Don't pay attention to the details.

Don't pay attention to the details. That must be the manta of this place. A veneer over rough-hewn reality and gilt over a bit of lead. If you don't look too closely it is the very definition of luxury. IF your gaze lingers in one place too long though, you will see that whoever decorate the place had the dictionary open and took things a bit too literally.

But before I come to this place, let me step back to the antithesis of luxury: my stay at the Hotel Gallery a few night's ago.

The lovely HO EL GALLE Y in Cheongju.

The room was clearly not designed for long stays. When I checked in they seemed more surprised that I was actually staying all night than they were that I was canceling my second night's reservation to go to another hotel an hour and a half north of Cheongju. You can see below the two hooks on the wall which passed for the closet in my room.

The room technically had air conditioning but after seeing the cakes of dust in the vents I was not foolish enough to fall into that trap.

My room was "non-smoking" but they had forgotten to remove the ash tray when they converted the room to be non-smoking for my reservation so I pulled my window open to try to air out the room as best I could. Once the sun went down, I learned that I was in a no-win situation: with the window closed and covered with the curtain I could not breath and with the window open my room was bathed in the neon light from the brothel next-door's sign.

I cannot actually confirm that it was a brothel but below I'll show the sign by day and you can be the judge.

I don't read Korean but I think I've got a pretty shrewd idea of what a neon sign like this means when it's lit up like Time Square at 3 o'clock in the morning.

I wore my clothes to bed that night and I did not sleep in. As soon as I felt it was a reasonable time to head to the office I got up and hopped in the shower. There was no shower curtain, but frankly I didn't care if I got the bathroom floor wet; it could probably use a wash anyway.

I am used to ducking to get under shower heads in Korea but it seemed like they put the "jacuzzi" tub over whatever tub was there before. When I stood in the tub I needed to duck to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling.

When I got out of the shower I grabbed a towel. It was a hand towel. I dropped it to use as a bathmat. I grabbed the next towel. It was also a hand towel. I grabbed the third and last towel. It was also a hand towel. I dried myself with the two hand towels and got the hell out of there. I did not stop in the first floor cafe for the breakfast of canned noodles.

Getting to the office long before anyone in Korea goes to work, I dropped my luggage in a conference room and went to the Angel-In-Us-Coffee a few blocks down the street toward the bus terminal. The coffee was nothing to brag about but I did see that Sarah's favorite car (the Saturn Sky) lives on in Korea under the moniker of the Opel GT.

Opel GT, Saturn Sky, Vauxhall vx220 or Pontiac Solstace?

I slept so uncomfortably at the Gallery that I still have a crick in my neck two days later but that night I was at least recovered enough to go out to dinner to a place where the sushi chef filleted the tuna's head at the table for us for our third course of tuna sashimi.

There was also a fair amount of both soju and mecju.

One more day of work after that, another work dinner with soju, mecju and somec and it was time for me to head to the airport. Bill signed me into the Asiana lounge while we waited for our flights. I will end up at ~49200 miles with United since the start of August which leaves me just shy of being able to check into the lounges on my own for my next flight to Korea. I've had another 50k or so miles this year, unfortunately they've been scattered across other carriers rather haphazardly.

So here I am in the definition of forced luxury: the Asiana lounge in Seoul. Perhaps other lounges are the same and I never noticed but today I looked more closely at the bookshelves that surround the area where we are sitting. There re 73 books in each of the 15 book cases. There are only three different titles though: Sketches by Boz by Dickens in two sizes and three different color bindings, King Henry VIII with no author listed (perhaps Shakespeare's play?) and Image Collections claiming to be by Agatha Christie and containing The Homecoming and Lost in the Himalayas. Every case has these same three books in various sizes and bindings to give the appearance of a vast collection. Interspersed are a bunch of the same plates, the same pieces of driftwood and the same vases.

Likewise the bar does not appear to have an end to their supply of Jack Daniel's, Gordon's and some sort of vodka but not much else in the way of selection. But as it turns out, I might complain for a while but am easy to please. I've learned it's easy enough to let the details blur and ignore what doesn't matter. I'm enjoying my fake library and real gin and tonic. Soon I'll be on an airplane and be home in Boston.

