Got up early this morning... a truck selling garlic (마늘 [manɯl]) drove past very slowly and very noisily.

waking up in the Land of Morning Calm

I was going to do a video about travelling to Korea, but I started to take it in Heathrow and forgot to switch my camera off. It seems like I must have recorded hour after hour of inside my backpack before my battery finally gave up. After a long flight from Heathrow I reached Dubai. I wanted to try some Arabic in the airport, but everyone spoke English and a muttered 'aywa or shukran here and there really isn't enough to get by. Once on the plane, I really enjoyed the view from my window. We flew over Inner Mongolia where the landscapes were especially impressive. Suddenly, I'm descending through the seemingly impenetrable fog and am racing to beat the queues through immigration in the spotless Incheon Airport. Ray and Lisa kindly meet me at the airport and we take the bus out of Seoul to Ray's house in Cheonan. Korean buses are fast: they even have their own lane on the motorways. We're not fast enough to beat the rush hour or the impossibly heavy rain, though, and the journey takes longer than we expect. We meet Ray's mother at the bus station, and together we have a delicious dinner in a place nearby which serves 숯불갈비 [sut̚p͈ulgalbi] 'charcoal-fire-ribs', rib meat cooked on a charcoal stove. After spending a nice evening out and at home, it's time for bed.

At 05.00 I can't sleep anymore, I'm too excited. And, the noise of the cicadas (매미 [mɛmi], they make the noise 맴맴맴~ [mɛːmɛːmɛːm]), which I'm not yet used to, is too loud. As the sun rises and it gets lighter, I can start to admire the view outside. Later, we sit down to a breakfast which is huge by my standards. There's kimchi soup, chicken stew, beef stew, garlic stem, burdock root, pickled sesame leaf, dried pollack, dried squid... all so so so delicious and really fun to try. The thing that caught me off guard at first was the dish full of raw crabs, still in their shells, ready to eat. They're a couple of inches across, so you can just pick them up and eat them whole. Once you get past the initial strangeness of crunching through the shell, it's actually quite a yummy thing to eat.

Test

This is a test.