6 October 2006: The Hermit Kingdom!

I'm back! I had traveled to Korea and some parts of Taiwan in the past week or so. In the following posts I shall try to condense my travel experiences in a concise manner and to the best of my recollection (I never keep diaries). Some readers of my blog had reflected that my blog is informative in descriptions of environment and landscape but little on the food culture and various aspects of lifestyles in the places that I had laid my footprints on. Noted! However, my focus will still remain on general narrative of the beautiful places that I had visited (my forte lies in this). Thanks for your interest in my blog! At the meantime, I must say that I am not a very good photographer, and for beautiful pictures of rustic landscapes in Europe, do visit my friend William's blog: www.wilkywilliam.blogspot.com .Very captivating shots by my aspiring amateur(?) pal!

I had made an impromptu decision to visit Korea after Francoise mentioned that her cousin in Suwon would be free to host us there in the past week. In fact, I made a last-minute booking of my ticket just two days prior to the trip! The airfare was reasonable, considering the fact that it was CathayPacific, the best airliner of the year 2006 (something which my Hongkong friend Elvis will happily attest to). So the trip was really unplanned for (not a matter that my army pal Benjamin may accept), but we had our fun there!

We boarded the plane in the late afternoon and it took us two hours before reaching Incheon International Airport. Francoise's cousin Liet and his friend had kindly picked us up at the airport and Liet eventually brought us to a restaurant in Suwon for a late dinner. We had a few rounds of booze and Francoise could not take that much, resulting in her transformation to our Singapore's Merlion in foreign land. Nevertheless, we were all fine and had slept well, anticipating a few good days ahead in the trip.