Last week Jimmy, Tessah, Lois, Matt and I headed South to explore areas in Korea we had yet to see. We saw green tea fields, accidentally fed jimmy nuts, saw cold boat harbors, cute bars and restaurants, cultural villages, huge new years celebrations, art museums and LOTS of love motels and buses and buses and buses. Lois peeled off to see family and Matt was hit by stomach virus “oh ten.” But Jimmy, Tessah, and I stayed on the road for the whole week.
Love motels range anywhere from clean spacious modern rooms to small dingy cells with prostitute fliers outside the door. Our last room was the later and ironically the most expensive because it was in Seoul.
Most travelers when looking for a motel for the night look for a motel/hotel that looks clean, cute, new, friendly, all of the above. But when I decided to journey around the lower half of Korea I was looking for the skeeziest looking accommodations.
Buildings with peeling paint and burned out neon lighting won my business over any well groomed establishment. Why?
because I am cheap. And a cheapy love motel goes for 25,000 to 30,000 won a night. Split that between 2 to 4 people and I have a mega steal.
At love motels you can either buy a night or just a few hours in which to hanky panky. When entering love motels you are often met with shady couples dodging in and out of the shadows on their way to turn in the room key after a mid afternoon rendezvous. A few are young couples that still live with their parents ( most Koreans do until married). Much more likely I will see some fancy suit dude and his mistress.
Most love motels will only allow heterosexual couples to stay. So the game plan was that Jimmy and I would get a room then text to Tessah the room number. She would wait a minute and then mission-impossible-style sneak up to the room.
Korea loves technology. There are flat screens on buses, in taxis, at bus stations as well as state of the art security cameras that see every corner of even the dirtiest love motel.
So I don’t think we were fooling anyone with our three person rooms. In Yeseo Jimmy and I took extra blankets to only find out from the miffed motel owner that the blanket closet was also hooked up to a camera and sensor.
