Sunday, January 21, 2007

Everything Korean



I have arrived in Korea and have been here for 4 days now. What an amazing country! I have explored a little bit but really haven't had a lot of time as I have work to do while here as well as some other urgent work for Intel that had to be completed. Nevertheless any spare moment I have taken to check out some of the views and society of Seoul.
Speaking only English provides a real challenge. There seem to be very few people who speak English and even the people in the hotel speak a very limited version of English. So I have spent much of my time communcating in a very limited way by sign language. Taxis are everywhere but again noone speaks english so to get anywhere I have to firstly show the concierge where I would like to go, get him to write it on a Hilton business card and then I show that to the taxi driver and then when I catch one back I show him the card with the Hilton on it. It's not always successful, I got refused in a taxi last night because I was on the wrong side of the street-it seems that they don't want to have to turn around!!!
Of course I can't read any of the shop signs although luckily the street signs and things like the railway and subway stations have both Korean and English sign. But even to write this blog I am looking at Korean characters in the login, the post section etc. As you can see, so it's a bit of a guess which button that I push. Even to tag this page is impossible as it's all in Korean. I'm sure that there's something that I can download but I'll muddle through for now. :)

I saved this post until I got back home because I quite literally couldn't read much of the page because it was in Korean text.