Networking | One Year Away

A Brighter World

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Jussi Kangasharju

First, apologies for the long quiet period. It was not a case of “start a blog, write enthusiastically for a while, then drop blog”, although that would not be unusual. No, it was a case of a nasty flu, which triggered a whole bunch of follow-up effect, on top of which both kids had the chicken pox. All of that pretty much ensured that between end of October and a week before Christmas, I was able to get in about 2 weeks of effective working time. Then, as things got better, it was time for my cataract surgery.

I had been diagnosed with a rather advanced cataract in my right eye in the summer. Wait, but cataracts don’t just appear in an advanced state, I hear you say. And right you are, they take time to develop and now, knowing what symptoms I should have been looking out for, I know that it first manifested itself about 3-4 years ago. So, why didn’t I do anything about it? Mainly because it wasn’t really bothering daily life until Spring 2012. Further, the only thing I knew about the English word “cataracts” was that it’s something to do with the eyes. I didn’t know what it translated into in Finnish, although I was much, much more familiar with the Finnish term. “Much, much more” as in “it has something to do with eyes and old people”, and since I’m not old, the thought never occurred.

What can you do? As someone said, time passes and different parts start to run out of warranty. (But cataracts really are not at all normal for someone my age. I guess that makes me special. :-)) The only treatment is surgery where they make a small cut in the eyeball, use an ultrasound machine to destroy the bad part, and put in a replacement. The good news is that it’s a very common and simple surgery (as simple as anything about eyes can be called “simple”) and side effects are rare.

Why did I then do it here in Korea? Well, the Finnish doctor who diagnosed me wasn’t very confidence-inspiring and wasn’t really able to give straight answers. (In case you’re wondering, this was at a private healthcare provider who is responsible for University of Helsinki’s occupational healthcare; good news is that the check-up didn’t cost me anything. Sure, it wouldn’t have been him doing the surgery, but still.) I did explain to him that I was going away for one year and getting the operation done before departure would have been tricky, and asked if it would be safe to wait for my return. (If you wait too long, the operation becomes more difficult, so this was definitely a concern for me.) I didn’t get a good answer and The Better Half then suggested to do the operation in Korea.

Turned out that this was a good choice, in more ways than one. First, I got the operation done at a big university hospital (not SNU; it’s a long story and not a comment on SNU’s hospital :-)) and the person doing the operation was extremely competent and I felt at ease. Second, I had already noticed in early Fall that my eyes were getting worse and the doctor confirmed that my case had already advanced quite a lot and he did not recommend waiting for return to Finland. Third, and I will return to this below, I paid about the same amount of money that I would have paid in Finland.

The operation itself was very quick and took about 15 minutes. Before the operation, I needed to wait in the hospital, in a bed for about 2 hours with nurses coming to give eye drops every 30 minutes or so. This brought up a nice cultural observation. Your typical cataract patient is 60-70 years old, so the nurses were addressing them as “mother”, “father”, or “grandmother” (Korean language has no good way of addressing someone in second person singular) but I did not get any special form of address. Maybe that was partly because they didn’t expect that I know Korean, but also because there isn’t really a suitable term of address for that case. In some sense, “oppa” would have been possible and since I do have some style (and live almost in Gangnam), it would have been funny. Alas, they didn’t seem to agree with me having style. 🙁 Yes, I’m fully aware that “oppa” has evolved in the direction of boyfriend in meaning so I wasn’t really expecting it.

In the operation, they use local anesthesia, administered via anesthesic eye drops, and all I had to do was “look at the light and don’t move your eye”. After the operation they kept me there for about 2 hours which I slept. All in all, it took about 6 hours from arrival into hospital to departure. The eye still had bandages on it and they took them off the next morning. And that is where the title of this post comes from. See, cataract means clouding of the lens in your eye, in other words, your world gets dull and fuzzy, but it’s hard to notice since if it’s one eye getting worse faster than the other (like in my case), the stronger eye will compensate. When they took off the bandages, I was treated to this wonderful vision of a bright world with very saturated, bright colors. Admittedly, the first thing I saw was a poster in the hospital hallway, but the image will remain with me for the rest of my life. For days afterwards, I was looking at things and wondering how bright and saturated the colors are. Nice. And the “good” news is that I will get to experience the same thing once more, after my left eye gets the operation in some not-too-distant future.

For recovery, there were a bunch of restrictions on what I could do. The main ones were no water in the eye, no rubbing, and no leaning your head forward. Oh, and you should sleep on your back which for someone like me used to sleeping on my side is a bit of a bother. No water in the eye means washing your hair is somewhat tricky, but doable with a helper. No rubbing the eye is easy and they gave me a plastic cup to put over the eye at night. No leaning your head forward actually crimps your lifestyle quite a lot and makes most daily things somewhat more complicated, especially with kids leaving stuff lying around all over the place, making moving around very slow since I had to scan the floor far ahead and figure out a path that way. Obviously, they also told me to avoid reading and using a computer.