I can't wait to be home with Sarah and Freddie and to catch the tail end of the best time of the year - for running and for life -- in Boston.

Cheers!

The Gallery

I checked out of the Cheongju Ramada Plaza three days before my flight back to the United States. When I first asked to extend my stay from the 11th to the 16th I was told that I could only extend until the 13th as they were full up after that. As the end of my stay neared a few rooms opened up but they only had smoking rooms available. Knowing what I know about how people smoke over here I had no interest in trying a smoking room so on to plan B.

Plan B was a relatively small hotel a few blocks from the customer site. The place is called Hotel Gallery and the website looked nice enough. They have Cafe and Bar that claims to have "international cocktails, snacks and an attractive regularly changing lunch menu." They also claim to have an indoor driving range though for the life of me, I cannot figure out where they have space for it, even if it is a video driving range like many in Korea.

When I arrived only one thing sprung to mind: seedy highway motel. When I got to my room it had a stale musty odor. Unlike the Ramada though, this place has wifi so I was able to google it to see what other travelers had to say about it. There was only 1 review that I could find:

"The location is close to Printing museum, nice walking around.Budget hotel with computer for internet in rooms, also has heat floor which work in few rooms. the walls are to thin so you can hear whats going on in the next room. The breakfast contains bread, butter, jam, canned noodles and juice." - Nataly P on TripAdvisor.

Thanks Nataly, at least now I know to go out to an Angel-In-Us coffee for breakfast tomorrow instead of risking the canned noodles.

But for ₩77,000 (as opposed to ₩166,000 at the Ramada) I guess you get what you pay for.

At least it's just for one night. Tomorrow I go back up to Dongtan and get to stay at the Shilla Stay which has come to be my favorite hotel in Korea (and is right across the street from my third favorite running route in Korea).

This place wouldn't be much worse if the TVs played this video review of the hotel on repeat:

Hotel Gallery Cheonju

Another week in Cheongju

I was supposed to fly home yesterday. Or at least that's what my ticket said a few weeks ago, but things never go quite as planned in Korea.

For example: this little buffet item said "Pretzel" on the tag. It sure as hell looks nothing like any pretzel I've ever seen.

So as usual, just before getting to fly home I needed to stay up late to call the travel agency and book a new ticket. In theory, perhaps, one would think that my Korean mileage would be adding up by this point. I have spent 10 weeks in Korea this year after all. But no, I feel like General Pickett at the end of the movie Gettysburg.

General, you must look to your mileage.

General Lee...I have no mileage.

I wouldn't say that this trip to Korea has been my Pickett's charge but in the two weeks I've been here so far I've only managed 31.5 miles. 11 of that was today on a loop out along the river and 10.5 of it was last weekend (see my previous post if you're life is that boring) so that tells you something about how much running I've gotten in on the weekdays.

Last week, when I gloated about getting Saturday off? Well, I paid for that. I ended up getting called in Saturday night and then spent all day Sunday working. I'll be going on 26 days since my last day off when I fly home at the end of this week. That many consecutive days with a median number of hours per day working over 12 is not a recipe for a lot of mileage.

Fortunately, I don't need to have that mileage in the bank today. Last winter I knew Boston was not going to go well for me. I didn't know that it was going to be 3:18:30 bad but I had a good feeling that I was not going to re-qualify. So I started looking at the internet and found a little race in Chicago scheduled for today. The qualifying time was just 3:15 so I figured: "no problem, let's do this!". I talked to Mark and convinced him to sign up for the lottery. Then I was lazy and forgot to sign up.

Mark go in and is running his first Marathon Major today! Good luck and kick some butt!

As it turns out I'm in Korea and wouldn't have been able to run today anyway. This would have been the second time that I would have picked up a DNS at a major marathon. The first time was the 2010 New York City Marathon; that time I got stuck in Korea as well. Neither of those races were or would have been inexpensive Did Not Starts so I guess that sometime it pays to be lazy.

Instead of heading out to the Windy City with Mark and everyone from GLRR and Wicked I went out on a run yesterday in search of the Sangdangsanseong Fortress. I failed. I thought that I could kind of see it along the ridge line from the hotel but got lost on a series of dead end trails and rural roads on my way up into the hills.

