Must resist the overwhelming urge to do bandwidth testing, nmap scans, Linux hacking the entertainment system, playing Left 4 Dead, and streaming video. I am only traveling places Virgin goes to from now on. Now if they just had complementary massages, free alcohol, and a place to lie down and sleep.

• Smoking seems to be more prevalent here than in the United States. It is not uncommon to see dozens of people outside of each university building smoking in between classes and during lunch.
• People walk slowly. Even compared to Iowa. I attribute this to the large Confucian influence, where not being in a hurry is valued. I dig it, because it is hot here, and I can walk really slowly and not break out in a pouring sweat.
• Koreans love fried chicken. Okay, this is very over-generalizing, but I mean it in the nicest way since I freaking love fried chicken. Koreans make the most wonderful, delicious, succulent friend chicken. It is not to be confused with southern fried chicken in the United States, and I wouldn’t make them compete against each other. Rather, I’d have a big bucket of each and just enjoy. For more, check out this New York Times article about importing Korean-style fried chicken to New York City. Mmmm… one thing I will really miss about this place.
• Parking is surprisingly cheap for such a crowded city. Well, at least compared to the Boston area.
• Korean traffic is slow. In two ways, actually. The speed limits are low, and the traffic is thick. Think of it as the central downtown area of any big city (NYC, Boston, Chicago), except spread out over a larger area. When I drive in to work from the suburbs (say, like Natick to Boston), it is about 11-12 on-road miles. It can take anywhere from 30-90 minutes. The speed limit is at most 70kph in places, but one rarely gets going that fast. The drivers are not very aggressive, and they all seem to reliably signal their intentions, but it is crowded. You really have to pay attention, as lanes appear and disappear constantly, with the only indication being arrows painted in the lanes.
• The arrows painted on the streets are all done in the same font. Cool.
• Koreans don’t use Google. They user Daum.net or Naver.com.
• http://maps.naver.com must have some sort of geolocating via IP address going on because when you open it in your browser, it brings centers on your current location pretty reliably. I’ve tested this at home, at the Ramada Hotel, and at Yonsei and Ewha Universities. Very cool, and super useful.
• Koreans must have the ability to take in more sensory input than I can. I find everything a little overwhelming. They have tons of bright lights on every building. People are constantly shouting at you at the grocery store to buy their stuff. They even use amplification on the weekends. The music and the department stores is blaring. Their web pages have so much going on on them it is crazy. (The simplistic Web 2.0-y U.S. style has just not caught on here, with the big, simple, shiny buttons and very little text.) It is all a bit much for this midwesterner. Check out any Korean web page and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
• On that topic, I went to the aquarium yesterday. For one of their underwater shows, they had a crowd of people assembled in front of a tank, all crammed into the area twice as large as a large living room. In the U.S., the announcers/guides would have either just shouted, or had very little local amplification. Not here. The sound was seriously loud. And it didn’t seem to bother anyone but me. Ouch.
• No one uses a Macintosh here. But, they still remain “cool” enough to use as props for high-end commercials where people are acting like architects and stuff. Go figure.

Okay, enough for now. This is probably only interesting to me, and even that is suspect.

So, we broke up the trip by flying to Seattle first and visiting friends and family for about a week. Only then, did we attempt to fly over to Seoul through Tokyo.

Some random musings:

