first impressions
> the people
- very nice, clean, well dressed (perfect casual style, just to my taste), amicable, polite
- the girls are pretty, well kept, well dressed, no tattoos, no weird hair colors, no piercings and they all look and act like women
- the most beautiful white people are more beautiful than the most beautiful asians but also the worst white people are also worse than the worst koreans
- the men are tall even for your average european, plenty over 180 but close to nobody has more than 185
- aesthetically, koreans > japanese
>the city
- so far it seems like your usual globohomo metropolis, at least in the center
- could be any other out of 200 cities on this planet
- hana financial is everywhere; they have their own mini city between Incheon and Seoul
- very crowded, to give an idea roughly same metro area as my city's metro area (considered crowded by euro standards) but 5x the population
- the Seoul region (12kkm) is just a little bigger than one county where i live but has 26mil population versus 2.5mil (county pop plus capital metro area)
- very little green space, during days like this the gigantic han river and the sea 40minutes to the west give humidity and with 33C it gets very uncool; luckily for me I left from 37C but back home I have trees on every street; here you don't
- it's kind of dirty; they leave their garbage sorted in the evening right on the street in bags; it gets picked up but looks ugly
- wires everywhere on back streets; even in poor the outskirts of my shithole everything is being put underground; here 500m from Myeongdong there's piles of garbage and wires hanging
- busted sidewalks; you can see they're new but very few portions are perfectly straight (like SPB palace plaza is after 300y) - seems the art of perfect sidewalks is a northern europe secret.
- open stores everywhere at all times (you can't go hungry like in western europe after 6pm)
- cheap food but I don't like it; will try again tomorrow one last time
- Lotteria has good burgers, locals go there more than mcdo and bk
- no niggers thank God; only a few tajiks and uzbeks selling kebabs in russian
>the airport
- gigantic, i thought it would never end (kinda like schiphol from what i've visited - frankfurt is probably still bigger)
- public transport is perfect except the subway where on the platform it's very hot and humid (trains are air conditioned)
- very good destination for shopping (i entered Lotte Mall for a few minutes before closing time 20:00! and it looked like good stuff for good pricing)
It's far easier on the eyes to walk in Seoul than in Berlin where everyone looks like a freak.
In terms of city design europeans have no rival yet; our love of gardens and flowers and parks is unmatched (I need to check Japan and China too but I doubt much would change)
All in all you can see they're a young nation that does not have a history of being rich and just came into money, built everything everywhere very fast but with little attention to the years that will follow.
It's like an RGB build with intel 14900K.
tomorrow is the first of 3 days for attractions and visiting starship ent building.