Most of the restrictions are now lifted, but I’m still told to go easy on the computer. On one hand, this means work does not really advance, but on the other hand, the eyes and brain are not quite yet used to the situation and refuse to look at a screen for extended periods of time. Interestingly, my 3rd generation iPad seems to be the easiest to use. I wonder if the retina display has something to do with it. Also, I can notice that the eyes are confused in other situations, since the one that used to be “clear”, is now fuzzy and the fuzzy one is clear.

All in all, a very positive experience and I’m really happy with everything the people at the hospital here did; cannot complain about anything at all. I’ll get my new glasses tomorrow and one piece of good news is that I don’t need as strong glasses as I used to (not that they were strong to begin with). The right eye has a fixed focus roughly at a computer-use distance, meaning that for reading and computer use I won’t need glasses.

But I do have some doubts regarding Finnish healthcare after this episode. See, in Finland you could get a cataract operation done in a public hospital or a private hospital. The advantage of the first one is that it costs about 100 EUR and the disadvantage is that there is a waiting list of at least 6 months and you need a very advanced cataract to be even put on the list. Private hospitals charge 1500-2000 EUR which is about what I paid here. My non-confidence-inspiring doctor in Finland wasn’t quite sure if my case was advanced enough to qualify for the public hospitals. The catch here is that I don’t think I would have been able to wait for it to get worse and then wait 6+ months for an operation. The eye was getting clearly worse during the Fall and was making some things like using a computer difficult. (Then again, I’ve seen on Internet that private doctors in Finland often say that you wouldn’t qualify for public hospitals; not necessarily a good thing either, but not really a fault of public healthcare in Finland.)

The Korean doctor on the other hand said that I really should not wait with the operation, and personally I’d say he was right. If I really wouldn’t have qualified for public surgery in Finland, then all I can say is that I’m left with the impression that the public healthcare in Finland (at least as far as cataracts are concerned) isn’t really good for the patient and considering the taxes I pay, I don’t see that I’m getting a decent return in this case. DISCLAIMER: It is possible that my eye deteriorated quickly between July and November and that both doctors are correct; I’ve heard that cataracts in young people can advance very rapidly and unexpectedly.

With that note, we return to our regularly scheduled programming and I hope I’ll be able to update the blog more often from now on.

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous | 4 Comments

Hiking on Gwanaksan

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

I see it every morning from our window, the Gwanaksan mountain, and I’ve been wanting to hike up the mountain ever since we moved here. (Yes, I’m fully aware that the -san in Gwanaksan means mountain and therefore Gwanaksan mountain is redundant, but see if I care. :)) So, with the Kids spending the night and day at the In-Laws and The Better Half having her classes also on this Saturday, I had plenty of free time and since the weather was cooperating, I didn’t need any further encouragement. Just as a point of note and gloating towards my Finnish readers, the weather has really been cooperating most of the days, with only a couple of days of rain since beginning of September (and one of those was Typhoon Sanba). Temperature-wise, nights can be a bit chilly, but days are still plenty warm.

Anyway, back to hiking, which is enormously popular in Korea. The country is very mountainous and Gwanaksan, being very close to Seoul, as in reachable by public transport, is a popular place to hike. There are tons of hiking paths around Gwanaksan, but of course the most interesting ones are those taking you to the top. Another popular hiking spot near Seoul is Bukhansan on the north side of the city. I plan to go there some other day and go all the way up. I’ve already done little bit of Bukhansan a few years back when the In-Laws lived in that area.

So, off I go, via a convenience store to get some water and chocolate. Koreans take their hiking very seriously and people come equipped for a serious mountaineering expedition, with latest gear from NorthFace or something similar. Don’t worry, Gwanaksan is an easy hike and all you need are decent shoes. If you take the easy way up (I’ll explain these below), normal street shoes would almost be enough, sneakers would definitely suffice; no need for much ankle support on that route. If you take the path from Sadang, you might want to have some kind of hiking shoes, since on a few places you need good traction between your shoes and the rock below.

So, where do you start? There are, as far as I’ve been able to determine, three main starting points: Seoul National University, Sadang, and Gwacheon on the other side of the mountain. There are probably some other places as well (Anyang?), but when I googled for possible routes, those three came up. I figured since I’m already at SNU, I might was well start there and that seems to be a very popular starting place. Every day, especially on weekends, the buses from Nakseongdae station carry hikers to the starting point of the trail.

Bus with hikers. I was a bit slow to catch it, but you can see the bright colors of hiking gear in the bus. I also have to confess that on the way down, as I was sweaty and it got windy, I put on a NorthFace windbreaker, although it wouldn’t serve to camouflage me as a Korean hiker, since it is a drab grey whereas here anything duller than hot pink doesn’t seem to exist in hiking gear.

