Welcome to Korea

I always thought it would be a little appropriate to die in Seoul, like kicking off in Hell North Dakota. Despite my best efforts though, my plane landed without crashing. More people speak English in Korea than in Idaho, according to my informal airport statistics. What’s more impressive is that without a common tongue Koreans become celebrity doppelgangers. I saw a Korean J Jonah Jameson and a Korean William Defoe. I tried to get a picture with Korean Sean Pen before he decked me.

The trip to the hotel itself was relatively painless as well. The Hotel June comes equipped with a special “tourist restaurant” that serves Cesar salad and fried chicken. The hotel room itself, though, is a different story.



All the power is linked to a hotel key that you have to wedge on a pressure plate like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. This tends to be a popular architectural option in fantasy video games, none of my tour books mention this (or contain the phrase “do you speak English” in Korean for that matter), so I bumbled around what I hoped was really my hotel room like a caveman in an eighties sitcom. To further complicate things, all of the buttons for the lights are in a single universal panel, the kind they have in the horror film about the automated house that goes crazy and kills everyone who lives there. Yes I’m sleeping in a crazy room. Why else equip every room with a “simple descending life line.”


Some things to know about your Korean hotel room: if you don’t close the bathroom door before playing with the Bidet, toilet water will shoot onto the bed fifteen feet away. I know it’s very chic for Americans to make fun of Bidet, but my actually has a butt massage feature. There’s no air conditioning, but I get all the free butt massages I can stand with my room. If I hit a button and a hooker-bot drones out of the wall, I’m writing AAA about the best hotel ever. I already get both regular and bathroom slippers and a bath robe with super tiny sleeves, which make things twice as hospitable here as at home

Although I’ve been unintentionally training for the jet lag by staying up until six AM every night, I’ve had six non-consecutive hours of sleep in the past fifty and I am beat. More soon, or when I get to somewhere to plug my laptop into.