I hate it when traveling in Asia and find that the toilets don’t have clear signs for which door is for who, they just write the word “female” or “male” in the local language and I have to take a guess (yes I should try to learn the language, but hey, guess what, i’m lazy).

Anyway, thankfully none of those issues at Gimpo airport last Friday, I was left in no doubt whatsoever:

We got odd looks on check-in when we asked for rooms for the entire night rather than the usual hour but it was damn cheap, about 50 quid for the night for a room with a huge jacuzzi bath, underfloor heating and one of the comfiest beds I’ve had in Asia (despite the fact that’s it was probably festooned with jizz).

Anyway, here is the computer set-up in my room:

I’m lost for words….

I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t for the fact that they spend so much of their budget on crockery that they can’t afford simple essential items like chairs, or even full length table legs.

I’m promising myself that I’m going to do 2 weeks of stretching before my next trip (just like every other trip to Korea..)

So, we met our customer and went out for some Korean Barbecue, which is pretty much my favourite food in Korea (I guess every foreigners favourite), although that chicken and ginseng soup (samgyetang?) comes a close second!

Korean Barbecue – probably beef

After dinner we hit the town, apparently we were in some small suburb west of the airport, far away from the sea front, in which all the bars have “VIP” or “room bar” in huge neon lights at the entrance. Barbers poles were dotted about the place which my colleague explained “the barber shops sometimes offer special services, the more poles outside the place then the dirtier the service”, the most I saw had 4 barber poles outside a dingey stairway disappearing down into a basement, one of the barber poles was six feet high, I can’t imagine what kind of depravity was taking place down there.

The Only Street in Korea Without a Baskin Robbins, Starbucks and Paris Baguette

We spent several hours walking around, popping our heads into bars and then carrying on, my colleague, a late 40′s Korean tutting at every bar because the clientele were all so old (almost his age).

One thing I find confusing in Korea is that bars are on so many levels, when you’re looking for a place you have to look in three dimensions, I think I’m only used to looking in two. The pic above doesn’t show it so well but in the same building you might have a restaurant on the ground floor, a bar on the second floor etc etc up to the 10th floor with the signs all stacked up outside, you could have a pub crawl and never leave the building, it gets very confusing when you’re looking for a place though.

Eventually we ended up back at the hotel bar, I was easily the youngest there and a Philipino was belting out Bonnie Tyler. We had to order something from the food menu, apparently we couldn’t just sit and drink, so we ordered a fruit set which cost something ridiculous like 20 quid which we picked at while we drank. I managed two pints and called it a night.

Grandpa, you’re not invited, you’ll have to wheel yourself somewhere else to empty that bag!

Throne Room – Father and son privies

If only we’d had these a couple of years ago when I was a young kid in the UK, what a fantastic bonding experience it must be between a father and son. I can just imagine sitting at the kitchen table having just finished my gruel, excitedly waiting for the moment my father folds the newspaper, stands up and says “grab a comic son, let’s go and make some bum-spuds”

As if the dual outhouses is not enough they also have a selection of toilet papers for every occasion, a smoothish one for every day use and a heavily profiled one for cleaning up after the most viscid of stools.

A selection of personal-tissues for the discerning fecal hobbyist

Anyway, I almost forgot about chopsticks completely when I saw this in front of me in a queue at the airport

“Call to arms for all chunkily penised bous to do her right and do her good”

They should have scrapped the rest of the nonsense and just gone with that, in HUGE RED CAPITAL LETTERS

EDIT : What do you call Chinglish from Korea?