Below is a map of Gwanaksan and the paths from SNU and towards Sadang. I didn’t do the part to Gwacheon, so I can’t comment on that, but from what I read on the net, it’s pretty easy to find as well. The left side of the map is SNU campus and the blue circle is where I started my hike. This seems to be the most popular starting place on campus. There are a couple of other starting points as well, the two triangles a bit further up and near the main gate, just outside the top-left corner of the map. This path would take you along the small river east of the campus and end up at the red circle. At the red circle, you want to go to the right and down, cross the river, and then go up. It’s really straight-forward and you can’t get lost. The path is sometimes a bit steep and there are stairs to help you. Nothing to it, really and it took me a bit under 1 hour to get to the top, with a couple of short break in-between. (In case you’re interested, the map is from Daum Maps and this app has by far the best maps for Korea, unsurprisingly since it’s a local app. It even includes the hiking paths. If you’re coming to Korea and need a good map app for your phone, I highly recommend it, assuming you somehow manage to get a data connection on your phone…)

The left branch from the red circle apparently also leads to the top, but is trickier. I’ve done a bit of that and you need to have good shoes for it. Both paths should get you to the top.

My path took me first near Yeonjuam temple from where you can continue either along the mountain ridge, past the weather radar, or go down to the temple and then go up. Both ways get you to the actual summit of Gwanaksan and Yeonjudae shrine. These are the yellow circles on the map. Definitely worth seeing.

Here are some views of the forest on the way up.

Here are a couple of panorama shots from the top. That’s the reason why one of the guys on the lower photo looks funny since he was moving as I was taking the shot. If you want to see them bigger, go to Flickr, select “All sizes” from the menu, and take your pick.

The circular dome in the pictures is the weather radar which you can also see from our home.

The main attraction, besides the summit and the views, are Yeonjuam temple and Yeonjudae shrine. The latter is, rather typically of such shrines in Korea, built right on a steep cliff. But the view of the shrine and from the shrine are superb.

Here is the temple which is further down.

This is the weather radar and some rocky formations at the top. Unfortunately the power cords were in the way from all possible directions, so I couldn’t get a better photo.

To go down, I decided to take a different path, towards north and leading to Sadang subway station. I had noticed on the map that at the green circle, a path would take me left and down to home, so I figured that would be a nice shortcut. I never quite figured out where the path was, even with a GPS and the map helping me, but a bit further down the path was another branch to the left with a sign Nakseongdae. I followed that and got home quite easily. This path was not on the map, though.

Obviously, I was not the only person on the mountain, as you might guess. There were lots of people everywhere, but not too much to be actually a bother. Only on my little shortcut down was I alone, save for 3 people who I saw coming up, and 3 older, slightly toasted guys going down. Typically Koreans would have some makgeolli when they get to the top; these guys had stopped a few times on the way down to have some more. Can’t really blame them, it was a gorgeous day for a nice outing.

Here is the main path with people and my shortcut with nobody else on it.

The path down to Sadang is definitely harder than the way up from SNU. I’m not saying it’s really difficult, but it does involve using your hands and going up over exposed rock, so you want shoes with good traction. However the views are way better from the Sadang path since it’s more exposed. The SNU path goes basically the whole time in a forest, coming out only at the very end at the top.

All in all, it was a very nice hike. It took me about 4 hours total time and it was really worth it. Going up was a bit tough, especially towards the end, but as soon as I got up, all tiredness simply disappeared. The views were gorgeous and definitely worth climbing up.

Here are some more photos from the hike.

Nice red leaves

SNU campus from Gwanaksan along the Sadang path. Our home is almost in the middle of the photo.

Posted in Korea, Sightseeing | 3 Comments

Public Transport in Seoul

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

Seoul is one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of a bit over 10 million in the city proper. The whole metropolitan area has a population of well over 20 million, which is pretty impressive, considering that the country has a total population of a bit under 50 million, i.e., almost half of the population lives in or near Seoul. The area of Seoul is about 600 km2. To put it in perspective, for at least the Finnish readers, the combined area of Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa is about 700 km2 for the land areas, but with a population of only about 1 million. This means that during mid-day, the subway is almost as crowded as trains and subway in Helsinki during rush hour. Rush hour here is something different. 🙂

So, with that background, no wonder that public transport here is cheap, extensive, and frequent. Mainly it consists of the subway and buses, although some of what appears to be the subway is actually a train, but then again, subways are trains as well, so going into further details there is like splitting hairs. I haven’t seen trams (and as far as I know, they don’t have them here), but taxis are a real option for moving around.

Although the subway network is extensive, it obviously doesn’t cover every place, such as SNU campus. The closest subway station to our home is Nakseongdae, about 20 minutes on foot from here. The good news is that there is a bus that leaves from the subway station, drives towards campus right outside our building, makes a partial tour of the campus, and then drives back to the subway station. The better news is that the interval during most of the day is less than 5 minutes, meaning you never need to hurry to catch a bus. Comparing that to back home where the bus intervals are at minimum 20 minutes and often 30 minutes. Feel free to ask “why did you choose to live in the boonies”; I’ll happily ignore you. 🙂

Price-wise the whole thing is a steal. Basic subway fare is 1150 KRW, in practice 1050 KRW since using a travel card (T-money card) gives a discount of 100 KRW. The fare does increase a little bit if you travel further, but even the 30 km trip to Ilsan last weekend was only 1550 KRW or so. Taxis, as I already wrote, are extremely cheap (compared to Finland) and plentiful, as in you can catch one on most streets within a few minutes. Then again, that’s how it works in big cities. Price-wise, I can drive half way across Seoul for the same price it takes me to get in a taxi and close the door in Finland (i.e., the starting fee).

