Dull Self Analysis and an In-Depth Study of Korean Culture

At some point over the last few years I have managed to acquire a fear of flying that turns every take off, landing and episode of turbulence into an excruciating ordeal, which is weird because I’d always been a good flyer in the past. It doesn’t matter how much I rationalise to myself that flying is generally quite safe (I love it when people tell you that, statistically, you’re more likely to be killed in the car on the way to the airport than you are to be killed in a plane crash. It occurred to me the other day that it is actually a massively unhelpful thing to say, and now I have a fear of driving to the airport as well. Thanks). Anyway, I hate flying, and the trip from Sydney to Madrid was particularly bad, with pretty much constant turbulence for the twenty six hours we spent in the air. There was a nice diversion during takeoff though, when a guy tried to take his kid to the toilet while the plane was taxiing down the runway – the sight of the stewardesses trying to manhandle the two of them into the jump seat before the plane took off was pretty entertaining, and we were in the air almost before I realised it.

We had a stopover in Seoul, with a night in a hotel included. A night in a hotel in which I discovered that I actually have a second phobia – I don’t like sleeping on floors above about the fourth or fifth and we were on about the eighth, so as well as not sleeping on the plane due to the bowl-clenching terror that turbulence always brings on, I didn’t sleep in the hotel either. I don’t know where this comes from; I’m not scared of heights. It’s probably due to some deeply traumatic event from my childhood. Anyway, my tedious cut-rate psychological problems aside, the hotel was very nice, though we were too far away from Seoul to make it worth going there for dinner as we’d planned. Luckily, the hotel overlooked one of Seoul’s lesser known attractions; the Biannual Meeting of the Sitting in the Rain and Looking at the Mud Appreciation Society;

I assume that was what it was. I can’t read Korean.

There was also a rather wonderful sculpture by the highway, and I managed to take a picture of it the next day on the way back to the airport;

Sadly, the pictures I had taken of it the previous night from our hotel room didn’t come out very well, and this rather drab picture doesn’t do justice to the magnificence of this particular sculpture which also lights up at night with a line of fairy lights running around the edges, flashing like a beacon of hope in the dark.

And that is everything I know about Korea.