more of Seoul, about travelling alone

Right now I'm at the Seoul airport and got some time because my flight is delayed - 1,5hours it seems :-/
But at least I find some time now to write on this post in which I want to describe some more experiences and impressions about Seoul and also talk about the experience of travelling alone.

On my last days in Seoul I took a boat trip around the huge Han river that runs through Seoul. It was a very pleasent tour and offered a nice view of the city. Finding pleasure in passively leaning back and just letting the impressions pass by, I decided to take a further sightseeing bus tour in the evening.

some architecture

I also met up with Jieun, another Korean friend I met at UCSD and we had some Korean food together. She had actually just come back to Seoul from Frankfurt where she had an internship for a few month and she had also visited me in Berlin a few weeks ago.

delicious Korean food with Jieun: my dish is called korean "bibimbap" (mixed pot)

There is a small river running through seoul, constituting a strong contrast to the towers of steel and glass. It actually used to be a road that was rebuilt to this river a few years ago. Liked this a lot and reminded me of the Highline in New York.

Besides that, there were actually not very many public parks in the city. I think this has to do with people usually not having the motivation to enjoy the sun outside in contrast to Europeans.
What I also liked a lot about Seoul is that it has many open spaces and wide streets so it doesn't feel cramped here despite the hugeness of the city. Also there are many open wireless internet works for free everywhere in the city and also at the airport what is quite convenient for me. And I also felt extremely safe here.
Some more impressions:

around my "tent" was some kind of shopping area for building/constructing with hundreds of tiny shops for sinks, lamps, drill machines etc. So where there's one "Bauhaus" in Germany there are hundres of these shops here instead it seems...

Got one of these for breakfast!

Usually around subway stations there were huge underground areas also often filled with hundreds of tiny shops for everything you could need. I even saw a shop for medieval antiques...

All in all Seoul has been significantly cheaper for me than Japan. In total I paid only 200€. 60€ for accomodation (3 nights) and 140€ for the rest as transportation, food etc.

Now some last thoughts about travelling alone: As some of you now, I actually wanted to travel through Asia just on my own. I had often been quite fascinated when people told me how they travelled somewhere just on their own as I think this requires a lot of self-reliance. And also when I travelled to Paris last summer, besides visiting some friends, I did most of the actual sightseeing just on my own and found this quite enjoyable as I found myself more open and more focused on the outer attractions and also liked the complete independence - you can do whatever you wanna do.
In constrast to my travels through Japan, in Seoul I was usually in the company of friends as I stayed with Geebum at first and with Mikkel later and met a hole bunch of other people. What I noticed is that while travelling alone, interestingly I had generally stronger and also more emotionally intense experiences - bad ones as well as good ones. I think the reason is that travelling alone moves you out of your comfort zone and therefore you just get more exposed to the outer experiences.
Concluding, I think travelling in company is more convenient and pleasent while travelling alone enables deeper experiences.

Next is China! Ni hao! :D

Nara, Seoul, differences

Time for post number 4!
The last city I visited in Japan was Nara - also once capital and despite being much smaller than Kyoto still having more temples than the humble traveller can visit in a day.
Here some impressions:

Nara is famous for having hundreds of deer running around everywhere and trying to get cookies from tourists

huge temple containing a massive Buddha statue (next picture)

massive Buddha!

Right before my flight to Seoul I also managed to meet up with Aoi, an other Japanese friend from UCSD and together we explored the harbor area of Osaka.

One other impressions of Japan that struck me was that there are only very very few public trash cans. When I arrived in Nara I ate a banana and just couldn't get rid of my banana peel. I guess I missed noticing half of the sights because I was looking out for a trash can all the time...
A friend told me that the Japanese government actually actively removed public trash cans after a toxic gas attack in one of these in 1995. Following this brilliant strategie I propose we should tear down all tall buildings as a precautionary measure against terror attacks...

Some info about costs so far: All in all Japan has been quite expensive - I've paid a total of 290€ for accomodation (for 6 nights in hotels -> ~50€/night) and a total of about 450€ for everything else (I guess at least half of this for transportation). Therefore I payed about 90€/day in Japan.

On Friday night I finally arrived in Seoul, where my Korean friend Geebum picked me up from the airport. He had invited me to stay with his family for the weekend and as it is rather uncommon for Koreans to invite people to their home, I feld quite honored by his invitation. He and his family were incredibly hospitable, making these days some of my best of the trip and it was also quite interesting for me to see a Korean home from the inside. During the following day he showed me some different neighborhoods of Seoul and gave me a good first impression the city.

Geebum and me on the way from the airport

expensive apartments here

like this architecture!

In the evening we met up with my german friend Caroline that was also travelling in Seoul - quite an coincidence! In fact she also had problems with her stomach so we could empathise with each other.