• Breaking up the trip was a truly great idea. I highly recommend this.
• Long airplane flights suck with a child. Really, I didn’t know how awesome I had it when I didn’t have a kid. To all those without rugrats, no more complaining about flying. Seriously. I spend my entire flight trying to keep my kid off your nerves, so no complaining about him, either.
• Flight attendants are generally great. Anyone that brings me food and drink gets props in my book. Some, though, suck big time. To the asshat that kept reminding me that the fasten seat belt light was on while I was trying to get Carter to stop screaming his head off, thanks a ton. Didn’t you notice the half dozen other people standing around near the lavatory stretching their legs? Why didn’t you glare at them and snap, “I can’t be responsible for you if you get hurt” at them in your snarky voice? And to the crazy bitch that answered every call button request with, “okay, who pushed that? Because you know, if you push it, I have to come, and if you didn’t mean to push it…”, gold fucking star to you. Sheesh.
• Airline employees should be charged $1000 every time they use the fucking all-plane intercom to make an announcement. The only useful pieces of information that come over that intercom are the final destination of the flight and the expected flight time. Seriously, I could even do without those. Surprise me if I’m on the wrong flight. You do not need to tell me when the drink service will start. You do not need to tell me that you are about to dim the lights so we can get some rest. You do not need to tell me that we are about to land. And you certainly do not fucking need to tell me that, “on the left side of the plane you can see Syracuse, NY.” Holy mother-of-all-that-is-holy, let us just put our heads down and try and forget we’re on a plane full of airline idiots clamoring to use the “bother everyone via intercom” button. Really, the only announcement I might like to hear is something along the lines of, “holy shit people, we just lost engine #2. Might be time to start praying and hoping for a water landing.” God. Damn. Just shut up and let my kid sleep. Win for everyone. Oh, and quadruple the fee for international flights, because they announce everything in four languages.
• Narita airport in Japan is under-air conditioned.
• Incheon airport in Korea is over-air conditioned.
• The security lines at SeaTac airport in Seattle are stupid long and ridiculously slow. I don’t know if it is the TSA employees there, the passengers, or what, but man, SeaTac always has long lines. The kind of lines where you think you are joining at the end, but really you are just at the middle point where they had to split the line to let people pass perpendicularly because the line stretches all the fuck the way across the airport. Boston Logan by comparison has very short lines. I think it is because the TSA employees in Boston are meaner. They have one or two people continuously shouting at the passengers in line to remind them to take out and hold on to their boarding passes and identification. It is totally obnoxious, but the number of people that get to the security checkpoint without that shit together is really small. Compare SeaTac also to Narita, a totally over-staffed and smooth operation with polite, competent, and sincere people. Wow, what a concept.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’ll be posting more this summer, so stay tuned.

Korea is:

• Fast broadband, and without filters! I can now torrent all those legal HD movie trailers I’ve been aching to see!
• Awesome because of DMB — Digital Multimedia Broadcasting. I watched TV on the long car ride from Ilsan to Ewha Womans University on a cell phone. It was free over the air, not through some stupid data plan.
• Easy because you don’t really tip anyone.
• Way, way, better delivery food than the United States. You can get almost anything delivered, plus you don’t pay extra for the convenience. Mind blowing. Bonus: your order will probably be delivered by a dude wildly driving a moped carrying a large tin box with your food in it! Bonus+: Your food often comes on real plates with real silverware. Bonus++: Just put the plates outside your door and the random driver dude will come pick them up!
• Gadget land. Not just the little ones that Gizmodo and Engadget are always drooling over, but even their refrigerators are cooler. Check these pictures out. A simple door-in-a-door to put your beverages. Keeps them accessible without opening the whole door. Awesome!
  
• I sat on a heated toilet seat in a public restroom. ‘Nuff said.

So, just like so many students, after Olin’s graduation, my family packed up and blazed out of town as quickly as possible.

Aside: Part of what makes Olin so great (IMHO) is the culture. It is one of learning, excitement, and, in all honesty, overindulgence in being geeky (for many). One of the downsides of this culture is that we (and I) are always on, 24/7. What that leads to is the urgent desire to get very far away from Olin once the opportunity presents itself. This is what leads us to…

Korea. And Hawaii.

Last year, it was England and Italy with the pregnant Caryn and her mother. This year it is visiting family in Seoul and catching the ASEE conference in Hawaii with Caryn and our seven-month-old son, Carter.

We left Boston June 3rd, 2007 at noon, and arrived around 11pm local time in Seoul. I actually have no idea what day it was. We went Boston > Detroit > Tokyo > Seoul. It took forever.

A few hours to Detroit, where we took in a little Taco Bell and rushed to our plane late. Carter did just fine on that ride, although he didn’t sleep much.

The DTW > NRT leg was 12 hours 55 minutes. A long time for an adult. An eternity for an infant. Add to this the fact we left maybe an hour late, and things were shaping up to be hell above earth. In reality, the 13 or so hours went by faster than most trans-Pacific flights I can recall. I believe it had something to do with the constant needs of an infant taking precedence over being interminably bored. Amazingly, we got to Tokyo in one piece. Not much sleep had happened, but we were on the ground.

The NRT > ICN leg was trying, with Carter having a major meltdown for about 10 minutes in-flight. He slept alternately in our arms and we finally arrived in the land of broadband, Seoul, Korea.

