Week1: Whatta place!!

My first week in Korea has been fun..
I came here by Thai Airways, it is supposed to be bad but I liked it because it was my first time.. Nothing special though.
The stops were in Bangkok and Taipei. Those airports were really awesome! Huge! (I hope Devanahalli Airport will be half as good some day.)
We landed in Incheon Airport in South Korea on Sunday evening…
My office there is close to “Suwon”, a satellite city of Seoul. Its an hour and a half from the airport. But the distance is far more than u’d expect. Awesome roads! not a single “road-hump” or pot-hole and till I reached my guest house, the bus stopped in just 2 traffic signals.
The weather is a little hot here. Worse than Bangalore. Reminds me of Surathkal. It seems it will get better in Sept. I hope it does..
The guest house we live in is run by Koreans, who also know how to make great Indian food. I’m shocked that the food here is as good as any good hotel in blore!!
The accomodation is fine. The room comes with a computer and internet at blazing speeds. I can’t believe the download speeds here. I could download 700MB in 40 mins.!!

Work: Samsung offices are HUGE here. There are lots of them spread around. The place where I work is as big as the entire Bagmane tech park, and the office holds the entire memory division, starting from Fabrication to software!
In office, for lunch, we have to take a bus to another Samsung office which serves Indian cuisine. The food is ok. Not as good as the guest house food.
The food that the Koreans eat SUCKS!! It stinks whenever we enter the cafeteria. Even my teammates who had thought they would try all kinds of food have stuck to Indian food after seeing their food. Its so bad.
The Koreans have a strange habit of brushing their teeth in the office. Some do it in the morning, but all of them do it in the afternoon right after lunch. Strange!

We went walking around the guest house the first day. On monday night, we went to a mall close-by called CGV. It was a small mall with a multiplex at the top. We watched Fantastic 4 and the rise of the Silver Surfer. It was not fantastic. It was arbit. And the only reason I watched it, Jessica Alba, was not looking pretty. It was 1 p.m when we got back home.

We went to Young san market on Independence day. (It was a holiday here too. Guess why.) That place is famous for its electronics market. We took a metro train there.(which is super efficient obviously) The market was right in the station! It looks like…imagine National Market in Forum Mall. Thats how it looks. I bought a Nikon camera. Lot of bargaining. But they can’t understand English, so we have to type the money on a calc.

And on saturday, we went to a shopping mall called Galleria in Suwon. It was like Bangalore Central, although a lot less crowded. The place closed down at 8.30 sharp!
Then we went to a bar and my friends had beer. I had french fries. (the only veg item on the menu). My friends said the beer was damn good, that it also tasted good, and kicked like vodka!
They had 5 liters. Hmmm… I had a sip. Yuck! as usual.
The bar gave us all free mugs as a gift. To drink more beers??

Thought for the week:
The Koreans started from scratch after world war II. And look at them now.
We’re not even close. Now tell me why, oh why, did we get left behind???
What the hell went wrong??
We discussed a lot about this. Bad government, politics, constitution, leaders?? or is it something about Indians in general that we cannot get asses to work hard enough??

I don’t have an answer.