I woke up sore all over, see previous post.
I met my colleague for breakfast, which is a buffet at the Hotel and very international in the variety of dishes. I ate smoked salmon (almost Lox, but not quite) with cream cheese capers, onion and no bagels. I had to use a sourdough roll. Scrambled eggs, rice, bacon, smoked duck, and angel hair, cold in tomato sauce with mush rooms and Caviar. Lots of caviar. They had kimshee on the buffet, but I had had some last night and did not want to have more for breakfast. I did not have the japanese sea weed soup or the "snail porridge", whatever that was.
Here is the outside view of my hotel. I am not going to try to write the names of the areas or neighborhoods in Seoul because I can't spell them and they were all in Korean(except for Itaewon), the written language in South Korea is actually called Hangul.Went for a walk down toward the convention center, COEX, in the neighborhood where the 4 Season's Hotel is on a hill. Found lots of back alley restaurants and street vendors but in over 5 hours of walking only saw 2 and 1/2 western faces. Very homogenous culture. It made England look like a positive den of diversity!
We were looking for a brew pub or three we had found in Ron's guide book, but pubs don't open in Seoul on Saturday until 4 pm. So we ended up at this place:
Jacksonville! Even though there were almost no westerners anywhere near us most of the shops and restaurants had signs and names in English. And they were for the most part ridiculous, like this one. I had thin sliced pork and octopus in red pepper. Here and in a couple of other restaurants/bars I had trouble ordering a coke. Still don't know why.
Yes, that is me with a red pepper coated octopus tentacle, along with standard bowl of rice, kimshee on my right and a random bowl of soup broth with bean sprouts. So far nothing has risen to the level of flingy-lingy hot.Wandered around a bit more admiring the architecture and getting caught in flash crowds (mostly when trying to cross a street) we finally made it to the Irish Pub that was in the guide book. They were having a Jack Daniel's festival.
In fact nearly every restaurant we saw had some kind of festival going on. The 4 restaurants in the hotel had a festival board so you could know what festival was going on where. The Tivoli bar was having a scotch festival, the western restaurant/breakfast buffet was having an espresso festival, the Japanese restaurant was having a wood mushroom festival, etc.
Going back in to the hotel we saw this:
Apparently Saturday in Seoul Hotels is wedding day?! Not sure. I expect there are going to be lots of unexplained things.The rest of our engineers had arrived and we ending up eating at the hotel again. I had a BLT and a coke. This hotel does know how to cook bacon.
Stay tuned. The next day I go shopping in Itaewon and drive down to TaeAn. Exciting, huh?
I wonder if I can find grits in Itaewon?
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