Been a while...

So, I've been in Korea for 3 weeks or so and it's a pretty sweet place.

Had some success yesterday with longboard glue, thankfully! I noticed my longboard was delaminating along one of the plys and went on a massive search around all the DIY stores I could possibly find. I ended up with some rubber general purpose adhesive (doh) and some "Strong" craft glue. The craft glue didn't work.

Eventually I decided to go into this huge shop called "HomeCC". Now, i'd looked through the main entrance and all I saw was a massive lobby with no one in it. This seems to be a traditional tactic in Korea, rather than putting what you're selling near the entrance, replace it with a nice open space to waste. Oh and make sure you have a desk or something so you can employ someone to do nothing for you. Anyhow, I ventured upstairs (at this stage I was seriously wondering what I was going to find, if it was the UK, i'd be in an office building). Thankfully I found 3 floors of DIY stuff and more importantly, Titebond III! This is the best woodglue in the world. Happy days!

So, apart from longboard related disasters, everything is going pretty well. My miniboard lost a large chunk of wheel yesterday, but I can deal with that. Went screen golfing yesterday, that was fun. Korea is the ultimate masochistic society it seems. They enjoy any sports that they can't possibly do, like golfing. Korea has no open spaces which could be converted to golf courses, yet golfing is like a national pastime. Anyway, they solve this dilema with screengolf, where you hammer golfballs down a green that's projected against a wall. This seems odd, but is great fun. Unfortunatly, although I kick ass at putting, my golfing is pretty terrible. As a result, the machine got hit more than a few time with strange richochets....

The scariest thing I've found so far in Korea are the roads. Like the matrix, most laws in Korea can be bent, some can be broken. It seems more like the drivers are heading towards breaking on the whole though, especially traffic lights! Here's the standard reaction drivers have:

Light on green: Drive faster.
Light on red: Put on hazard lights and/or beep horn. Drive faster.

So basically, it seems to be perfectly acceptable to break the law as long as you have you lights/horn on. This also applies to pedestrian crossings. Actually, pedestrian crossings are interesting. They have the standard green man red man ones that work on the above rules, then there's the non lit ones (like zebra crossings in the UK). The trick here is to slow down enough so the pedestrian doesn't want to step out in front of you, whilst appearing as if you're slowing down to stop. As a pedestrian, this gets very irritating. You're standing there waiting and then they slow down, but you don't want to get killed so you stand there. They get slower and slower then literally crawl across the crossing, however by this stage you can't cross the road as there's a car moving at 2 mph blocking it. As a result, you spend a lot of time waiting at crossings.

Leaving for Jeju island on Saturday, which should be a lot of fun! I'd explain, but wikipedia is better than me at that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju-do

Dubye

Successfully managed to get to Dubai, which is no surprise considering my excellent sense of direction and signs in more than one language. Thank god for the English language. Not sure if my board made it too, or whether some Gatwickien has nicked it, but I suspect I'll find out soon enough.

Ate a big mac. I figured since I had sushi in London I should follow it up with a burger in Dubai. Now to complete the trend of eating the wrong things in the wrong places I just need to have a curry in Seoul :)

What surprises me the most (apart from the huge McDonalds) about Dubai is that the palm trees in the airport are fake. That's a pretty poor job, the can even grow them in the Isle of Man! The other thing the surprises me is the clothes, or rather, the combinations. Beautiful dresses and stuff like that, but they're all wearing Adidas trainers. These people need some serious fashion advice. But I'm probably the wrong guy to do that.

No pictures because I don't have a camera. But imagine a huge building with lots of people. And chrome, lots of chrome and glass. Could be improved by putting the ceiling on the floor and making a huge half pipe, but meh, skateboarding is probably against the rules over here.

Very excited about the open free wireless. I had to uh, do naughty things in Gatwick to get net. It was all BT openzone and such, buggers. But incidentally, if you're ever there just stroll down to the big fountain and look for:

BSSID: 00:15:70:37:0F:1D
ESSID: 076
WEP: 43EEE0F541793259DFA9AE2547

But don't tell anyone I told you.