Today is Wednesday of our first week. I am very proud to be back in the rhythm of presenting this material as I have on other trips. What you are reading is the third edition of this front page. It starts out as being the only content of the web site. Then as I develop content, it becomes what it presently is, thoughts for the day, and then in the final stage, it is an overview once the trip is finished. Right now, this content which was on the front page has been moved to its “home” BUT there are not pictures or real content about our Wednesday in Seoguipo. That will come, maybe. Right now I have just moved this text her to free up the Korea home page for other musings!
Today is a staying day. We are in Seoguipo for the day. That does not mean we stay here, just that we wake up here and go to bed here. No packing, very little pressure to make a train or find a route. One of the main goals of this trip is to entise Kim to come on more. I really enjoy traveling. Maybe not the day to day anxiety of wrong place for lunch or lost reservation, but the gestalt. I think that Kim is mainly on this trip in the role of a mindor for me. In years past, one might have been afraid of my misbehavior. And certainly that continues. You can’t imagine how terrible my shirt looked yesterday with BLACK sweat stains completely covering the back and the droopings from at least one meal in evidence. But mainly Kim is concerned? about the eye sight. I really would not be able to drive without her assistance. I love the driving but there are things that come late to my consciousness like cones low on the road or a man yelling for us to move left while I am concentrated on moving left, focused on the traffic in my review marrow and not the man.
Sooo, will Kim decide to continue to travel with me? I am very much looking forward to my normal yearly routine of riding a bike in Cancun, CA, and Lagos. I don’t really expect her to come on those trips. She does come on CA as that has now moved to include a March 22 grandchild Thomas birthday. We have talked about trying to substitute or insert a 2 week winter ride trip in Texas. Kim is interested in a next big trip, her motivated, to Austrailia. We had to abort a trip to Japan as Covid started. Certainly I am more than happy to continue to travel Asia and I probably would like to get back to Europe. Kim went with our younger daughter on African Safari without me in the close of 2023.
A major focus of my traveling in the past, or at least a constant enjoyable supporting companion, was drinking. My liver spoke up in the sping? of 2023 and asked for a change. I did not have any symptoms or problems, just a test number that motivated doctors to engage with me on the topic. As you can imagen, drinking is a habit. Luckily I have a character trait of being obsessive compulsive. I do the same thing over and over. Drives the bar tenders nuts that I order the same food and drink! And certainly the obsessive is a part of the drinking. One gets in the habit of drinking. But the other side is that it is possible, and I would propose easier, for an obsessive person to substitute another activity for the drinking when such is necessary.
At home in NH, I am in pretty good shape on this topic. I have a HUGH collection of non-alcoholic beers and consume them nightly along with a non-ending supply of snacks. I have pretty much been able to duplicate this activity in Cancun, Lagos, and of course CA. It is a little harder in a new local like traveling to a different city every 2 days in Korea! I have seen one can of non-alcoholic beer in a 7-11, and bought and consumed it! Last night at a brewery here in Seoguipo Kim reported there was one non-alcoholic beer on the list. (Most menus, 80%?, in Korea are on video screens at the table. Switching to reading glasses and placing my head closer might allow me to make something out of the material but generally Kim has assumed the role of reading me the selections.)
Sooo, this drinking substitution game is going to need more focus in the coming weeks as we move inland. I can just skip the beer at lunch at least every other day. The ones they offer I assume are fairly low alcohol BUT one liter! I have settled on normal Ginesse cans for regular home use. I am very addicted to the non-alcoholic Ginesse at home. And actually, in my world of interesting beers, Ginesse is usually fairly low in alcohol.
The two other components of my “put Tom to bed” routine are snacks and TV. Some nights I will work on this web site but it is good to have a TV alternative. So far every changer in the hotels has had a YouTube button. I don’t think we even turned on the TV in Seoul, Just too otherwise occupied. The one in Jeju City was really inconsistent. Of course a contributing problem is that I can not interpret the purpose of the buttons. The one that says YouTube is fairly obvious but there are lots of others! I could ocationally make YouTube appear but other times I could not get it to work. When it did work, I could not use search as all the prompts were in Korean. No Roman alphabet.
I took the changer to the front desk. They tried to exchange it but I was able to communicate that it worked fine, was not broken, I just needed help operating it.