While Not Working

Many years ago I asked a brand new family member, born and raised in China and newly arrived in Australia, what she first noticed was different about her new country. I expected an answer about food/people/habits and customs. "I can see the edge of the world," she said.  "I can see that line where the earth ends and the sky begins." That would be the horizon, which for her whole life had been a concept well hidden behind smog. I woke up in little old Adelaide, on the edge of the Southern Ocean, after six weeks in a world where at sunset the sun sank slowly into a fuzzy purple haze, and on a clear day distant objects had a haze over them not dissimilar to the fog on your eyes after you've swum underwater in a chlorinated pool without goggles.  I went for a walk along Henley Beach while we waited to move into our next house sit. I could see the edge of the world.

Well, I better get a wriggle on with this, seeing as I'm already home and struggling from post-holiday discombobulation.   We had a late flight out of Seoul so there was time for one last little bit of exploring.  We caught the train out to Dongdaemun History and Culture Park, discovering all these interesting galleries and museums that we no longer had to time to appreciate. We walked around and appreciated the futuristic architecture instead.   And one of us went for a ride on a chair. The airport bus took us all the way out to the airport lickety split, no trouble at all, and I even got a peek at the canal that South Korea had to build because Seoul lost its access to the sea when the border with North Korea got drawn right down the middle of the Han River estuary. Incheon Airport is on an island, reached by impressive bridges.  The tide was out.           Incheon Airport was suitably shiny, with impressive orchids and shiny travelators, a...

 On our last day in South Korea I left Roger to enjoy his morning cups of tea/coffee and walked over to the Deoksogung Palace , just past the Seoul City Hall.  Deoksugung was used as a palace after all the other palaces were burned down by the Japanese in 1592.  It was then the Imperial Palace of the Korean Empire in 1897 and expanded with buildings of both Korean and Western style.  Fire, Japanese colonisation, and demotion to a mere park happened, and then a period of restoration started in 1947-48 and there I was in 2025 wandering around appreciating all the beautiful buildings. Outside the palace walls a huge crowd gathered for an open-air celebration of Easter Sunday, belting out rousing Korean worship songs at the top of their voices, aided by a very effective sound system.  Inside the palace grounds, the music provided a rousing and vaguely patriotic sound track to the centuries of history and beautifully decorated traditional buildings. Traditional guard...