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In some ways it feels I’ve been away weeks. In others, it feels like no time at all. I flew back from Seoul last night and fell asleep almost right away.

It’s been a strange week. Lots of fun and laughter, but the food was dodgy, especially if you’re as picky as me. I was lucky and avoided the diarrhoea and sickness that pounced on quite a few of the others on the trip, and got away with nothing more serious than a churning stomach, mainly thanks to the PRs and our guides being so good with the menus.

I can’t say there’s much beauty to Seoul. There is some pretty countryside between it and Daegu, a city we visited in the south, but the capital, which was levelled in the Korean war and rebuilt in the 60s and 70s sits in a mountain basin under a blanket of smog.

It was so humid that the hot air felt doubly heavy, but everywhere we went except some of the factories was air conditioned, and since coming home I’ve really noticed the heat in my flat. It’s scary what a softie you can turn into in a week.

Now I’ve seen my fair share of Far Eastern factories and production lines, but the montor factory I saw this week beats them all. Bigger than a housing estate and hotter than a furnace, it was filled with machines the size of family cars that we climbed under and over, and dodged as they cut across our path. Guard rails were low or non-existent, and workers spent all day sitting or standing at a conveyor, fixing a single screw or chip.

We spent two days in the south of the country, at its hottest but most boring city, Daegu, where I choked on orange juice and the hotel pool was closed to non-club members. On the journey back, we wove in and out of the traffic past two men fighting on the roadside. One was weilding a wooden club above the head of the other. The following night we landed in a hostess bar, where many of the hostesses had to lift their skirts and stand at the urinals. Make of that what you will.

Want to see the pictures? Check out the gallery.

I got home to a note from my mum. My grandmother passed away on Thursday just after ten in the evening. The funeral will be next Tuesday.

Reacquainted myself with the gym and spent 328 calories I probably could not afford after last week on a 5.1km run. I did it in just over 30 minutes, which is not lightning fast, but not bad. Feeling rather chuffed, I went to the Army with Paul and met Trevor and Jon there. We knew it was going to be quiet when we got in there because we got parked in the car park. You used to have to park in the nearby roads if you didn’t get there earlier, and Jon and I looked around once inside and commented on how sad it was to see the pub with far fewer people than it ever used to get.

There was a

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2001 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.