CaroCaro!

On the next day we met up with more Koreans and Mikkel from Norway who also made his way to Seoul and had some Korean food. It was quite nice to met up and see everyone again. Right after leaving UCSD, I did not imagine to be able to see so many of them again so soon :-)

desert!
(I case you are wondering about the girls making the peace sign in all the pictures - its considered to be cute...)

For the next days I was sharing a room with Mikkel in a guesthouse. This was the entrance staircase - WTF?

Worst stair ever! Bring a German engineer!

Unfortuately that place was not very good and we used to speak of it as "our tent" because staying in our tiny room felt more like beeing in a tent than a hotel. Also the shower was so smoothely integrated into the bathroom that there was practically no difference between shower and bathroom -.-

lots of locks ... and Mikkel

nice view over Seoul!

One thing that seems to be an issue for me is making enough breaks and not starting to get in the mode where I'm just kind of checking off sights from my to do list without really enjoying them. Of course it seems obvious that you should not go sightseeing when you are not in the mood or already full with impressions - but now imagine you beeing in an exciting city like Tokyo (or whatever is interesting to you) and making the decision to take a day off and just relax with a book - not an easy decision, right?
In this context, having in mind Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what I also discovered is that you need to be in a generally very good state/ your basic needs fulfilled etc. to be able to enjoy seeing the foreign environment. For me, when I'm tired, or hungry or feel bad for whatever reason than there's actually no value in doing sightseeing for me at all. However as I said before, its kinda hard to resist this inner pressure of "you need to get the most out of it". In this context, beeing sick made it really hard for me to properly enjoy the travel on some days and unfortunately after finally getting rid of my stomach problems (lasting for a week) it seems I caught a cold now - wtf? -.-

All in all I was surprised to see more differences between Seoul and Japan than I had expected. Many of the everyday life details are different, the people seem dfferent and actually also look different, cars are driving on different sides, food is different, city design different. I'm quite curious to see China next and expect it to be quite different to these as well. For most people in Europe its all just "Asia" but I'm glad to have a much more sophisticated view of this region now.

Kyoto, Osaka, impressions and feelings

So now it's post number 3 - I've got the feeling this might get a bit longer...

First I want so begin with the stuff I've been doing and seeing and later get to general impressions about Japan and my trip.
So on Sunday, my last day in Tokyo I had another nice overview over the city at the Metropolitan government building and then got to see the probably busiest intersection of Japan:

In the evening I took one of the famous Shinkansen trains to Kyoto - and that was impressive! I like driving the German ICE trains as its comfortable and fast - but this was just on another level. Even though the ride was quite smooth, you could feel the immense power of the train. It felt more like beeing in an airplane than a train! Unfortunately there was no indication of the actual speed but it was probably around 300kph and the surroundings were just flying by. However it comes with a price and I paid over 100€ for the ~3h trip to Kyoto. Another thing I found quite amusing during the ride was that the train personal was bowing whenever entering and leaving a wagon of the train. So when they arrived at the end of a train partition, they moved around, bowed, and moved on :D I wanna see the German personal doing that!

In Kyoto I was lucky to be able to stay with Yumiko, a couchsurfing friend of my good friends Jakob and Karl. Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years and is stuffed with tempels and tradition, so that was what I wanted to see there! Here some impressions:

its sooo hot here! I'm sweating literally all the time outside

never forget to take off your shoes before entering a room with Tatami mats - worst sin you can do ;-)

massive temple

inside the temple

impressive gate to a temple

After getting tired from the sightseeing I also visited a Japanese Onsen to relax a bit. Even though Yumiko told me that the one I had been to, was not a particular good one - more like a public bathhouse -I liked it a lot and felt pretty good after enjoying some hot tubs.
The next day I walked through the city quite randomly, got to see some more stuff and moved to Osaka in the evening, where I am now. Here today I visited a Japanese style castle that was pretty impressive and checked out the city center.

japanese style castle

Osaka, view from top of the castle

I need to get one of these - so handsome! xD

Now some general impressions about Japan:
Firstly people are generally very polite and friendly here. Even though many people don't speak Engish at all or not very well, the try their best to be helpful. For me its quite expensive - even though I heard that it used to be much worse here, my money is flowing away like nothing. I think I've spent about a 100€/day including accomodation and transportation -.-
Secondly I'm getting lost all the time - thanks to minimaps at most streetcorners its not as bad as it could be but I really miss having a smartphone with google maps. Today I somehow managed to exiting at the wrong metro station without noticing and then wondering why the temple I wanted so visit was so small and looked so different on the pictures^^
Then here it seems umbrellas are not used as a mean of protection against rain, but against the sun. Whole crowds walk around with umbrellas when its perfect sunshine - looks quite weird to me^^
Everything is extremely organized and clean - especially in Tokyo. Overall it sometimes feels lile a higher stage of civilisation. For example in subways there are often screens that show maps of the upcoming subway platform so you know where to go, right after leaving the train. And pedestrians regard traffic lights that unfortunately switch only veeery slowly. It's like they wanna test your perseverance in regarding rules -.-
And finally the food: Its sooo different - there is only a minimal overlap with European style food. Sadly I couldn't try a whole lot thanks to my stupid stomach! During the last days my diet consisted mostly of pure rice and bananas  :-/ (the internets answer against stomach issues ;-) ).

