Snoozing in Seoul Starbucks

Today I went to Gwanghwamun 광화문 (my friend typed this -if you can't read it, try 'unicode' encoding) Gate in downtown Seoul for lunch with my friend Binh. His office - which has a view of Seoul from the nineteenth floor - is there. I was so completely exhausted from my two flights yesterday that I could barely stay awake in the subway. I was so tired, it even almost seemed to hurt to walk at first - I'm serious - that's how whacked out and out of sorts my body was.

Had a "Chinese" lunch with Binh. It was yum. I say "Chinese" with quote marks, because it was not real Chinese food, but a Korean version of it. Unbelievably the two dishes of noodles cost roughly $3.00 total. The price was proof to me that however much I think Korea has been booming in the past 10-20 years, it is still not as hard-core expensive as Japan is yet.

After lunch, I went to have a coffee at Starbucks. Started reading the newspaper... but in 5 minutes, I crashed. I fell asleep in the middle of Starbucks for 2 1/2 hours. What a productive day (not). After I woke up finally, I took a walk around and found found the Kyobo book store, the largest book store in Seoul, which has tons and tons of books- not only in Korean but also in English, French, etc.

I left the bookstore finally - didn't want to get too interested in any book because I was liable to spend all my money and end up with too much luggage as usual. So, went back to Starbucks to wait for a ride home from Binh. He was late, which made me pretty happy, because while waiting, I started reading the book he recommended to me, The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs.