Tasmania to Tokyo – At Sea – Day 56 can be found here.
Today’s Chronicles can be found here.
Today we have the best of both worlds – a leisurely wake up followed by an excursion.
We generally avoid booking afternoon excursions, and to be frank I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it makes sense in hotter climes, so we see the sights before the heat of the day settles in. And wildlife is more active in the mornings and we tend to be animal-focused as much as possible.
But heat is no longer an issue. It’s properly cool out – single digits, Celsius. Perhaps we had that in mind when we booked this afternoon excursion? We have no idea. We have a spreadsheet with 111 lines that lays out our trip day-by-day, but our past selves left no clue for our present selves to ponder.
We wake late and reprise our new routine – or try to, as we discover a large crowd in Dolce Vita waiting to disembark. A fair number of them are bearing luggage, and we suspect they’ll be staying overnight in Seoul.
It’s not until 10:15 am – when we are well and truly settled in Arts Cafe – that Cruise Director Zaid announces that passengers can go ashore. We later learn that tides complicated the placement of the gangway. The Ritz Carleton Luminara has taken the prime berth, so we’ll need to take a shuttle bus to the terminal building.
I feel for those who had 9:30 am tours, and for the Excursions crew members – who will be busy figuring out how the delay will impact the rest of the day’s schedule.
As for us – Arts Cafe, reading / writing / homework, and then our daughter and I head to Kaiseki while my wife and son depart for La Terrazza.
Even then, we have time to leisurely prepare for our excursion before we set out almost 40 minutes in advance – rumours are circulating that it took 45 minutes or more to get through immigration this morning.
There is a line of shuttles ready to go, so we depart immediately after we board. Then on to immigration, where there is no line-up whatsoever. We’re given QR codes that will speed up this process for the remainder of our time in South Korea.
Out to the parking lot, where Iliana directs us to our Incheon: Past and Present tour bus. I have made the newbie mistake of forgetting my quiet vox, but thankfully they have spares to hand.
We board the bus and depart almost 15 minutes early – I suppose everyone else had heard about the delays and decided not to take any chances. We will be shifting berths overnight, so that should prevent this from being an issue tomorrow morning.
Off we go across Incheon. Much of the city is built on reclaimed land, and is essentially part of a planned community or “smart city” with a series of hubs that each specialize in different industries. Songdo’s focus is the ‘cutting-edge knowledge and service industry’, Cheongna is the ‘global robotics industry hub and the centre of finance’, and Yeongjong is the ‘international marine tourism city with aviation, logistics, tourism, and leisure.’
It’s intriguing, but also vaguely dystopian. In Korea, “smart city” means constant CCTV – plus instant notifications if, say, there is a missing person, and precise availability numbers on passing public transit. I know it’s meant to feel helpful yet it feels subtly intrusive. Apparently they are working on being able to locate a missing person within 15 minutes, which sounds wonderful – unless there’s a reason that person is trying to disappear.
We soon arrive at the National Museum of World Writing Systems, and pause to admire the smart city – starting with the G Tower, which we will be visiting later this tour:
We enter the museum itself:
And then move on to the “Tower of Babel” – a stack of speakers from different eras that whispers languages from around the world.
The original legend of the Tower of Babel holds that humanity tried to build a tower to heaven, but God confused their speech by creating multiple languages, thereby ending their unity.
We then pass through a video on cave paintings, a precursor to written language:
And begin the exhibit with a genuine cuneiform artifact:
From here the museum branches out. Our guide provides in-depth explanations at each stop, but we elect to switch off our quiet voxes and explore on our own. (Though I would rank her as being above-average in terms of her knowledge on the subject.)
We see a replica of Hammurabi’s code of laws:
We explore how writing moved from one region to the next – and how it developed independently in Mayan cultures.
We also see hieroglyphs, such as this replica of the Rosetta stone:
And examples of ancient Angkor script:
There’s also a special exhibit on Korean writing, Hangul, which was designed by King Sejong the Great to be graphically simple and easy to understand. Previously, more complicated Hanja (Chinese) characters had contributed to Korea’s high illiteracy rate.
The kids also really enjoy the section on petroglyphs – particularly the clay tablets where they can make some of their own.
