Last weekend.

Unfortunately I was required to spend Saturday at a teacher training thingy in Seoul. It was incredibly dull, full of people talking about different series of teahing books (a lot of sales pitches disguised as teahcing method lectures) and I didn't really listen much. I wouldn't have minded if it hadn't meant getting up at 7 am. That may not sound too bad to you but it's over an hour earlier than I get up to go to work!

Getting up that early, and catching the 8 o'clock train, only had one advantage: I got to see the sun rise. And it was good. As we sped south it rose on my left hand side over the cold and barren landscape of northern South Korea. The area is hilly, with a few big mountains in the distance, and I expect it is used extensively for crops in warmer weather, but at the moment it is rather bleak. Running alongside the train tracks there are many small allotments, and they are also squashed into small patches of ground in towns and cities. Street sellers and market stalls tend to sell a lot of this small production stuff.

The landscape has two main features other than the hills; electricity pylons and large congregations of blocks of flats. I hope, in warmer weather, to travel more around the country and see some of it's beauty, but for now my Korean world is dominated by man made objects. Not surprising, perhaps, as South Korea is the 19th most densly populated country in the world (480 people per square kilometre). Most of the countries that are higher on that list are tiny ones like the Vatican, Gibraltar, Macau, Bermuda and Monaco. The only large countries that have a higher population density are Taiwan and Bangladesh. All of this is to say that South Korea is a crowded country, so it's not suprising there are so many blocks of flats and infrastructure objects.

[Geek that I am I actually find the list of high population densities quite interesting, for example the population desity of the UK is almost exactly the same as that of Jamaica. All this thanks to Wikipedia.com. I love that site for facts and figure.]

Anyway, despite the industrialism I still think it's beautiful, but then again a great sunrise can probably make anything look beautiful to me.