Arriving in Seoul and a tour of a typical South Korean Hotel Room

We left Atlanta at 1 in the afternoon (12 Noon FWB Time) and arrived in Seoul at 5 PM the next day.  Since it is late and the traffic is horrible and it is a 3 hour drive (on a good day) to Taean where we work we stay the first night in Seoul at a Hotel near Highway 1. 

These pictures are from the Hotel Oskar.  We got there about 7PM and after bouncing through Seoul Rush hour traffic we got out of the car and I got my first real smell of Korea.  Everyplace smells.  Korea has a very distinctive odor (I tried to write aroma, to be polite, but that's not right, Korea smells) which is unmistakable.  On my first trip I thought this was the smell of drying fish, but it is not because there is no drying fish during Spring, that is a fall season event.

Anyway here is a tour of some of the things you see in every Korean mid-price hotel room.

The first thing you see in a Korean Hotel room is the entryway.  This is a little anteroom, just a little bigger than the width of the door.  Slippers are for walking in the room, which is straight ahead and there is a set of plastic slippers on the left (on the cute star mat) for walking in the bathroom.  Needless to say you take your street shoes off here and put on slippers depending on which part of the hotel room you will be in next.  In Korean tradition you don't walk on the (almost always wood) floor in your socks but with slippers.  They even give you disposable slippers at the airport when you send your shoes through x-ray.

Also, in every Hotel room is a water dispensor, like this one, hot water (and it is always HOT) on the left and cold water on the right.  Instant coffee with about 99.99999999999% sugar is provided in little tubes which you can see on the tray on the bottom right of this picture.

The tray of hair care (mostly) products.  Always, brushes, combs, hairspray, hair gel, facial lotions, q-tips.  Every hotel room (well, except for the very, very expensive ones) has this basket of goodies.  Notice also the plug strip on the left.  A good hotel is one that has this and internet access (Hotel Oskar did not) and mediocre ones make you move furniture to find a plug.

And, because I knew it had to be somewhere, I found the thing every single Hotel Room in Korea has.