Posts

South Korea

Image
My friend Andreas and I took a detour from Japan to visit South Korea. We checked in at the New Seoul Hotel, and I appreciated the name for its bad dad joke. Since the artist Psy was the catalyst that exploded K-pop’s popularity into the Western mainstream with the global mega-hit Gangnam Style in 2012, I made Andreas follow me all the way to Gangnam on the subway to see the Gangnam Style statue. While K-pop had already been building a massive following across Asia for over a decade by then, it was this song’s popularity that served as an unprecedented global breakthrough. The release shattered cultural and language barriers, becoming the first-ever video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube and fundamentally changing how Western media and audiences viewed the Korean music industry. It was pretty hard to find the statue, so we got lost and accidentally stumbled across the Starfield Library in the COEX Mall first. The two-story library has 13-meter-tall bookshelves and more than 50,0...
Post a Comment
Read more

Japan

Image
The trip started badly with no sleep on the plane, and then my friend Andreas and I got lost on the subway. First I went to the wrong hotel, and when I finally found the right one, the machine that I was checking in at said there was no reservation in my name. The problem was fixed in the end, and when I finally got to lay down in my hotel bed after nearly travelling for a full day and night to get there, I was exhausted and thought, why did I even bother to do all of this when I could have stayed at home. We soon went out in Shinjuku in the evening, and I saw fat rats running around the street at the same time as girls were standing outside bars trying to get guys to go in. It felt almost like the red light district, and soon we would go by a park where there were prostitutes lining up outside of it. So the only positive thing to take with me from the first day was that I got to see the Godzilla head overlooking one of the streets and that I had some great food at Shogun Burger, wher...
Post a Comment
Read more

Egypt

Image
After my horrendous first trip to Africa when I went to Morocco, the worst country I've visited so far, I wasn't looking forward to travel to Egypt anymore. This was the first time I had no enthusiasm for going travelling and when we got there I could see the same poverty as in Morocco. Even though it was 04.00 in the morning and hard to see that much when going through the outskirts of the capital Cairo to go to Giza where the pyramids are located in the Sahara Desert. My friend Andreas and I would be staying at a hotel right in front of one of the seven wonders of the world but it was so dark when we got there and we were so tired, that all I could see was a top of one of the pyramids in the distance before we entered the hotel and got a room with a view of a wall in front of our window. The receptionist said there had been a crazy man staying in the room that was supposed to be ours so they needed to renovate it before we would be able to stay there, so we would have to stay...
Post a Comment
Read more

Morocco

Image
 Hello Africa! Tell me how you're doin'? My friend Karl-Henrik and I arrived in Marrakech in Morocco at night after a long day of flying with a stopover in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It was my first time in Africa and the last continent to discover if you don't count Antarctica. We were welcomed by chaos in the traffic where a guy casually ate a sandwich at the same time as he almost crashed his motorcycle with no helmet on his head. He then drove against red light, parked in the middle of the junction and then started to drive against the traffic. It turned out he wasn't suicidal, it's just how they do it here. When we arrived at the riad a guy quickly took my bag out of the truck and headed into an sketchy alleyway and I wasn't sure if he just stole my bag or worked for the riad. It turned out to be the latter one. We realized they have great photoshop skills in Morocco because the riad turned out to look nothing like the pictures. The linens were stained a...
Post a Comment
Location: Marocko
Read more

Panama

Image
I went out on the balcony of the cruise ship that would take my friend Andreas and I to the city of Colón in Panama. It's where the Panama Canal begins on the Atlantic Ocean side of it. Our plan was to change the cruise ship for a smaller boat and travel through the canal all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and end at the port of the capital Panama City.  I could see a lot of big vessels with containers heading from and to the small opening of the canal and it felt like rush hour for boats.  I wasn't that into going on the canal because it seemed more like something you should do, rather than something you will actually enjoy. But now that I was this close I started to change my mind. We jumped on a bus that would take us halfway through the small country, so we would be able to go through all the locks on the other half in the canal before it was time to be back at the ship again. Colourful houses greeted us in the cruise port, but as soon as we boarded the ...
Post a Comment
Location: Panama
Read more