Seoul for a day.

The past week or so have been pretty stressful. For those of you that didn’t know, and that is almost everybody, I had to go to leave the country for a little while to renew my visa. It sort of came down to the wire because my work visa is in the mail and we waited until the last day for mail to find out if it would arrive on time or not. So Friday afternoon I got a ticket to Seoul for Saturday afternoon, which was the last day I could legally stay in Japan. I had a particularly crappy day last week when my boss said “You are going to have to pay for this, of course.” As if they had done everything by the book on this and it was all my fault. I had a wee argument with them and they sheepishly agreed that they should pay for part of the ticket. Whether this has any further repercussions or not, I don’t really care. There were other stressful things going on last week, but I don’t really feel like getting into that here.

Seoul was very nice. It isn’t as good looking of a city as Tokyo, and I think the people might be a little ruder, but that is somewhat refreshing. Dave and Erin were wonderful and gave me as good of a tour as they could in the short amount of time I was there. I repaid them with tales of Calgary and dumping my iPod onto their computer. What else? I bought some new shoes in Seoul. I am not sure of what occasion I can get away with Tron Adidas, but I intend to find out. I also bought a $4 tie and some fake Armani socks for $2 a pair. They are so thin I can see my feet through them.

Then as fast as I was there, I left. An hour spent trying to get a taxi in rush hour in the rain, then drove to the hotel. An hour and a half on the bus. An hour and a half waiting for my plane. Two hours on the plane. An hour and a half on the train. I would rather have been at work. Regardless of that, when I get home I have this waiting for me:

My roomates are pretty good to me.