South Korea
There are Korean entry and exit stamps in my passport, but unfortunately there isn't much I can tell you about Korea. I visited Seoul on a Japanese-style business/pleasure trip. Actually, I'm not sure whether it was business or pleasure... Perhaps it's best to say it was a pleasure trip with business companions - I'm not sure that's right either, actually. Here's the deal: In late December most businesses and other types of employment have a year-end party. The board of education decided that for their party we should take a weekend trip to Seoul. So we did... we left of a Saturday morning, were there for all of Sunday, and returned on Monday. It was interesting, but very much a whirlwind trip. 
Seoul is large, the airport (Ichion) is really nice, and in general the people seemed happier than the Japanese. I think one of the most interesting things about the trip is that I got to see Soule from a Japanese perspective, since I was traveling with Japanese tourists and many of the things we saw/visited were geared towards Japanese tourism. It was funny to see Koreans greeting my friends in Japanese, then stutter while switching over to English when they saw a blonde walking up. Another interesting new viewpoint was the way Japanese go on sightseeing trips (ooooh, yes, that lovely stereotype of taking a zillion photos is true) with business associates. I felt as though it was a little awkward, but maybe if my Japanese were better it really would have helped me get to know my fellow office workers better. 
There is a chapter in my first Japanese textbooks in which one of the characters goes to Seoul. This is the lesson we learned how to say "I did (thing one), (thing two), and other things like that," so the character said "I went shopping, ate Korean food, and things like that." And to my surprise, that's really all you do in Seoul. We went to Soule tower, went drinking, went shopping, ate a lot, and saw a few old palaces. Unfortunately, most the brochures were in Korean and Japanese, so I was left in the dark much of the time. We had hired a Japanese-speaking tour guide who practically made love to the bus microphone on the way from the airport into the city, but after that she took the men around the city, and I stayed with the female office workers. The lucky part of this move was that one of the women traveling with us has a friend in Soule, so we met up with her and her boyfriend and they took us around the city, and out to eat. I enjoyed this a lot because it gave me a better view of Korean lifestyle than I would have been able to obtain through a Japanese speaking tour guide. The elections had just been held, and we discussed politics (mixing English, Korean, and Japanese) and international relations and economic philosophy. That was a lot of fun. There was also a lot of Anti-American tension in Soule at that time - two G.I.s had just been acquitted in a U.S. military trial concerning the death of two Korean girls as a result of a car accident. Even on the plane over to Seoul I read a current events magazine with a picture of a restaurant in Seoul with a sing posted reading "Americans not welcome." Perhaps this was one of the benefits of traveling with Japanese folks: I never ran into any problems. 
Unfortunately, however, that's about all I remember of Seoul - tons of shopping where the venders spoke better Japanese, not English; lots of Kimchi (a spicy Korean cabbage dish), and trying to communicate in three languages from three cultures - for less than three days. The morning we were returned to Japan the bus to the airport stopped and we filed into the basement of a large building where an entire gift shop was set up and staffed with Japanese-speakers, with prices in yen (the Japanese currency). Brightly dressed and cheery women offered us samples of kimchi - the last thing I wanted at six in the morning. It seemed like a huge scam, so after a while I went back to the bus and slept. A few hours later I was back in Japan. 
This is probably one of my favorite pictures from Korea simply because graffiti looks cool in Korean! This is actaully from the hill where Seoul Tower is located; it's a hill in the middle of the city and this "decorated" wall in the remains of a defense and watch tower.
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