IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I FLEW on a 747, a plane that has been in operation for nearly 45 years and I had never before flown on Korean Airlines. I am happy to report that between the two we had a wonderful flight from Hong Kong to Seoul. But the service didn’t end there.
Off duty but still on the job. Thanks Sunhi
It’s quite a trip from the airport to downtown and Seoul is a confusing place with seemingly thousands of neighborhoods. We had no idea where to get off the bus or how to find our hotel in the Jongno-gu area and were beginning to panic. You see, few Koreans feel comfortable speaking English, even those few who can. Enter Sunhi, a Korean Airline flight attendant who was on our bus. She called our hotel, googled maps and wrote out explicit directions from the bus stop to the front door of the Sun Bee Hotel. We still got lost but we were so close that even I finally found the hotel. Thanks Korean Air — we’ll be flying you to Mongolia in a few days.
Making Dragon's Beard - 2, 4, 8. 16, 32, 64 ...
Despite its size (10.5 million) and the confusing Korean language we managed to walk to the Changdeokgung Palace and the nearby Jongmyo Shrine, two of the must-see places in Seoul. Along the way we stopped to watch a guy make “dragon's beard,” a local sweet, his banter moving nearly as fast as his hands. He began with a hunk of hard honey into which he bored a hole. Then he stretched it into a donut, doubled it, re-doubled it . . . and so on until there were 2048 strands of dragon hair with which he wrapped a handful of crushed nuts. Scrumptious!
Interesting rooflines and colorful decorations of Changdeokgung Palace
The guided tours of the Palace and Jongmyo in English provided more information than anyone but a student of Korean history could possibly want. There are so many rulers and even more spirits to be appeased. The Changdeokgung Palace, though smaller, was actually more of what we expected from the Forbidden City in Beijing. And we were able to wander pretty much at will — at Changdeokgung at least — under sunny skies. Happily we returned to the Sun Bee before the skies opened and the rain came down.
