baozi ahoy!

Tomorrow I leave for Seoul and on to Boryeong for Korea's famous (or is that infamous?) annual mud festival. The event lasts a week, but Sam and I plus friends will hit it on the weekend.

Apparently we have to wrastle. I'm going to kick some ass.

Sam, if you're reading this, it's on.

Monday and Tuesday will see me exploring Seoul's more touristy monuments - the war museum is a big draw. No kidding! War, art and summer palaces and in that order. Time to see what Korean heritage has to offer - they've got a lot more of it I'll need to let soak in. And speaking of soak, I heard about a seven-story bath house [jjim-jil-bang] in Seoul I should give a naked-test run.

Wednesday I'm off to Beijing.

I luckily got an invite to stay in the Shangri La World, a luxury hotel near Beijing's World Trade Centre with a friend. The offer's too good to pass up.

This is what the hotel looks like:



Wowza. ("How risqué!" quoth my mother.)

The choices were endless when I started planning summer vacation. It broke down like this: Tokyo would be the spiritual trip (I imagine, in a futuristic way), China is the cultural option, and Thailand would have passed for pleasure. Culture wins, so I'm headed to the gateway of the Orient.

In the meantime, it's swelteringly hot and in between steam showers here in the mountains I can't even get my clothes to dry, so I haven't been posting much, sorry for that. Worse to come -- for the blog I mean, I'll be MIA from the internets starting tomorrow until the 24th-ish. Please don't think I've crashed the motorcycle and died, I'm just riding a slow boat to China and back. I'll take lots of pictures.

On the menu: The Great Wall, Tienanmen Square, The Forbidden City and Peking Duck (called 'Beijing Duck' by the Koreans not surprisingly).

All this and as my brother points out, that Beijing-alleyway dim sum specialty, cardboard-steamed buns. Delicious!