I’ll be doing pretty much nothing for the next few weeks as we visit friends and family here. Work resumes with our trip to Hawaii, but that isn’t for a while. In the meantime, I’ll try and post up some interesting pictures and commentary while I have some free time. I have a few articles that have been brewing all year. Time to get them out.

At this time I’d like to give a personal shout out to the person that invented “hotel curtains”. Seemingly in use in every hotel worldwide, these allow the wary traveler to pretend it’s 2AM to trick their body into sleeping just a little more. These are a mixed blessing, though, as everyone who has been woken up by a foreign hotel alarm clock knows when they go to peel back the curtains and let in that first piercing shaft of Death Light. Is there anything more painful after a night of binge drinking? Ah, but I digress…

Communal shower facilities are fine and very clean (albeit not heated very well). The rest of the family (wife, mother-in-law) grok though the morning and we finally get to breakfast at 8:30 AM. A couple cups of coffee start the morning right, as does the presence of a full English breakfast.

The English breakfast, for the uninitiated, is probably the only bit of English cuisine worth eating. No, beans on toast does not count as cuisine. Okay, I’ll make an exception for fish ‘n chips, perhaps, but only without the freakin’ vinegar. The “English breakfast” typically consists of tea, toast, fried tomatoes, eggs, and bacon rashers (slices). Now I have no idea if the English breakfast is eaten by English people, but it is certainly trotted out as the de facto Bed & Breakfast accoutrement, seemingly gratis when you book their 90 GBP (that’s pounds, folks) per night room for three (which is, gulp, US$205).

Perhaps the coolest thing (according to my wife) is the toast rack. This is a typically cheap metal thingy that holds your toast upright and presents it in that oh-so-cute way. See more than you need through this Google Image Search. I swear, my wife squealed with delight when that thing came out, laden with toast.

After breakfast I find out that payment will be taken in cash only. So, I have to go out and find an ATM. Step outside and it is pouring rain. Pouring. Buckets. Digging through our luggage comes up with a solitary umbrella. Sigh. Mom stays put and me and Caryn run through the rain back down to Kensington Road near the High Street Kensington tube stop, find an ATM, and withdraw too much money.

We bum around for a while until shops open up at 10 AM and jump into an H&M and buy me a windbreaker/rain coat. It’s around 50F out and I packed for the 75F of southern Italy, not stupid England. Get back to Abbey House and check out. We drag our bags down to the tube and on to Victoria station. We check our bags into the “held baggage” area for, wait for it, 6 GBP/bag per 24 hours. Nice.

We take a little walking tour around the Victoria station area and stumble upon Buckingham Palace. After a quick lunch at an Asian noodle shop, we take some pictures in front of the gates of the Palace. It is interesting watching tourists (like us) gather around the gates for a glimpse of, well, important people. Semi-important-looking people were dribbling out of the front gate every couple minutes, all dressed up in tuxedoes (at noon) and bright-colored dresses with fancy, fancy, fancy hats. Who were they? No idea. But everyone was taking pictures of them. Doubt they were that important. Certainly no Queen Mother or famous kids.

We were headed out to Rome that afternoon, so time was short. We decided to stay in the area and ducked into the Queen’s Gallery. A small amount of okay art, but the real crowning jewel of the exhibition were the, well, crown jewels. I don’t think they were the official set of jewels, but there were some freaking huge diamond things in a case. Definitely “are these even real” level of huge.

We blew out of there and caught the 14:32 Southern train to Gatwick airport from Victoria station. Upon arriving at Gatwick, we learn that, at least in London, airports are different than the United States.

Instead of, say, a big swath of American Airlines counters ready to get you boarding tickets to wherever, there are single counters that serve particular destinations. So, all of us going to Rome Ciampino airport on EasyJet clamoured into a single line in the South Terminal. Makes kinda good sense, eh? No asking about your destination. Everyone knows what line they are in. You don’t get people in the back of the line whining about their Houston flight that is about to leave so can they pretty please cut in line? Nope. We’re all going to Rome. It also gives you a chance to check out the folks you’ll be traveling with. In one way, you can’t be mean to them because you may end up seated next to them. Interesting.

So we check in and head to the departures lounge — a second difference. Instead of heading into the gate right away like in U.S. airports, all passengers go to a big lounge and wait until the gate of departure is announced on the big plasma televisions hanging all over the place. Seems like they don’t announce them until, say, 30 minutes before takeoff, either. It also just so happens that this lounge, at least in the international terminal, is just jam packed with duty-free shopping. So much, in fact, that it is honestly just a mall with plasma screens with gate information on them. Sigh.

