I remember that Michael sent me to the airport the night before and I was a bit anxious as I will be traveling alone with a group of strangers to South Korea. I know none of them who is in this travel group and I feel kinda uneasy as I know I will be bored if there is no buddy during the trip. But in the other hand I did not want to waste such an opportunity to Korea, a country with it's unique cultures that really amazed me. With a bit of worries, I boarded the flight and heading to South Korea.

It was a long night flight with Korean Air through the South China Sea to South Korea. Our flight touched down the South Korean International Airport early in the morning. I recalled that this trip come all out of a sudden and I was not planning for it at all. My sister got this travel package but was not able to make it as exam going on and then she was offering it to me to replace her. So we did last minute changes on the air ticket name and I am heading to South Korea - a country that really eat a lot of "Kim Chi" :).

Out from the airport, I boarded a bus arranged by our travel agent and we are heading to the capital - Seoul :).


Some places that we passed by during our bus ride to the city center :).
























We were having a walk around the city, together in the picture was my travel guide - a funny old man with lots of stories to share :). He is a Chinese who has migrated over to South Korea for years and currently working as a travel guide for most of the Chinese travel groups to the country. And you can know that he is really good in both spoken Chinese and Korean. So no hard time to communicate with him and some of the time he can be our translator too as most of the Koreans do not speak foreign language =_=".




A multi-billion dollar project was the restoration of Cheonggyecheon, a stream running through Seoul, was restored after being paved over for a motorway. The water was crystal clear running through the city. We had a nice and easy walk along the stream. I saw the fishes swimming freely in the water and that reminds me of our Klang river which is so contradict to this =_=". Please be reminded, it is safe to drink from the tap in South Korea :). Just like what you can enjoy in Australian and Japan :).


With the rising concerns about environmental protection, the Korean goverment is investing heavily on projects like the restoration of Cheongngecheon stream aims to boost energy efficiency and green technology targeting to balance up between development and environmental protection. I believe all the developing countries should follow their footsteps by putting environmental protection before development. It would be kinda meaningless to achieve as a developed country and to become a big player in world economy with crowded metropolitan but in a severely polluted environment. Please think again :)!






Generally in my honest opinion, the city is a huge metropolitan with roughly 10,456,034 residents [as of wikipedia]. With such a big population, it really amazed me with it's nice and clean city. I always believe that the more crowded the city is, the more dirty it would be as humans are the root cause of polution. But South Korean proved that wrong. Through proper education on environmental protection awareness, the public leanred the importance of keeping the place clean through a sustainable development plan and keep a better environment for their future generations. This is something that we as a Malaysian should learn from our Asia counterpart.