Korea:


Two days off in Berlin after Lisbon. Genius decision. I did laundry and ate lunch with friends and hung out in children’s playgrounds (with a friend’s child, not just by myself). Very mundane stuff; it was a well-needed intermission. It’s not normal to spend your life flying around with Rock-Stars. It does bad things to your self-image; in all sorts of ways. On our next break at the end of Australia I was offering to do people’s ironing for them. Do you think it’s a cry for help?

We all met again in a departure lounge at Frankfurt airport. The tour party--who‘d flown in from places as varied as Berlin, Malaga, New York, London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Nice & Leeds--and three hundred Koreans flying home. It was a precursor to being in Asia: very busy; very noisy; and very exciting.

On the flight there was a problem with the air conditioning, they couldn't start it while we were boarding at the gate. It was so hot for the forty minutes prior to the engines being turned on. People were getting testy, everyone’s clothes were soaked through. It wasn’t a good start. One doesn’t like to start a ten-hour flight smelling like yesterday’s meat, never mind share a plane full of people doing the same.

Once we got going it was okay. There were enough things to play with on the business class seats to keep everyone amused.

We didn’t go to Seoul. The airport and the show was at Incheon, about 2 hours outside of the capital. The rain drizzled and everything looked oppressive, in quite a cool way. In fact, although we all wanted to go to Seoul it never happened. The 2-hour drive seemed impossible and I suspected that no one could be bothered to take us and consequently used a convenient rainstorm as an excuse as the "roads would be too dangerous." Even though the storm was bad it felt like a very Korean way of telling us to stay put. I got the feeling as with Japan and China, people don't like to say "no" directly.


Instead we wandered around the backstreets of Incheon's Chinatown (allegedly the only one in South Korea) before the show. It ended up being quite interesting, if only because wandering through the backstreets of any big city gives you a sense of place not always afforded to the visitors of Downtown or the tourist routes.




I liked the gritty, industrial feel of Incheon. The view from my hotel was of two scrap metal freighters being unloaded. I’m a geek for things like that so in many ways I felt right at home. The whole city felt like an industrial grinder, second-hand tyres stacked high by the roadside; store fronts selling only huge chains and shackles for the ships in the harbour; giant freighters full of cars putting out to sea.















It rained constantly while we were there, giving everything a post-nuclear holocaust kind of feeling. Our Korean hosts, and the staff at restaurants we visited, insisted we use umbrellas all the time to protect us from the rain, even when jumping from taxis to the restaurant. We asked why, and they told us there was so much pollution in China it made the rain in Korea acidic. We were lucky; the rain in the winter when millions of Chinese are burning so much more coal is allegedly much more toxic.

That was a stroke of luck, eh?