Maybe it's up on the ridge line or maybe it's somewhere else but either way I made it to the hills but never found the fortress.

That's about all I have this week. I wish I had taken my phone out on my run this afternoon along the river. There is a serious network of bike paths and running lanes that head out of Cheongju which look to rival the Bike Path I used to run on out from Arlington. They had an old school London style phone box and at one of the round plazas where bike paths crossed they also had a pair of heavy duty bike pumps. The bike lanes were paved and the running lanes were rubberized track. I wish I found this run earlier (and had more time to run it while here).

Tomorrow I change hotels. Here's to hoping that there will be a few more miles to be had before I fly home.

Here's a picture of some red bean buns from the Chinese place at the G-Well Mall across the street from work where we went for lunch on Friday:

Because why wouldn't red bean buns look like this?

And here is a random beer that they sell at the Home Plus in the basement of my hotel:

It's a beer from Illinois that ranks 64 out of 100 on Beer Advocate (or in layman's terms: bad). Why they sell it? I couldn't tell you. Why I bought it? Because they sell it.

Cheer!

The middle of Korea and the middle of no where are different places. Come visit Cheongju Korea (if you like running and working in the semiconductor business and can't get sent to Dresden to run by the Elbe).

It's a warm Saturday afternoon with a healthy dose of sun and a light breeze. Since I'm in Cheongju, South Korea, a nice day outside usually means that I see the sun come up while in my taxi to the cleanroom and don't come out until the stars are out.

Today was an exception. I couldn't get any time scheduled for today to setup for any of my tests so I woke up at 7am with a strange, new and exciting experience ahead of me: a day off in Korea.

I got to Logan at 8am last Sunday for my flight. Boston to Chicago. Chicago to Tokyo. Tokyo to Seoul, landing at 9pm on Monday. From there I took the bus from the Incheon Airport to the Cheongju bus terminal and a taxi from the bus terminal to the Ramada Plaza. It was just past midnight when I finally checked in; I lost two days of running to that travel.

For reference here's a map of Korea:

From top to bottom: Incheon Airport {where I always fly into and out of). Suwon: (where I was for half of my trip in October-November 2010 and in February 2013 and February 2014). Hwaseong: (where I was for the other half of my 2010 trip and in August and in September 2014). Cheongju: (where I am now, October 2014)

It might not be safe to call Cheongju the middle of no-where but it certainly felt that way on the bus ride and my first few days at the hotel. It is a city of some 6-7 hundred thousand people, which while small by the standard of Seoul or Suwon which weigh in at 10 million and 1 million people respectively, it is still a bustling place compared to my little Oak Grove neighborhood in Malden.

I tend to be timid about running outside in Korea because the laws give the right of way to the cars and all the drivers know it. That style of driving coupled with city streets in Suwon which can be up to 10 lanes across leaves me to run a lot of treadmill miles. I say "a lot of treadmill miles" but those of you who have seen my log know that this is a lie. It should read "a high percentage of my mileage in Korea is on the treadmill".

Even that isn't so true anymore. My past 5 weeks in Korea have been 4 weeks in Hwaseong (actually Dongtan but you cannot see Dongtan on the map) and one week in Cheongju. My first run in Dongtan was 5 miles on the treadmill which but the other 18.8 miles I ran on that trip were all outside in the park across the street. On return to Dongtan on September I ran all 26.8 miles outside so my outside mileage is starting to catch up to my treadmill mileage.

Which brings me back to checking in at the Ramada Plaza at ~1am Tuesday morning. The place is pretty massive. It has a movie theater attached on one side and what appears to be the Korean equivalent to Walmart on the other side:

This is one of their beauty shots of the building from the internet. At only 21 stories it still dominates the skyline in Cheongju. The tallest buildings that I can see from my room on the 16th floor are perhaps 3 quarters as high as my room.

This bastion of westernness looks from the outside (and on paper) like it has all the amenities: pool, fitness center, breakfast, duty free shop, 4 restaurants, a top floor bar, a virtual driving range, sauna...

