flickering pictures

Told you they’d be worth the wait. : ) More pictures and a much-belated post soon…

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As I write this, I’m sitting in one of Pusan’s Internet cafes — or “pishi bangs” — surrounded by twenty-something guys laughing and smoking and blasting the hell out of each other online. We got in this afternoon on the KTX, a blazing fast train something like France’s TGV that can hit 350 km/h. Safety [...]

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So it’s been a couple of days since my last post — sorry for that — but all is well and we’re gearing up to head to the port city of Pusan tomorrow morning. I live in a pretty cosmopolitan city, and as such there are large ethnic and linguistic communities there, but it was [...]

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South Korea’s president is not a popular man. He’s not so much George W. Bush unpopular — more like the bastard love child of Joseph Stalin and Richard Nixon unpopular. People here hate him like they hate Mondays, mortgage payments and bumper-to-bumper traffic. And no one seems to know why. Nevertheless, they’re mad as hell [...]

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It was a long, long haul, but it was so worth it. It took one short flight from Montreal, one busted airplane hydraulics system, a six-hour wait in Detroit, a looong trans-Pacific flight over Manitoba, Yellowknife and Alaska to Tokyo, and a mad scramble through Japanese security to catch a delayed (for our benefit — [...]

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For the next three weeks I’ll be gallivanting around beautiful South Korea — hopefully with a little side trip to Japan — and doing some much-needed backpacking. I likely won’t have Internet access every day, but you can expect occasional updates on where I am and what I’m making of this gorgeous place, as well [...]

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That beast up there is Tokyo’s subway map (click the map for a larger image), and it scares the bejeesus out of me. According to Infoplease, it provides 2.6 billion rides each year, and is over 281km long. Tokyo’s subway is by no means the longest though — the Beijing network, pictured below, is set [...]

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I’d heard the rumours and seen the Seinfeld episode, but I’d never actually seen pictures of Japan’s drawer-style hotel beds. They’re apparently quite comfortable, even if they do look like Easy-Bake Ovens. From a neat write-up on the aptly-named Cool Things in Random Places: These hotels are available all over major Japanese cities — especially [...]

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Contrary to popular belief, there’s an excellent chance that buckling up your airline seatbelt will save your life. The International Herald Tribune tells us why: What’s the point of listening to the safety instructions given by flight attendants? If there’s a crash, everybody dies, right? Most airline passengers apparently feel this way. More than half [...]

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For many adventurous young Canadians, the cross-country drive is a quintessential part of the list labeled “things to do before I die” — and almost a citizenship requirement in some circles. But we’ve got nothing on these guys. The ButterflyBus leaves London’s Victoria Coach Station around 10:00 a.m., and fifteen days later reaches its ultimate [...]

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