dumb American, smart toilet

I'm about to get on a plane for Chicago via Shanghai (normally the layover isn't worth mention, but China hasn't figured out through-ticketing yet... I have to get off the plane, go through immigration, enter China, check in again, go back through immigration and customs and get on another plane), so this will be a quick entry.

And sorry to make butts the new theme of the blog.

East Asia is famous for its embrace of technology--you already knew that. But the toilets are really something special. Toilet paper is obsolete in the finer bathrooms of Korea and Japan, because the toilet is "smart" enough to do the work of the paper and your hands. You do your thing, then press a button. First, there is a "clean" cycle. Then, we have the "bidet" (rinse) cycle. Finally, the dryer goes on.

But that's not all--the seat has an automatic butt-warmer. As soon as you sit on the seat, it starts to warm up. Amazing.

I never got around to pressing the "nozzle" or "massage" buttons--kind of scary.

The toilet and I got to know each other rather well. No, I didn't get sick or anything, but I ate what had to be the highest-fiber meal I've ever eaten. (Besides maybe that time in Mexico, when I ate nothing but papaya and mandarins for breakfast and lunch on a 10-hour bus ride.)

Last time I checked, I was in Brazil, learning Portuguese. So I don't speak a lick of Korean--it's been a challenge just to tolerably pronounce "good morning" and "thank you." All of this makes ordering food a little bit limiting. Street food is always safe, because I can just point and smile.

For restaurants, I do my best to pick the places that have pictures with a few English words on the windows. That way, I can just point, and there is at least some chance that somebody inside will speak some English. Yesterday, I pointed at a blurry picture of a dish called "barley rice," simply because I had no idea what it was, and it didn't look like it had any scary animal/fish parts in it.

Yes, I've gotten into all sorts of trouble with this strategy over the years--I always try to order something I don't recognize. Many intestines and stomachs and other pig or cow bits have ended up in front of me as a result.

Anyhoo, this meal was amazing. Eight small bowls of different wonders--a light rice soup, a spicy tofu stew, a bowl of barley and rice mixed together, some sort of seaweed thing, some pickled radish-like things, kimchi (of course), another bowl of some sort of spicy pickled root thing, and a big bowl of mixed sprouts and cabbage and lettuce and mystery veggies and hot pepper flakes. Really tasty. And nothing but spice and fiber, aside from the bit of rice mixed with the barley.

Probably not a smart thing to eat the day before a 20-hour plane trip. I'm convinced that the toilet in my hotel room is smarter than me.

I didn't really get out much on this trip, just because of the demands of work. But Seoul seems like an incredible place, from the little bit that I saw outside of the hotel and offices.

The United States lacks "real cities" like Seoul--our list begins with New York and ends with Chicago, in my opinion. These are places where you can get coffee, beer, burgers, or shawarma any time of the day or night in any possible state of dress or partial undress, and nobody ever gives you a second look, even if you're wearing shorts at the pizza joint at 3am in the winter. And you know that you can piss off entire neighborhoods, and there will always be more neighborhoods to explore.

Seoul seems like an endless place, just like New York--it's dense and energetic, and has more coffeehouses than anywhere I've ever seen, including Seattle and Paris and Berkeley. I like.

And oddly enough, it's a comfortable place to be foreign. It's one of the world's safest large cities, most people speak a word or two of English, and nobody finds it the least bit strange that my Korean sucks. I felt more foreign in English-speaking Trinidad & Tobago than I do here.

Good thing I like it here. I'll probably be back in a month or two, whether I like it or not.