Author archive
13 July 2023
Elusive bus tickets We woke to strong morning sun around 0630. The ground appeared wet from rain earlier. I headed around 0715 to a supermarket to get some fruit, milk and yoghurt for breakfast. By the time I had showered, shaved and did some planning, it was around 1000 despite my early start. The information […]
12 July 2023
Above: View from our Uskudar cafe while killing time. It was a repeat of yesterday morning in that Kim went sightseeing without me. This time it was Istanbul’s Roman Basilica Cistern, which I had only been to last year. With no queues soon after its opening time of 0900, he was back in no time. […]
11 July 2023
I finally had some “me time” and chilling this morning. I had recommended that Kim visit the Dolmabahce Palace, which I had visited on a previous visit. He did that while I relaxed in the room and then the hotel lobby. I didn’t emerge from the hotel till our lunch together. We bought some sweets […]
10 July 2023
Islands-hopping on the public ferries Being such a glorious morning, we thought we’d go island-hopping on Istanbul’s public ferries once more. Google Maps wasn’t too helpful with the public transport schedules to the islands by ferry because it’s a little faster to go by underground then change to a ferry. It did show a ferry-only […]
9 July 2023
Conquering jetlag We were surprised to have slept till 0615 despite the 6h time change from Seoul. [Edit: It turned out that we adjusted to local time straight up as we had no issues on subsequent days too.] We had an early breakfast soon after it opened at 0700. Looking up my notes from my […]
8 July 2023
Getting to Incheon airport Today, the plan is to fly to Istanbul on staff standby tickets. There are three flights during the day with one to two hours between each one of them and a final and fourth flight at night. We chose to try Asiana Airlines at 1025 as it would be silly not […]
7 July 2023
Wall Museum We woke earlier than yesterday but with a less “full-on” day ahead, we took it easy and had breakfast later. We headed out to the nearby City Wall Museum to take a look at the history of the city’s wall. The displays were very well done, showing the scale of the wall and […]
6 July 2023
Hanok Bukchon Sunrise in Seoul now is about 0500. I stirred around 0600 and fell back asleep till 0740. We ventured downstairs to the good hotel breakfast around 0800. I had hoped to have an early start to avoid the expected 33 deg C heat but it wasn’t mean to be. We left around 0900 […]
5 July 2023
Above: Dongdaemun Design Plaza. Flying on the Airbus A220 We have an 1145 departure from Naha airport to Incheon today. We left by monorail after 0800 and got to the airport 3h before the flight. As today’s flight on a small plane, an A220, I didn’t expect check-in to be open that early. I did […]
4 July 2023
Mass suicide bunker The mall in which Banana Car Rental is located opens at 1000. But they had set up a desk outside for our 0930 collection in a highly professional and organised manner. We turned up a little earlier and managed to hit the road in our Suzuki Solio at 0930 heading to the […]