But the best part of the whole system is the T-money card. You can also use it for paying in taxis, convenience stores, and some other places. Doesn’t this mean you need to charge a lot of money on the card and then worry about losing it, I hear you ask. Yes, if you use the version of the card where you charge money, then you are absolutely right. However, the most amazingly niftiest thing I’ve ever seen is that credit cards also contain an RFID chip for the travel card and you just show your credit card (or your wallet containing said credit card) to the reader. It automatically adds the fare to your bill and the system is smart enough not to bill every trip separately but instead collects all the trips in one month on your monthly bill. This is simply wonderful and so super-convenient for the user. Why, why, why can we not have this thing in Helsinki? Why do we have that “archaic” system of needing to go to some specific place to charge your card? I’ve thought about this a bit and I think you could easily implement this kind of a convenient system in Helsinki as well, even when you factor in the myriad fare rules and options for charging your card. (In case you start complaining about some weird corner case where the Korean system would not work, tough luck.)

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous, Sightseeing | Comments Off

Ilsan Lake Park

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

The Better Half is taking a nail art class and there was an exhibition on nail art (and other beauty stuff) at the Kintex exhibition center, in Ilsan. Her teacher had encouraged the students to visit the exhibition. Ilsan is basically a suburb Northwest of Seoul and was originally planned to help with the housing problems in Seoul. There are other such satellite cities around Seoul, one of which is Bundang where we were at Chuseok.

Ilsan’s main claim to fame is Ilsan Lake Park, which, somewhat unsurprisingly, consists of a lake in a park. Not just any lake, mind you, this one is claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Asia. Now my understanding of either of “artificial lake” or “Asia” may be somewhat off the mark, but I have a hard time imagining there not being a larger lake behind some dam in China or Russia. My guess is that the artificial part here means that it really was somehow completely man-made, without there being a river to start with. The Han river that flows through Seoul is a little bit away from the Lake Park. I haven’t found any confirmation of what “artificial” is intended to mean in this context, but the photo below gives an idea of the size of the lake. It’s actually a bit elongated, so there’s a fair amount of lake both to the left and right of the photo.

Still, it was a very nice park. The Better Half was off to the exhibition and I was strolling in the park with the Kids. We discovered two play areas, a small island, and a cactus exhibition. One little negative side of the park was the lack of concessions, which became an issue in two cases, as in a suddenly developed urgent need for a toilet and in a possibly more urgent case of needing some ice cream. The first one is the reason we visited the cactus exhibition and the second one we were able to fulfill only after leaving the park. But it made for a very nice afternoon.

There was also some event where local farmers or other food producers were selling their stuff, but since none of them specialized in ice cream, we gave that part a miss. There were a few cows in that event as well, but they didn’t manage to hold the interest of the Kids for more than a minute or two.

In the evening, we visited The Better Half’s uncle who lives in Ilsan. I get along with him really well and the feeling seems to be mutual. In fact, as soon as I had heard that The Better Half would come to Ilsan for the exhibition, my first question was whether we could go visit the uncle. 🙂

We’ve only met three times, but we always have a very good time. I don’t know how much of that is due to the notorious chief of a famous tribe, The Great Boo, seeming to wake up from his sleeping-sickness-induced coma every time we meet, but we always have a great time. In case you’re not familiar with the Great Boo, here is an explanation, courtesy of Edmund Blackadder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6F_egAM5vQ

You can find the rest of the episode on YouTube, I suppose.

To get home, we took a taxi. Going up to Ilsan we took the subway, but that takes about 1.5 hours door-to-door, so late in the evening with two very sleepy/sleeping kids, that was not really an option. The 33 km drive from Ilsan to our home cost us a measly 28800 KRW, i.e., about 20 Euros. The lousy 6 km drive from Helsinki airport to our home in Finland on a Saturday evening would cost me about the same. What are we doing wrong in Finland? Besides not having procreated enough to yield a sufficient population for building a good base for all kinds of services, that is.

Posted in Korea, Sightseeing | 3 Comments

Internet and Geography

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

I’ve noticed an interesting, although not a new, thing about Internet here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the speed which is more than adequate here, or at least if you know what you’re doing. This post will get quite technical towards the end, but if there is a networking nerd living inside you, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it as well.

I already wrote about the 3G connection on my phone in the last post. In uncrowded places I can get a good 5 Mbps downstream which is quite sufficient for mobile phone use and even decent for tethering a laptop. Of course tethering is allowed and included in my 11000 KRW per month payment, as it really should be in any civilized country.

At home, I have an Apple Airport Express for sharing the connection to our multitude of devices. There is an Ethernet jack in every room (living room, bedroom, office corner), as you would expect from building that is only about 10 years old. Since the building belongs to the university, we’re connected to the university network which makes for pretty fast speeds. The speeds vary quite a lot, but the fastest I’ve seen have been around 50 Mbps in both directions, with the curious observation that typically upstream is faster, even way faster, than downstream. In any case, they beat my 10 Mbps back home in Finland (limited effectively by my “remote” location).

