| 1530h
Mood: very good Fact of the day: Seoul is the size of Singapore, but has a population of about 3 or 4 times that of Singapore. event of the week: Exploring kyoto on my own. Kimpo International Airport was a disaster. My brother and I had hoped to sleep one night over at the airport, to wait for my parents' flight to arrive early next morning, on Christmas Day itself. But when we arrived, we took one look around that old and dirty looking airport, we changed our minds. Bleah.
But the trip in Korea itself was very fun. As fun as a guided tour with my family and several other families can be anyway. There's been the crying-non-stop kid, the overly-enthusiastic-talkative kid, the fussy-spoilt-brat and so on...but heck, it was still fun. My parents paid for everything, my dad even gave me some allowance to use in case I wanted to buy some snacks or something. Man, it's been such a long time since I didn't have to worry about budgeting while travelling. The last trip to New York, I let go, and suffered the consequences when I went back. But this trip, no adverse consequences at all. Happy happy holiday.
It snowed the very night my brother and I arrived in Seoul, which our tour guide later informed us to be totally uncharacteristic of Korea, cos it doesn't usually snow until early january. Yes, I feel lucky already. My mom was quite fascinated by the snow, as we loaded our luggage onto our tour bus. She started spewing out all these really cheem chinese sayings to do with snow and how white it is. Hahahahaha....as it turns out, she doesn't like snow as much as she thought she did. Though she didn't fall sick, she was highly cold-intolerant and didn't really like the wintry Korea.
Some of us tried our skiing for one morning, and I'm proud to say, I fell down only once! I'm not saying I'm glad I fell, I'm saying I'm glad I fell only once. Just when we got the hang of it all, managing to make turns, not running anyone over and generally actually having good skiing posture, time was up. It was time for us to move on to the next stop on our tour.
I guess that was one thing I didn't like about this tour...everything was over so quickly. We were sort of given just that little taste of what that particular aspect of Korea was like, and then shuttled away to the next. At the end of the day, I guess I come back with a very general picture of what Korea was like. Very general. I guess maybe I shouldn't be too fussy and just be contented. At least I have one very specific picture in my mind. Some fresh snow covering the roads outside Kimpo airport, somwhat glittering in the morning sun...and my mom spewing Chinese proverbs.
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