Our flight is called up and we walk with the other hundred or so bargain flight hunters to queue up at the right terminal, a mere 10 minute walk away. Ugh. Now here is where EasyJet policy starts to suck. Like Southwest Airlines, you don’t get a preassigned seat. I call that cattle seating. Instead, your boarding card is marked with A, B, or C. You make your way to this tiny terminal room, no bigger than twice or three times the size of a modern living room. And you stand around. Sure, there are seats lining the walls, but seriously, we’re packed in here like sardines. And you stand around.

And you stand around.

And you stand around.

Wow, this sucks. Almost like Southwest sucks. No one seems to tell us what is going on, or when the plane is going to arrive. We stand around some more. Finally, an EasyJet employee makes a move to one of the two doors on the opposite side of the room and everyone jammed in here stands up and crowds around this pour soul. He opens the door to let more people in from that door, then promptly shuts it. Everyone looks at each other and there is a scramble for the recently-vacated seats. I laugh out loud. No, this is better than Southwest!

Finally, at some point, we all get on the plane. This is the typical mad dash for good seats, with arseholes sitting in a three-wide on the aisle all by themselves, piling their stuff into the middle seat for good measure.

Not only until after takeoff do I fully comprehend the true cost of low-cost airfare. First, eating or drinking anything costs money. Okay, I can handle that. But the real gem is that the flight attendants, basically for the entire duration of the flight, busy themselves (and disturb the passengers) pimping stupid EasyJet products for purchase. Not only do they broadcast this over the PA all flight long, they also tromp up and down the aisle the entire flight with their little cart of shit, stopping to sell to everyone in every aisle.

Oh. My. God. I was already a captive audience at the Gatwick “lounge”, but this is ridiculous. Oh well, I need to move on.

We land in Rome at the little airport known as Ciampino. We blow through customs, pick up our bags, and meet our driver right outside of baggage claim. He brings a nice Mercedes 300 E-class over, takes our bags, and whisks us into the center of Rome to our hotel, Hotel Daphne, Veneto [gmaps].

If I have to make a recommendation to you, the reader, who might be traveling to Rome, I’d take a cab to the center of Rome if you come into (at least) this airport. If you’re coming in in the evening like we were, you just don’t have the energy to train/Metro into the center of town, especially toting a bunch of luggage.

Our driver cost us 55 Euro without tip, and it was an entertaining ride. We drove past the Colosseum, some of the Roman Forum ruins, through downtown, and all over. For the uninitiated, driving in Rome is, ahem, interesting. You can read about the style and aggression, like here, and many other places on the web. It was a thrilling ride, to say the least.

Since I had just come from England, all I had was UK Pounds in my wallet. Told the driver to find a cash machine so I could get him some money, and he drove us to a bank near the hotel. I jump out, insert my Bank of America card, and try to punch in my 8-digit PIN. Italian bank cards have 5-digit PINs, but better yet, the entry field is only good for those 5 digits. Uh-oh. I try a couple variations, but the ATM just balks each time. One of the times, the machine complained that my account was not authorized for international withdrawls. When the machine returns my card, I decide that I shouldn’t risk it, run back to the car, and grab my wife’s card. Her card, linked to the same account, only uses a 4-digit PIN. Whew. Cash in hand, I’m back on the road to Hotel Daphne.

We get to Hotel Daphne and meet the night manager. The hotel, room, and manager are all wonderful. This is an awesome hotel. The pictures on the web site are totally accurate. The room is spotless, very nicely decorated, and totally modern (good for American travelers). Some of the niceties include an electronic safe, air conditioning, WiFi, internet access on a public computer, private bath, refrigerator, and coolest of all — use of a cell phone.

Why other international American-destination hotels don’t do this is beyond me. Daphne provides a cell phone for your use. A simple Nokia phone with a prepaid SIM card in it with some amount of money (~30Euro in our case). Pre-programmed into the address book are emergency numbers and hotel personnel contact information, pasted on the front and back of the phone is the address of the hotel (in case you get lost), and the phone number of the cell phone (all incoming calls are free, so give it out if you need to). The Daphne staff invite you to call them for recommendations when you are out and about — food, drink, sights, etc. They bill you your usage. Simple, elegant, and makes the trip so nice. Truly a well-thought idea. If I ever run a hotel in Europe, I’m doing the same.