Together, we connect the petroglyphs on display with those we have seen on our earlier travels – including those in Rapa Nui and in Namibia.
The kids are fascinated by the printing press as an evolution from hand-written books, which we connect back to our previous visit to the Book of Kells and the differences between hand-copying and illustrating a book versus “mass”-production – and how that changes how information can be disseminated.
Fascinating as well to see some examples of Asian writing done in moveable type:
And the historic writing implements:
Plus that most ancient of computing devices, the floppy disk:
(Apparently Japanese youth have recently wondered why the ‘save’ icon is a picture of a vending machine.)
Unfortunately, the ‘future of writing’ exhibit is under repair.
We carry on to the second floor and the outdoor exhibit:
But there isn’t much around at present…
… Except a clever museum sign done in moveable type:
It’s a great museum – we could have easily spent another hour here.
But that’s time we don’t have. Instead, we re-board the bus and head to Incheon’s Central Park:
The river is actually made of salt water, and its bottom is made of concrete to make it easier to clean.
We soon board our water taxi:
And we explore Central Park by electric boat:
The contrast between the manufactured park, “smart city” technology and identical buildings is intriguing and vaguely unsettling.
It’s sort of like Blade Runner meets the Truman Show.
Our son notes that the sameness of the buildings reminds him of the Nox: Confessions of a Machine exhibit we saw while in Singapore – a fitting connection, one I hadn’t made myself until he mentions it.
As if to punctuate his sentiment, a lone drone hovers overhead:
We head back along the river:
We pass the “Face of Global,” which is designed to encompass a wide range of cultures.
… And underneath one more bridge
But soon our water taxi ride comes to an end.
As we return to the bus, one of the guests asks about South Korea’s declining birth rate. Our guide notes that women in Korea are well educated and earning a good salary, so they are reluctant to embrace marriage – particularly as many saw how their own mothers and grandmothers have been treated in their own marriages.
Many families often pressure women to get married as opposed to living with partners on a long term basis. Given that South Korea remains a deeply paternalistic society where women are now expected to hold a full-time job in addition to providing almost all child-care and house-work as well as elder-care, it’s easy to understand why wouldn’t want to get married.
(And if women do get married and have children they’ll spend the next eighteen-ish years of their lives dedicating almost every waking moment to preparing said child for the Suneung, an eight-hour university exam that determines your child’s entire life trajectory – unless you can afford to send them to a foreign university.)
Off to the G Tower:
The G stands for both Global and Green.
Here we enjoy sweeping views of Incheon:
I can see my water taxi from here!
And the National Museum of World Writing
Unlike the Marina Bay Sands Building, this view is glassed in as opposed to being open to the elements. Given the weather, that’s not a bad idea.
This dystopian sameness is even more pronounced from this height:
The Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) was established in 2003, but some say that they have not lived up to the promises made when some of the surrounding villages were bought up for development purposes. It seems that lower-income Koreans have been pushed out, while the hoped-for economic growth has not yet arrived.
This is perhaps the least-engaging part of the tour, but I’m still glad we went up.
We then head back down, and briefly enjoy the wonderful strangeness of a South Korean convenience store:
We then head back to the Silver Moon. We arrive at the terminal perhaps 10 minutes early, but it’s shortly past five by the time we get back to the ship itself.
Farewell, Incheon! It was… interesting
Back to the room to drop bags, then off to trivia. Our usual group is absent, so we partner with one of the other teams instead. We correctly identify the colonial history of Goa (Portuguese) and the population of Colombia (60 million), but learn that Samuel Morse – who invented Morse Code – was American, and that the term Zodiac is a Greek word.
We disagree with Zaid’s unwillingness to accept ‘curry’ as the second most popular food in the United Kingdom – he insists it is specifically chicken tikka masala. Our 16 out of 20 score is nevertheless sufficient to tie for third place.
Off to dinner at the Grill tonight. I get my usual favourite – steak with shrimp, baked potato and onion rings.
I snap a shot of the lights of Incheon:
And the Ritz Carleton Luminara:
Then it’s time to call it a night. We have an early start tomorrow as we will be heading to Seoul on our own and then taking a full-day K Pop Demon Hunters-themed tour.
Brilliant idea or overly kid-centric? Stay tuned to find out!