They also have ethernet cables. They even give you one for free when you check in because there is no wifi in the rooms which appear to have been last redecorated in 1976. The lack of wifi didn't matter that much to me; hotel rooms are never so large that I really care that I need to plug in but they surprised me with another annoyance the next morning when I went down to the gym. It cost ₩11,000 to use the gym. Perhaps I would have been more upset about having to pay ten bucks to run five miles but since I just paid $175 for permission to run 26.22 miles next April I'll call this one a bargain.

Jetlag and a cold hit the next morning and I didn't run until Friday morning when I went down to the gym for a slightly less economical 4.75 miles which brings me to today (ignoring the week of 12-14 hour days in the cleanroom and just skipping to the running bits).

Actually it doesn't bring me to today; I will digress and go back briefly to last night. I got back to the hotel relatively late and typed up my notes from the day to send back to the factory and then went out in search of some dinner. This was when I learned that the hotel is not in the middle of no where. It is perched at the edge of what appears to be a college town. The street that the hotel is on is quiet but any of the side streets opposite the hotel will take you into a town densely packed with pizza, chicken, beer and coffee shops. That walk convinced me that Cheongju was safe for a run outside.

Now we're all caught up to this morning.

If you have ever watched a baseball game then you know and hate every time the announcers come up with the stupidest statistics to shove at you to try to fill the dead space which is 95% of the game.

"You know Tony, we have just seen history in the making. That was the first time a player on an away team has ever turned an inning-ending double play on artificial turf on a Thursday between Labor Day and Columbus Day while trailing by three runs with the batter facing a 2-2 count to a left handed middle-relief pitcher."

That's the kind of run I had today. It was my first ever 10+ miler in South Korea. Beyond that there are no superlatives to describe how I did on this run. It was not particularly long, neither fast nor slow and though it went up into the foothills of a mountain range the elevation gain was nothing to speak of. It was however a really nice run.

Cheongju from my hotel room. This photo is taken perpendicular to the direction of my run this morning. At least the start of the run (relative to this picture I ran right to left). The return from the hills was parallel to this picture and then turned right for the final loop.

I started down the street to the left from the hotel and just followed the road downtown, keeping the wooded hills to my left. The traffic was light and there were not too many pedestrians out to force me to weave through traffic. The buildings in Cheongju are more squat than the skyscrapers that Asian cities are famous for and the air tasted fresh save for when I ran past the small hole-in-the-wall restaurants preparing to serve lunch and was greeted by the smell of garlic and chilies.

The break from urban to rural was sudden with no buffer of suburban sprawl. I suddenly simply had no more buildings around me as I climbed out of the valley that hold Cheongju and into the surrounding hills. The houses that I did see scattered in the hills were smaller and more like what I saw at my visit to the Korean Folk Village in Suwon back in August than their modern high-rise counterparts just a few miles back down the hill.

Climbing further up into the hills I came across an observatory nestled amongst the hilltops. The slopes around the observatory were spotted with small greenhouses that alternated glass panels to let light in for crops and solar panels presumably to run the electronics onsite. On a steeper section a bit above the greenhouses there was a large bank of solar panels with no crops below. In the cleanroom and on taxis I always see the environmentally friendliness stickers which rank products to 1-5 on some government scale but I had presumed it all to be a bit of greenwashing given that the cities of Dongtan, Suwon and Seoul all appear to be lit up like Time Square year round. Today was the first evidence I've seen to the contrary.

Perhaps a mile or so up past the observatory the road leveled and started coming back down for the loop back into Cheongju. It is impossible to get lost running in this part of Cheongju if you are staying at the Ramada. You can almost always see it to point your way back home. It was just over an hour of running when I got back to the hotel so I ran past it to add on another 20 minute loop through another part of the city that I hadn't seen yet.

By the time I got back up to my room to write this blog I had come to the conclusion that Cheongju is a bit of a runner's paradise, at least in October. You probably wouldn't bother coming here just to run but if you're going to get sent somewhere for work you can do a lot worse then Cheongju and if you are here book a room at the Ramada but skip the fee for the gym. The streets and hills of this town are all you need. Tomorrow I will explore the run along the river bed that I noticed on my descent back into town on today's run.

Cheers!