It’s been a while since I wrote one of these as I don’t travel all that much. South Korea is also a very common destination for Malaysians, so I won’t waste time talking about the itinerary and will restrict myself to personal observations.

• Their tourism infrastructure is excellent, amazingly so. Since my wife organized the whole trip, this is more her talking point than mine but it’s hard not to notice how seriously they take the industry and how well run their promotions are. We found their tourism promotion office in KL to be extremely helpful, both in providing the usual set of useful and updated information and by offering free T-money chips to start off with.

• Naturally their websites are fantastic as well. My wife was able to arrange for free Mandarin-speaking tour guides for a number of tours online. Apparently this is some form of government program that calls on Korean volunteers. The guides we got ranged widely in Mandarin-speaking ability but were all knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the places they cover. They were all also rather elderly, suggesting that these volunteers are mostly retirees.
• You can also see this emphasis on tourism in how the attractions are run. Admission to many places is either free or incredibly cheap. More significantly, there is no price discrimination between South Korean nationals and foreigners, which to me is very much unheard of. There were guided tours offered in English, Japanese and Mandarin at the major palaces. As far as I can tell, there are even times when access is available only to foreigners. I was bemused to see that the closing days for the attractions are all carefully coordinated to avoid having all attractions close on the same day of the week.

• Nonetheless, travel on our own in South Korea still wasn’t as easy or trouble-free as we expected. The main problem is that apart from public transit facilities, tourist maps and major attractions, all signage are exclusively in Hangul. For example, we went to hike a short trail at the Bukhansan National Park and there was absolutely nothing in English, not even at the Park Information Center. It was also almost impossible for find anyone who could speak English intelligibly, which surprised me. In fact, we had way better luck finding Mandarin-speakers.
• Wow, there is a lot of police presence in Seoul. Our trip actually coincided with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s summit in the country, so this certainly helped explain the heavy police presence, down to squads with riot shields standing by in subway stations. But I feel that police patrols everywhere are a regularity there, on the streets, in subway trains etc. When we traveled to the park by bus, we repeatedly went by multiple military training camps and the bus was picking up and dropping young soldiers all the time.
• One stop my wife arranged specifically because she thought I would like it was at the War Museum. We originally thought that it would be devoted maybe 50-50 between the Korean War and the various invasions from Japan, but it was more like 90 percent about the war against North Korea. The fact that their war effort was UN sanctioned is apparently a huge deal to them. It makes for a grim reminder that the North remains a salient threat in their minds.

• Seoul is oddly free of advertisements. Sure, there are still billboards and banners, but way, way less than Kuala Lumpur. Over here, we have gigantic billboards along all of the major highways, but it was hard to find even one on the way between Incheon Airport and Seoul. There are long stretches of pedestrian tunnels that pretty much have no ads on them. Given how big South Korean celebrities are in Malaysia, we were also expecting lots of celebrity endorsements but the ads that we did see were mostly bland and kind of tame.
• Apparently it’s true that Korean schoolgirls wear relatively short skirts, even in the cold. At around 5 to 10 degrees Celsius during our visit, it wasn’t quite freezing but still plenty chilly enough for us Malaysians to want to wear plenty of warm clothes. All of them wear stockings of course but how warm are those really? I don’t recall women wearing skirts in winter when I lived in France so it must be a culture thing.
• We went to watch a performance of the famous Nanta show and I got roped in to help out despite trying to demur. It was pretty great with performers who must be well trained in many different skills.  But what surprised us was that when we visited Namsan Tower over the weekend and watched the free public performances. It turned out that they shared many common elements from the Nanta show down to their sense of humor and importance placed on audience participation. It actually gave me a better appreciation of how the Nanta show draws from a wide variety of more traditional Korean dances and performances.

Anyway that’s about it since anything else would be of the more mundane and boring variety.