::A Geek in Korea::

My wife and I went to China via a Korean tour company. We arranged for the flight and the entire vacation on the “no tip/no option” plan, meaning we didn’t have a choice where we were going, but we didn’t have to pay for anything extra once we arrived. Prices for English tours were basically double what we were paying, so I was happy just to have a simple translation and listen to what I could understand from the guide.

We left our house to catch a bus at 4:45 AM at the local bus stop. Once we arrived at the airport we met the tour guide. We were assigned teams, and this determined the buses we would be riding in for the rest of the trip. Our first sight was Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City. That’s a fantastic way to start out any trip.

We took pictures of everything, but the sense of scale on the Chinese buildings dwarfs anything I’ve ever seen in Korea. Bulgoksa temple, a rather large temple in Korea, could fit in a corner of one of the large entrances of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was absolutely enormous beyond anything I can describe easily. 2 kilometers of dedicated buildings for the Emperors.

One of the coolest things the tour guide mentioned was the engineering they did to try to protect the Emperor. Not only did they create a giant moat and walls along the entire structure, they also fortified the ground underneath the most important buildings. The places where the Emperor would spend the majority of his time had been set atop stone brick laid into the earth 10 to 30 meters thick. That way, entrance was blocked for people that would attempt to dig under the walls instead of going over them.

After we went to the Forbidden City, we went on a rickshaw tour of the surrounding neighborhood. We had a train of about fifteen rickshaws going through the neighborhood with their bells and brakes making noises as we squeezed past cars and navigated around construction blockages. The neighborhood we went through was comparable to a poorer area of Daejeon. The people had their own houses, and maybe a car, but no toilets. They used a communal public toilet building. The small, low buildings were all unpainted and very dull looking, with the air pollution giving everything a dull sooty grey look. They couldn’t be taller than the Forbidden City. The tour guide said that the proximity of the Forbidden City meant that not long ago these people were considered “rich” by Chinese standards. Most of the apartments and buildings we saw in the city were unpainted, stained by heavy pollution, and not all that nice looking. The architecture was taking a turn for the more modern as foreign companies started building in a highly compressed area in anticipation for the 2008 Olympics.

The city was definitely trying to improve it’s image in anticipation for the Olympics, but aside from it’s historical buildings, nothing was all that beautiful architecturally. I’d say the prettiest modern building was the Korean LG company building, simply because it was finished and didn’t look dirty from a distance. After the rickshaw, we went to an acrobatics show.

This was basically the same show I had seen in Expo a few months ago, albeit on a larger scale. This wasn’t a disappointment, as they had new tricks I hadn’t seen yet, and the show was still impressive no matter how many times you see it. After the show we arrived at our nice hotel and collapsed in our room before even attempting to do anything else except get ready for the next day.