Even though it is late, we haven’t had any dinner yet. The Daphne staff recommend a restaurant just down the street, and we wander there around 10PM. A dinner of wine, pizza, spaghetti carbonara, and mussels over pasta welcomes us warmly to Italy. Here, I am introduced to my new favorite appetizer (nay, meal) — prosciutto, tomatoes, and a big, semi-spherical hunk of buffalo-milk mozzarella cheese, all drizzled with olive oil. Oh boy this is good stuff.

After the brief dinner, we head back to Daphne. With a long day of travel behind us from England to Italy, we quickly turn in for the night.

Stay tuned for more…

Our last-minute plan to get out of Boston begins with an early AM flight, May 23 2006, from Boston Logan on American Airlines. Our friendly neighbor Nick gives us a lift to Logan as a cab will run us into $60.

Now one thing I did not know was that you can’t use those nice internet-based flight check-in web pages for international flights. At least not on American. So flash back to the prehistoric days of flight and we’re back, waiting in a long queue to check in for our flight. A couple counters and passport checks later (oh, and like 2 hours) and we’re seated on a Boeing 777 headed for London Heathrow.

I fall asleep when my butt hits the seat. I wake up when the flight attendant brings me my “food”. Now, I make it a habit to put down “vegetarian” as my meal preference on all flights that offer food. One reason is that often, what airlines think of as meat does not meet my minimum criteria for food. Thus, the vegetarian (or vegan, or kosher) meals are often better. It made more of a difference back when airlines used to serve food. But since they can’t seem to do anything but lose billions of dollars per second, well, food had to go. But on international flights, we’re big ballin’, so we get food.

On this particular flight, I learned a second, more sinister reason for checking that vegetarian box when buying my tickets: people go crazy when you get special treatment. And crazy people are hilarious. On many airlines, a vegetarian meal is delivered by hand, from the galley, before the main meal service begins. This gives you, the recipient of said vegetarian meal, plenty of time to watch the wacky people around you that witnessed your early meal arrival crane their necks in your direction and whine to every flight attendant that walks by, “why didn’t I get my food like that guy?”

Trust me. When you’ve had two hours of sleep and were just awakened by the thump of a cold plate of “food” placed in the tray table in front of you, it is hilarious in an evil sorta way.

The plane arrives nearly on time to London and we do the dance of the queues. From the passport line to the baggage reclaim line to the customs line. Ah, humans queue up so nicely, don’t we? Since we’re now starving for actual food, we hit up the Marks and Spencer right there in the arrivals terminal. I am met with some serious sticker-shock when I realize that two, cold, prepackaged, refrigerator sandwiches, a couple bottles of water, and a “sushi plate” costs 12 UK pounds. That’s damn near $24. Yikes. Glad they take plastic.

Munch down the awful food and make our way to the London Underground — or as it is more affectionately known as, The Tube. Tube over to Earl’s Court and switch to the District Line to Kensington High Street. A quick 10 minute walk in the cool 50F weather of London gets us to Abbey House Kensington [gmaps], our home for the night.

Abbey House is a budget B&B right near Hyde Park in a rather nice part of London. I had negotiated with the owner over email to leave the keys in a potted plant on the doorstep as we would be arriving near 10PM. All was well, and we rolled our baggage into Room 11, right on the main floor.

We were greeted with a clean, if not spartan, room with four single beds and a creaky door. There was an in-room sink, and we shared bathroom facilities down the hall. We quickly got into bed and sacked out.

Next up, a quick day of London…

Sometime in early May, we hastily bought tickets for a European vacation. Now, I enjoy soccer (natch, football) as much as the next guy, but Europeans redefine the saying “Love of Sport” when it comes to the World Cup. It just so happens that this gala event is going on in Europe right about now. Combined with the soaring cost of oil, it made traveling to Europe this summer pretty expensive. Okay, rant over.

With flights to London, Rome, and Florence booked only two weeks in advance, it was a chore finding places to stay. A swing through Trip Advisor helped me pick places that we could afford. I didn’t get a chance to do my usual OCD-like search for the best places to stay, but hey, it was last minute and I had better things to do.

So, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before — try and narrate my vacation in some sort of travel-log so that I can hopefully relive the experience better and share a little with friends and family.

It all begins in Boston…