Rubber Seoul

From Germany, I searched on the internet for the cheapest available flights to Melbourne. In the week before Christmas I settled on flying to Sydney and catching a domestic flight home.

The cheapest available flight was through Asiana airlines, a carrier of South Korea.

It turns out distance and time wise Seoul is about half way between Frankfurt and Sydney, so a good way to avoid jet lag I keep hearing about. The trip from Germany to Korea is almost due east; from Korea to eastern Australia almost due south.

So, my first time in Asia - albeit for 7 hours. The flight got in around 12:30pm and the flight to Australia left around 8pm.

I spoke to a couple of people in Sydney who said they'd also been through Korea and spent the time in the transfer lounge at the airport. I had spent 6 hours in Vienna airport once (5am-11am), so I wasn't keen to repeat the boredom of waiting.

My face had been cold in Germany and Norway but I hadn't needed gloves. My hands were still frozen about an hour after I returned to the airport!

The photos are of a reconstructed imperial palace complex, close to the heart of the modern city. Korea was an independent kingdom until the turn of the 20th century when the Japanese invaded, destroying and pillaging many sites of Korean identity,