Not that I expected anything less, knowing how well Korea is connected to the net.

Now for the interesting bit. Back in Finland, I’m a subscriber to Elisa’s Viihde service, basically an IPTV service where you can record TV shows in their cloud service and stream them later. Officially, the service only supports streaming via the set-top box, but there is a separate client available that can download the stuff you’ve recorded. Since the bandwidth from here to Finland is highly variable, streaming isn’t really an option, but downloading is. The client is a little bit shaky with poor network connections, so that’s where the interesting stuff comes in.

I’m connected to a university network here. University networks typically are well-connected with high speeds through the research backbones. This holds for pretty much all the countries I’m familiar with. My IPTV provider Elisa, being a commercial company and a telecom operator to boot, is connected via commercial networks. If I start downloading directly from their service, my packets jump from the “academic” Internet into the “commercial” Internet right here in Korea, traverse the Pacific Ocean, fly across the US, the Atlantic, and eventually get to Finland. I’m lucky to get 1 Mbps of throughput in my downloads. One hour TV episode being about 1.3 GB, that implies download times of about 3 hours per episode, if you’re lucky and the connection remains stable, which is usually doesn’t. Not good.

However, if I open a VPN connection back to University of Helsinki, the packets still go to Finland “the wrong way” across the Pacific, but they stay in the research networks the whole way through. My IPTV download will then jump into a “commercial” network only in Finland and the interconnection there is pretty fast. I typically get 5-10 Mbps of download throughput doing it this way, which makes downloads reasonably fast and I think even streaming would be feasible. However, the bandwidth does still vary a lot and I haven’t tried streaming.

To non-networking people, the above might sound strange, everything is on the Internet, right? But things are not quite that simple, and in this case, having lived through something similar in my past, I’m able to get my fix of TV and get the Kids their favorite program from Finnish TV as well. Yes, we let them watch TV, but at least it helps maintain their Finnish, or at least that’s how I rationalize my behavior. 🙂

The reason I knew to try this thing was because I experienced something similar in the past. When I moved to France back in 1997, browsing the Web was quite slow because of the poor interconnection between the French research networks and the back-then-still-in-their-infancy commercial networks. In order to speed up browsing, I would open an ssh connection with X11 forwarding to Finland and run the browser on a computer in Finland. Obviously this means that the browser must render its window over the network in France, but the faster connections in Finland and the fast research network between France and Finland actually made the experience of browsing faster than running the browser locally and using the French network connections. It felt a bit perverse, but it worked, and the other Finnish student who was in the same place was using the same trick as well, once we had discovered it.

So, that’s it for this episode of “Internet and Common Sense Do Not Mix”.

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous, Technology | Comments Off

Tips for Tourists

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

So, you are coming to Korea as a tourist and want to avoid paying data roaming fees, since in this age of smartphones, a phone without a data connection is next to useless. Sure, it can make calls (roaming, thus expensive) and maybe send text messages (roaming and expensive, but not as expensive as calling). Maybe text messages? Well, earlier it wasn’t such a given that you could send text messages to Korean numbers from abroad (see previous post) so text messages were a maybe, but these days with a 3G phone they should be ok.

Based on what I’ve seen and know, the options are:

Use your own phone as usual, but you’ll be paying roaming fees which for data are generally nothing short of extortionate.
Rent a smartphone from a Korean operator and use that. I don’t know the fees for data usage, but they won’t be cheap, although they might be cheaper than roaming data. The handset rental also won’t be cheap. You can easily rent these from the airport.
Get a WiFi hotspot pass. These are sold by operators, convenience stores, etc., all around the city and you can choose different prices for different validities. I seem to recall the ollehWiFi web page asking for about 3-4000 KRW per 24 hours, but could be wrong. At least in central Seoul, the hotspots are all over the place, even in the subway, so if you’re in those areas, this is an option. You can of course use these on your laptop as well, but be prepared to needing Internet Explorer on Windows (more on that later).
Get a prepaid SIM from a Korean operator and suffer the high data prices. The downsides of this are having to wait and the high prices, but if you’re going away from the cities and hotspots, this might still be cheaper than roaming data.
Mooch off free WiFi. There are also open access points, not as widely spread as commercial hotspots, but rather widely. One such network is iptime, which is actually the name of the SSID used by the home access points of some Korean operator. Generally these are probably ok, but obviously you are trusting your data to an unencrypted network going via a box you know nothing about. It could be someone setting up a honeypot, but most likely it’s just a home user with an open access point and no bad stuff going on. VPN should help here, though. There are also other such networks, google for them.

Essentially, the options are the same as pretty much everywhere else, with some local caveats on the required bureaucracy. The nice bonus in Korea are the WiFi hotspots which alleviate some of the pain.

Bottomline: Being a smartphone tourist in a foreign country is not easy and if you want to make it easy, it will cost you a lot. For longer stays, Korea seems pretty reasonable and the prepaid plans are actually better value for money than post-paid plans (for my pattern of usage).

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous, Technology, Traveling | Comments Off

Mobile Phones in Korea

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

Addendum: The automatic recharging of prepaid mobile data that I mention below, didn’t quite work as expected. Just something you might want to know in case you go that route.

