My blog

The flight from Hanoi to Seoul took four hours. Unfortunately, I can't sleep in economy class, so I didn't get a wink. I moved west about two hours, so now I'm seven hours away from Poland.
I got to the hotel at eleven with the plan to get some sleep, but they charged me so much for an early check-in that I decided to go into town without any sleep. And today I broke the record for the number of steps taken per day - thirty thousand. After a sleepless night, that's quite a feat.
The first impression of Seoul is really good. It is a modern, clean, and one could even say sterile city with very good infrastructure. There are elegant limousines, every twenty meters a coffee shop. Gentlemen in well-tailored suits and ladies with make-up walk the streets - you can see great care for appearance here. There are no scooters. Nobody chats you up or tries to persuade you to give them a lift or to make purchases at a bargain price. There is practically no street food, but there are plenty of various pubs, which you can't be afraid to enter, because they look decent and classy. In short, a city that does not fit the Asian climate at all - after three weeks spent in Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia - it is the complete opposite of what I saw there, in every possible dimension, also in terms of temperature - in the morning at eight o'clock I was greeted here by a Polish, April 12 degrees. Fortunately, in the middle of the day it became almost twenty.
My first goal was to climb the observation tower, which can be reached through a large park or by cable car. I chose to walk. At the top I ate lunch, with a panoramic view of the city in front of me. It was a buffet and my first contact with Korean cuisine - love at first sight. With the ubiquitous kimchi - Chinese pickled cabbage.
After lunch I walked down the city center, the length and breadth. You can't walk through the entire ten-million metropolis. I visited the royal palace and a few more temples.
And then I took it in my hand for the first time. Nicely rounded, pleasant to the touch, fits well in the hand. I knew it would become my friend for a long time. Its name is Samsung Galaxy S8 plus.
It was in the Samsung flagship store, supposedly the largest in the world. The store is located in the Gangnam district, which is a bit like New York's Fifth Avenue. They even have their own Shake Shaka. And if you just go into the side street, you discover dozens of fantastic eateries.
In one of them I ate barbecue, which you prepare yourself - it's one of the more popular dishes here. Fried meat is wrapped in lettuce leaves with onions and other vegetables and various sauces. You drink it with vodka served in bottles like for beer. Delicious.

After two days without sleep, I slept so long that there was no point in separating breakfast from dinner, so I simply ate pasta with a cutlet right by the hotel. I chose a small restaurant, where with difficulty but success I managed to persuade the lady serving to take a picture of me - they don't speak English here, although they love America. However, they perfectly understand a Samsung handed to me in a "please take my picture" gesture.
Today I decided to wander around the city, since yesterday I had already seen most of what a visitor to Seoul should see.
First I walked around the waterfront park, then I saw a village in the middle of the city - or rather a district in the highland-Korean style, where tourists do not allow ordinary people to live. Then I visited the village museum and the royal palace, and finally sat down, like a motionless tourist, on the second floor of a Seoul hip-hop bus and once again viewed the most important points of the city. Finally, I visited a huge soap and jam market, where the most unusual food was pig heads.
I mostly used the subway today. It's bigger than New York's - some say the world's largest - and perfectly organized. It's hard to see a passenger without a cellphone inside, and many of them travel with a power bank, because no cellphone can stand being stared at all day long.
Convinced that any city, even one with ten million inhabitants, can be visited in two days, and with the reflection that our ideas about countries and cities always differ from reality, I chose the Itaewon district for tonight's dinner. There are a zillion pubs here, most of them serving foreign cuisine. In addition to American, Mexican and Brazilian, I saw Bulgarian, Romanian and Czech, for example.
Only after drinking two beers was I ready to make a decision: a small, Korean-Japanese restaurant. There was a queue to most of the restaurants, but this one had a place at the bar with a view of the kitchen, perfect for a tourist without a companion.
I ordered the Korean-Japanese seafood soup and spicy pork with sprouts and a beer. God, it was good.
While I was absorbed in the delights of the palate, a young couple sat down next to me. They ordered sashimi and dumplings and washed it down with some strange drink - pouring into glasses from a bottle that looked like beer.
I was really intrigued by this, so I immediately started asking around. And that's how I met my new Korean friends, with whom I spent the rest of the evening.
Hyun and his friend (he wouldn't let him call her a girl, and she wouldn't let him call her that either) turned out to be a very nice couple.
I learned that the most popular Korean dish is rice with bulgogog and kimchi, and the drink is slightly alcohol-infused water in vodka-flavored beer bottles (as I checked a moment later), and that if you really promise someone something in Korea, you have to intertwine your little fingers with them and touch your thumbs at the same time.
When Hyun went to the bathroom, his friend asked me how old I was. I asked her to guess. She thought for a moment and said: thirty-seven. Oh Mom - I love traveling. In return, I guessed her age on the first shot - twenty-four.
When Hyun's friend went to the bathroom, Hyun revealed that he likes talking to foreigners and that his biggest dream is to go to Europe. He would like to see Paris, Slovakia and Poland of course.
Then we went to a disco bar for a beer and dancing, and at the end of the evening for sashimi with salmon and transparent flatfish.
I had a really great time last evening in South Korea.