro-trash techno-pop, so there I was, by myself, singing along to porn in a Korean love hotel. This is a lasting impression of Korea for me.

I woke up at 3AM to the sounds of a girl in distress. Oh no... I truly hoped it was someone watching the television with the volume up high. I checked. Damn... So it is fair to say that it was far from a good night's sleep. I made sure not to touch anything after taking my shower before leaving. Luckily, this was my last night in Korea. I had abused my friends and her mothers hospitality for the other 6 nights, and I was so glad that I had.