Ok, I’ve alluded to this post many times already, so now it’s time to write it. I’m also posting a separate “Tips for Tourists” text if you want to know about getting a Korean SIM card or what are your options for mobiles in Korea.

Now I’ve been a proud owner of a Korean SIM card for about 1 month and here’s my own story. I won’t explain the technology and the terminology, but Wikipedia should be able to give you an idea, in case you’re not familiar with mobile network terminology. Don’t worry, most of it is only intended for nerds like me.

Historically, Korea has been “the odd one out”, since they used a CDMA-based system which was more or less incompatible with anything else in the world. Even though the US used a CDMA-based system, the networks in Korea were not really compatible, or so I’ve led myself to understand. Obviously, coming from Europe, I always had GSM phones with me, so I don’t really know first-hand about what the situation was for US phones.

I first came to Korea in 2002 and back then you had two options for using a phone here. Option 1, rent a CDMA phone with a Korean number, which I always did for two reasons. One was to avoid roaming fees and the other was the ability to send text messages to Korean numbers. See, you could not send text messages between Korean phones and GSM phones. Option 2 was to rent a CDMA phone. This was a special CDMA phone which could take your GSM SIM card, so that you were effectively roaming. This whole business of the SIM card actually being “you” (your number, etc.) is the whole beauty of the GSM system and, IMHO, makes it wonderful to use. So, effectively you were roaming in Korea, since you only paid for the handset rental to a Korean operator and paid for calls to your home operator (at roaming prices). These two options still exist for tourists.

Of course with 3G networks, the old GSM/CDMA problem is not slapping us normal customers in the face (it still exists in the background in a somewhat changed form), so you can typically use your 3G phone in Korea, roaming as you would normally do in a foreign country. I got my first 3G phone in 2005 and already that year I could see that the phone was able to find networks here, but couldn’t connect. I suspect that was because of a lack of roaming agreements, since my phone was willing to make emergency calls. After 2006, roaming has been fine with all 3G phones I’ve tried.

Anyway, so none of those options is really attractive if you’re staying here a longer time, so how to get a real Korean SIM card? There are three main operators in Korea: SK, KT, and LG. I’m with KT for the very simple reason that they seem to be the only one who provides good information about their plans in English. (Your browser might give a phishing warning on that website; I think it’s because some other pages under the same domain have been dangerous, but the KT pages seem ok.) So, everything below relates to my experience with KT; SK or LG might be different, but I suspect the big picture is the same.

First problem: Prepaid vs. post-paid? The latter is not an option unless you have a Korean bank account for which you need your Korean identity card (the plastic one, remember?), i.e., you need to be staying here a longer time on some non-tourist purpose. KT will give you a prepaid SIM card after you’ve been in the country for 3 days, even if you don’t have an identity card. If you don’t have the card, your SIM card will be valid for 90 days which is the time you would get to stay when coming without a visa (duration of stay varies for different nationalities, not sure if SIM card validity follows that). As I didn’t have my identity card when I got my SIM card, I initially got the 90 days, but once you have the identity card, just drop by at a KT office to show it and they’ll extend your SIM card validity.

Ok, Korean phone number on a Korean SIM card, safely ensconced in my iPhone 4S. As any iPhone user knows, without a data plan, the phone is basically useless. Until you get your real identity card, you can’t get any sensible data plan. The prepaid card allows for data use, at 0.28 KRW per 0.5 KB. Yes, half a kilobyte (the website says KB, but it could also be KiB, not sure; at that granularity of accounting, this makes a difference). 0.28 KRW doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you do the math, it comes out to 560 KRW per MB. After getting my SIM card, I left the data connection on, used my phone as usual (or a bit more data maybe) and in about 20 minutes or so, I had already spent 2500 KRW. Then I turned the data off. 🙂

I eventually got my identity card and went back to KT to ask for something more sensible. For some weird reason, if I changed to a post-paid plan, I would have to change my phone number. It’s not that Koreans don’t have number portability, since you can transfer numbers between operators, but apparently inside KT, this kind of porting from prepaid to post-paid is not possible. Just boggles the mind, given that in Finland, the ability to keep your number across operators is almost considered a “basic human right”. 🙂 (Updated to add that someone commented offline that in Finland the situation for porting a number from prepaid to post-paid is the same, i.e., it’s a no-go. Why? No idea, but it boggles the mind…)

The other downside of post-paid plans at KT is that calls, text messages, and data are bundled, so that if you need a lot of data, you also need to get a lot of calling minutes and text messages. This makes them rather pricy for someone like me who’s mostly going to use data, with the occasional phone call. Most of my text messages go over iMessage, WhatsApp, or KakaoTalk, so data plan already includes them. With the forced number change, they were mostly unattractive.