All in all, so far the trip has been quite an adventure - more of it than I've had planned.
I've had quite a few issues: primarily the jetlag and my stomach have been a pain in the ass and I ended up seeing and doing only about half of the stuff that I had planned (I guess I need to get back sometime). Secondly getting accomodations has been much more complicated than I had planned.Couchsurfing failed, where my ~15 requests got denied or left unanswered. Experiencing a Japanese traditional ryokan failed, because there was a national holiday and everything affordable was booked out, staying at a budhist temple failed because there were firstly much less temples offering this than I had expected and those offering it had a buddhist holiday --.- Well, and trying a capsule hotel failed because I decided that I'd had enough shitty experiences already^^

Furthermore its quite an experience for me to travel a country as foreign as this (actually most foreign ever for me) completely on my own and I've been through quite some emotional rollercoaster. Feelings like excitedness, tiredness, loneliness, pure joy, stress and curiosity are taking turns constantly - sometimes a few times just in one hour.
Worst was Saturday night when I was in my hotel room with stomach cramps, tired but couldn't sleep, alone, feeling like shit and depressed to be so far away from home in this condition. Then two days later in Kyoto I had goosebumps when seeing the beauty of the temples and gardens, was euphoric about the excitement of my situation and later felt completely relaxed in the onsen. In fact there is so much I experience here that the day before always feels like a week ago because there is so much happening in between.
I'm alive!

Tokio!

Now I am already in Tokyo!
The last day in Germany was a bit stressful: I wanted to send a suitcase with personal stuff, that I didn´t need and didn't want to carry during my travel, right to Taipei and this turned out to be quite complicated. I had to fill out a customs form that asked me to describe every single item in detail (not "clothes", instead "grey cotton sweater" plus specification of weight and value) and for this left me room on the form for maybe 20 words -.-
and what am I supposed to fill in for the value of my socks?!
Well I ended up just writing "clothes" and adding an additional formular with a detailed list of all items, that took me hours to write :-/ Now I just hope it will arrive without problems and damage at a friend in Taiwan who is holding it for me (Thanks, Iris!)
Finally I took my flight from Hanover airport at Wednesday with Aeroflot with a short layover in Moscow. That went all smooth to Tokyo, just with an one hour delay. To fight the jetlag, I had made the ingenious plan to get up on the last days in Germany very early (around 4-5am) to get used to the earlier timing in Japan (7hours ahead). I had even planned at which times to sleep in the plane to maximise jetlag-fighting effectiveness :D
Unfortunately my plan had a weak spot - the human component...
Thanks to seats made for people of normal size (excluding me), it turned out I wasn't able to sleep at all during the flight and so I arrived in Tokyo extremely tired and a bit desillusionized of my awesome plan...
While taking a train connection from the airport to my hotel, the first time I got outside was during changing at a train platform: It was like walking from the train into a wall of heat - 35° and extremely humid :-/ I didn't use to consider myself a belly-sweater but during my stay here it seems I have to change this view about myself. You go outside and immediately start sweating - and I heard thats its getting even hotter in Kyoto next week -.-

So finally I arived at my hotel, that was just fine. Bathroom a bit small - to increase legroom I usually need to leave the door open when sitting on the toilet^^

On the first evening I met two Japanese friends that I got to know at my US exchange pogram for dinner, which was very nice. I have to say that Japanese food is prepared with much more attention to the detail. I ate the most pleasently prepared veggies I ever had. Unfortunatley it turns out that you don't have it easy as a vegetarian in Japan (yeah, I became Vegetarian recently - not 100% strict though) - doensn't seem to be widespread here.
The next day I climbed the observatory of Mori building in Roppongi hills and had a great overview over foggy Tokyo and had my first ramen (noodles in a broth - very delicious) afterwards.

Mori building - what an architecture!

In the evening I met my German friend Manu, who moved to Japan to work here, for dinner and some drinks.

Manu

However, at that point I got problems with my stomach that worsed massively over the next hours what finally made me spend the whole saturday in my hotel room :-/
But at least this gave me time to write this post now...
here some last pictures:

temple

my first breakfast in Japan :D

nice garden/park Japanese style

Tak