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In my Seoul hotel room the first thing that I notice is a plastic box attached to the wall. I peer through it and find it to contain a rubber smoke mask. Instructions tell me how to use this bondage item in case of fire. By the window of my tenth floor room is a coiled rope and harness. "Descend to the ground facing the wall. User's responsibility". I go to bed reassured by this pair of devices. I think.

Seoul may not be the most exotic of destinations. Big but not flashy buildings, no particular vibrancy in the streets. But it is definitely odd. That smoke mask.

Everyday things too; cars and car names. Should be universal you think, yet here in Korea there are actually shapes you don't see in Europe, names odd in their near-plausibility and yet further instances of pseudo English:

Daewoo Prince Ace
Sayyong Electric (beautiful!)
Hyundai Galloper Intercooler
Potenta Senator Avella
Orace Turbo Grand Saloon

The oddness of Korean women. Some of the scariest, most stylised lookers in the world float, as if drugged, arm in arm through the department stores. Girls with mask-like faces, lustrous hair, plummy lipstick outlined in black lip pencil. So uniform is this look it is as if Korean women were simply conforming to the diktats of some State Department of the Erotic.

Beneath street level, long lustrous and meandering shopping malls; gleaming marble flights of steps, gold painted balustrades; in the centre of the Lotte plaza a futuristic construction of sheaves of glass pulses oh so gently, blushing almost, with light, now here, now there. The roof is supported by columns half doric, half ionic. Heaven could look like this. Terence Conran would hate it but who would want to go to a heaven designed by Conran?

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