The good news was that I had essentially two options. KT (and the other operators) run extensive networks of WiFi hotspots and for about 8000 KRW per month, I could add that to my prepaid SIM card. That, by the way, is not mentioned on the English website, and neither is the other option that I ended up taking. You can also get a prepaid data plan which is volume-limited. 100 MB per month is the cheapest, then it goes to 500 MB and larger plans. The nice bonus is that 500 MB and higher plans include the WiFi plan as well and since the 500 MB plan was 11000 KRW per month, that was a no-brainer. Back in Finland, I had a 300 MB plan which I knew to be sufficient for my use, so I was good to go.

In the end, I’m paying 11000 KRW per month for data (and WiFi hotspots) and calls charged at prepaid rates. Prepaid charging is in increments of 10000 KRW and the credit is valid at least 2 months (longer if you charge more). So far, looks like the 10000 KRW is enough for about 2 months of calling for me, so in the end I’m paying about 16000 KRW per month for my phone. It’s actually a little bit cheaper (a couple of EUR) than what I pay in Finland and I get about the same level of service. Downloads come in at about 5 Mbps, but uploads seem to be limited to about 500 kbps, whereas in Finland I get about 5 Mbps in both directions.

The WiFi hotspots are on one hand nice, but the more I experience them, the more annoyed I get with them. The nice bit is that they are practically all over the place in Seoul. The annoying bit is that KT runs two networks on their access points, both using the same SSID (ollehWiFi). One is encrypted, the other one is not. The non-encrypted one wants you to enter a code on a web page, the encrypted one works right away since it recognizes my MAC address. My phone sometimes picks the right one (encrypted) and sometimes the other one, which means that any network-using application seems to hang. I can manually go into the settings and change the network, but this is highly annoying. I guess I might be able to get a username and password for that network as well, but haven’t looked into it.

In general, I’m very happy with the phone service here, but then again, I sort of expected it from a technical point of view. What I didn’t know were the bureaucratical steps needed, but they were in the end not too bad. In the Spring, we’re moving to California for the second half of this sabbatical and I know that then I will get the third world experience of mobile phones and I’m slowly starting to dread it…

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous, Technology | 10 Comments

Chuseok: Korean Traditional Holiday

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

This weekend has been Chuseok, the traditional Korean harvest festival, also sometimes known as Korean Thanksgiving (although I suspect the last one is more an attempt at explaining the cultural significance of the holiday to Americans, rather than any relationship with the US Thanksgiving). Anyway, it’s a 3-day holiday, which in Korea where holidays are typically scarce, is a big thing. This year there is a bonus, since Chuseok ends on October 1st and October 3rd is also a national holiday, so many companies give the intervening Tuesday off, or people just take their holidays to make a longer break. Me? The intervening Tuesday is my birthday, so I don’t need any further excuses to take a longer break. 🙂

Where was I? Right, Chuseok, which technically is only one day, this year that day having been Sunday September 30, i.e., yesterday. Traditionally, this day entails paying respects to ones ancestors in their old home towns, if at all possible. This also means that roads, planes, and trains are packed over the weekend. My Better Half’s family celebrates Chuseok (and New Year, the other big holiday in Korea) at the home of the eldest brother of the currently surviving generation, which is in Bundang, about 20 minutes south of Seoul. The family originates from well further south, but the gathering of the family happens in Bundang, i.e., Seoul for all practical purposes.

The strong Confucian traditions about male lineage are very clear during these big festivals, and only the male branch of the family is present (with their wives and children of course). We are sort of an exception, since if I were Korean, we would celebrate Chuseok with my relatives, but since my uncle is Finnish, we don’t celebrate Chuseok. So, every time we happen to be here during the right time of the year, we’re invited. So far that’s been Chuseok twice and New Year’s once or twice, I can’t remember exactly.

I consider it a big honor to be invited and I even get to participate in the rituals the same way as all the other male family members. Yes, only guys take part in the ceremony which involves offering food and rice wine and bowing to the ancestors. Women are outside preparing food and the first time I was participating, I asked my Better Half about what I’m supposed to do there. She answered: “How should I know, I’ve never seen it happen.” Anyway, my relatives are very helpful and in the end, it’s only a matter of kneeling and bowing and the latter I learned at my wedding which took place here in Korea, so it’s actually pretty simple in that sense. I really appreciate being able to participate in the ceremony.

The ceremony is followed by food and these feasts are the only times when I can eat kimchi before noon. See, traditionally the ceremony was supposed to be held before sunrise, but these days my relatives hold it at a much more civilized time of around 8 in the morning, which means we get to the table around 9. Anyone who’s been to Korea can think for themselves whether they would be able to eat kimchi for breakfast (I wouldn’t, my stomach is conditioned to the western-style breakfast :)) And of course a little bit of rice wine. The ancestors were nice enough not to drink all of it. 🙂

After the ceremony, we went sightseeing in downtown Seoul. There was supposed to be a concert of traditional Korean music near Cheonggyecheon river in downtown Seoul. See the Wikipedia entry about what’s special about Cheonggyecheon; it’s a very nice place.

Turns out the concert wouldn’t start until the evening, but there were some other traditional Korean things there and kids could participate in making rice cakes, candy, or cookies. My Daughter went to make cookies and there was a Korean TV crew filming that, so now she’s been on Korean TV. 🙂

This is the stage where the music was supposed to be.

