Having spent more than 40 days in korea, life is more or less settled to a routine. And with routine i have come to accept the change in the daily ways of sights, smells & sounds. Following is what i see each day...
Sights
I venture out to see world every weekend from my small self sustained pigeonhole of a guesthouse room. I've more or less got a near complete superficial exposure to the Korean way of life. The people i have settled to observe on a daily basis are by all means hard workers, by habit. They come to office on time, leave late & work more. If free on weekends, will willingly spend 4-5 hours in office, doing if not some work, then simply planning what to do next :P.
The roads are clean & well marked & well lit. Streets, except those of office campus, are more or less empty. Hardly people anywhere unless its a market or a community park, or somethin.
In the markets the sights of small restaurants with large fish tanks filled with all kinds of aquatic life... fishes to octopus to squids to eel's is common. You can order what you see :).
The place is filled with huge apartment complexes. Each complex is a set of at-least 10 - 25 storey buildings. And the whole city is literally cluttered with so many apartment complexes. The reason for this, as i guess, would be that this whole city is build with winters in mind. A lone house is costly to warm. Apartments are a means of warming economically.
The best about the things you can see here are the chicks. *take a bow*. Matlab, they are all so well dressed. Mini-Skirts & super-short hot-pants & short dresses are the staple casual attire. High heels are as common as "hawai" chappals in India. Curvy they might not be, but they all look pretty :P. The other thing to write home about is that women here come in only two age groups... either young or old. Women here seem to skip something we call middle age. Its really hard to spot a middle aged lady here. The reason for that would be,
1) consumerism.. theres a whole world of cosmetics here. Markets have these huge shops selling ONLY cosmetics and they are just about everywhere. And so are the beauty salons & cosmetic clinics. A pseudo economy of sorts survives on beautifying women,
2) Well there are just too many girls. And less guys.. more competition :P (just guessing :D)
Btw yes, the nights are not dark here. They have a hue of yellowishness all throughout the night. The days are also long. Infact strangely very long, the sun sets at around 730! which literally translates to the condition that its still fairly "undark" till 8-830.
More on smells... next..
