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In the National Folklore museum I stand in front of the usual montage of Bronze Age (or is it Iron Age? I have always been a bit vague about these things); life in a Korean village; how many times have I seen this before? folk in sacking garb grubbing around, fiddling with pots and fires in front of conical huts. A hunter returning dragging a stag. It doesn't matter where you are in the bronze age. In the museums of Colchester, Lausanne, Mexico City, Seoul there they are, doing the same things; same clothes, same fires, same pots. And they say that life today is the same everywhere. Ha!

Back down town; as I come out of the subway I almost trip up over a recumbant beggar with withered limbs who is propelling himself across my path singing into a karaoke mike, loudspeakers slung under his cart.

To the Tombstone again, and then I stop off to eat mussels sitting on a bench in the street served by a cross and suspicious woman who is not at all happy to have me there. Cautious but friendly fellow eaters offer me rice wine, more and more of it. I try to buy some bottles to reciprocate but she won't sell me any. She wants me out of the way. I leave, and weave back to my hotel at midnight. I pass a videoscreen in the otherwise dark empty street offering gardening advice in English, French, Italian and Korean. Back in my room I turn on the TV just in time to see the two newsreaders seated against a backdrop of glittering skyscrapers bow gravely, as one man, to concludetheir bulletin.

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