The eagle-eyed of you may have noticed that there is a music video playing. Yes, there was and it repeated itself every 15-20 minutes or so, and unsurprisingly, the video was this:

Sorry about that, but given all the hype around Gangnam Style, you couldn’t expect me to blog for 5 months about things in Korea and not mention Gangnam Style. 🙂

After that, we did a short tour of the Gyeongbokgung palace, which had free entrance on that day. We weren’t the only ones there. (In case you want to see more photos from the palace, see my photos on Flickr.)

Today, the last day of the official Chuseok holiday we went to the Seoul Zoo, which is a little bit south from where we live. I’ve been to the zoo several years ago, but that was in February. October is a much nicer season to visit. The Kids were pretty excited to see all kinds of animals you can’t see in Helsinki zoo.

At some point, the Little One took a fixation on seeing the lions and he kept repeating that. Yes, we saw them and he was happy. (I don’t have a photo of them since I was holding him so that he could see over the fence better.) A very nice day as well.

Posted in Korea, Miscellaneous, Sightseeing | 1 Comment

Beach and Sea

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

This update took a while to put together, work got in the way. Here’s the last part of the weekend trip to Seoraksan. On Saturday we went hiking in the national park and on Sunday we went to the coast. We didn’t have any clear ideas of where to go, except to see the sea, walk on a beach, and eat some fish.

There was a tourist office at Sunrise Beach, so we just set the navigator for that place and started driving. After about 20 minutes of driving we passed the place, but you couldn’t make a left turn, so we had to drive about 1 km more to be able to make a U-turn. In Korea, lots of intersections have a specially marked U-turn, so that was not surprising.

Once we got to the place where we were supposed to make the U-turn, we saw that there was also a beach at that point. So, we stopped, got out of the car, and walked around a little bit.

Then we got back in the car, drove to Sunrise Beach and by that time we were sort of getting hungry. Sokcho (the city where this was) is mainly a fishing town, as evidenced by the many fishing boats all over the place.

Where there’s fishing boats, there’s fish and where there’s fish, there’s also lunch. The little guys in the photo below are 시르기, 놀랭이, and 우럭, clockwise starting from the left. About 5 minutes before I took this photo, the guys were swimming (happily?) in a tank.

The rest of them went in here along with some veggies.

Food was very nice. After lunch we asked in the tourist office, what there was to see. They said that about 10 minutes drive away is the Naksansa temple which is in a very nice location.

The temple was basically destroyed in a forest fire in 2005 (and damaged a little bit by typhoon Sanba earlier this summer). The only thing to have survived the fire was the statue below.

In the temple grounds, there were also small piles of rocks, assembled by the visitors.

All in all, a very nice day out by the sea.

The drive back to Seoul on Monday morning was pretty uneventful.

Posted in Korea, Sightseeing, Traveling | Comments Off

Hiking in the Seoraksan National Park

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Jussi Kangasharju

Saturday morning, bright sunshine, warm day ahead. The plan was to go to the Seoraksan National Park today and leave the seaside and other possible sights for Sunday, since forecast had been showing rain for Sunday. The rain didn’t happen after all, so also Sunday was a very nice day for being outdoors by the sea.

Although we could see one edge of the park from our hotel balcony, we had to drive a little bit around to get to the actual park entrance. Since September is not in the highest season, there weren’t too many other cars or people around. I’m not saying that we had the place to ourselves, not by any definition of that term, but the high seasons are July and August (holidays) and October (when leaves turn yellow and red) so it could have been much worse, I suppose.

Parking was easy to find and was quite cheap, only 4000 KRW for the day. The entrance fee to the park was 2500 KRW per person (children were free) so all in all a very nicely affordable experience. In the park we split up. I went up “my” mountain and The Better Half took the Kids and my mother up on a cable car to “their” mountain. The two mountains were on either side of the valley, so I told the Daughter that I would wave to them from my mountain. She didn’t quite seem to buy the idea of being able to see me…

On the way up, I saw a whole bunch of stuff. Mostly the path meandered alongside a dry-ish river, going into the woods occasionally, with some steeper sections covered by stairs, making the climbing not too strenuous. The photos below show some of the views and sights I observed along the way.

This is Heundlbawi Rock which you can push and make it shake a little bit.

At this point, I was only the last set of stairs away from the top. However, there are 808 steps still to go and I needed to start making my way back down, since we would need to start heading back to the hotel at some point and I was the only one driving. So, the top is for the next time.

So, I just enjoyed the view from where I was.

On my way down, I spotted this little guy having a snack.

After a late lunch we decided to try to check out some waterfalls that should have been nearby. Well, at least that’s what the map showed, but when we finally got to about that place, there wasn’t really anything to see (water levels were pretty low) and the Kids were starting to get tired. They had walked (mostly ran, though) admirably throughout the whole day, so it wasn’t a wonder they fell asleep in the car.

On Friday we had some Korean BBQ pork for dinner and it was excellent. On Saturday, we went to another restaurant in the hotel and the food was not bad, but definitely a step down from the Friday dinner.

Posted in Korea, Sightseeing, Traveling | Tagged korea, seoraksan, travel | Comments Off