Across the Yellow Sea

Strange things happen when one is lonely in a 'land far-far away' for over a month. I for one, am amazed (alarmed should I say) at how the month long stay outside India has affected me. Though I have never been an avid follower of Kannada movies, all of a sudden, Raghu Dixit's songs seem to be more enthralling than those of maiden and co. 'Gudugudiya sedi' has become my routine hear-once-before-beginning-work song. Even blogging, which I had stopped almost a year ago seems like an interesting option to pass time. I thought I would pen down (or key down and up) few lines about my first overseas experience as 4 hours of complete idleness has started to take its toll.

As with the state of most of things with my employer, where every moment is filled with surprises (due to lack of planning), I was glad that I was given at least 5 days notice that I would be travelling to Republic of Korea. My fear that I was in for a tough few months proved to be well placed as the air hostess informed me 'goto yolef thenyu' (in English) after taking a look at my boarding pass. The journey was pretty uneventful apart from the dosa i was given for breakfast in the Dragon-Air flight. I would advise any one flying Dragon-Air to leave the poor thing to itself and not to put yourself through the troubles of eating it. We had to switch to another flight that would take us to Seoul at Hong Kong airport. This is where it hit me that Indians must be considered as an omnipresent lot, as there was at least one Indian at every one of 80 odd boarding gates of the airport.

The immigration official at Seoul airport (pronounced as 'Sol') looked suspiciously at my passport for over 5 minutes before he decided to let me through. To convince myself that I was a tough guy, I decided that a jacket would suffice to fight the cold and strong winds in Korea. My first step outside the airport taught me again that I sometimes think too highly of myself. The chillness was beyond any of my imagination and sadly still is.

Another thing that struck me was that Korean roads seemed bereft of any populace. The population density in India places a strong impression on one's mind that every inch of earth is populated by humans, which I realized was not the case. I asked myself 'where the hell are people in this country?' question throughout the journey from the airport to Suwon (my current 'home') for the roads seemed too empty to be real on a Sunday evening.

One more interesting thing here is the multi-compartment aquariums in many of the stores, where fish, octopus and a variety of other sea creatures are kept. To my shock, these turned out to be restaurants, which serve freshly cooked 'food'. Since then, I lost the heart to even try the local vegetarian cuisine, though I doubt if such a thing even exists.

The stay in Korea has been pretty much work-lunch-work-dinner and sleep on week days, sprinkled with occasional late night strolls for playing snooker and bowling, which I have thoroughly enjoyed as I had never tried these sports and I must say that I am getting better with each passing day, particularly at snooker. I have watched some 12 movies until now, all on Saturdays, with Inglorious Bastards being the pick of the lot so far and Aladin being a reminder of all things that are wrong with this world.

Lotte world, an amusement park has been my best outing till date, with rides that range from the gravity defying to the extremely gravity-compliant(even to the level of free-fall) categories. Travelling in metro trains on Sundays has been real fun as you are free to talk your mind irrespective of time and place here as no one understands what you speak anyway. I burn with envy when I see the football stadia here as they have such a plush green layer of grass and comfortable seating arrangements.

I have one more month of stay left and hope to explore more of the 'Samsung/LG-land' (which really should have been the name of this country as one is guaranteed to see either of these billboards every few feet on any street).

Cheers,
Anirudh.