Seoul 2006 - Part I: Cityscape of Seoul

I visited Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, for the first time from the evening of 24th through the morning of 28th March 2006. It was in many senses educational. Which means how little I knew about this neighbouring country to Japan.

The first thing that struck me was how similar the cityscape of Seoul is to that of Tokyo. But people there, of course, speak Korean, not Japanese, and use Hangeul - Korean alphabets, which are totally different from Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana) - for all signboards. So all I saw looked what I'd seen before in Tokyo, which was not the case. This dazzled me a lot. To be fair, it's probably partly because I came directly from London, not from Tokyo. My images of Tokyo were not quite accurate as it was one year and three months ago when I last visited Japan's capital city. Still, the fact that this was my first time experience of visiting a rich country that doesn't use European or Japanese language probably enhanced my confusion. (Continued to Seoul 2006 Part II: Korean cuisine.)