Wednesday, 6 September 2017
Related posts: Seoul Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Today is our 4th and last day in Seoul. In the morning, we had a visit to the Smartcity Promotion Hall. It’s basically a showroom on how they use tech to modernise our homes. While some of it seems interesting, like using solar and natural light, I find other aspects of the home are better off in “manual mode”.
For lunch, we were taken to a nice Korean restaurant overlooking the hillside. I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant as everything was written in Korean.
After lunch, we visited the Hyundai-Rotem Research and Development Centre. I was quite fascinated to see Hyundai-Rotem’s military research arm.
They modified the American M1 Abrams tank and produced their own K1 88 tank which looks equally impressive.
From Hyundai-Rotem, we went to the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ). I didn’t know much about IFEZ until we got there. It’s a major smart-city development!
It was very impressive to see how well planned the entire area was. There were 3 regions in the IFEZ. We visited the Songdo region.
We had an early dinner in IFEZ. It was a barbeque Korean restaurant. The food was really tasty!
After dinner, we headed to the airport. As our flight is much later in the evening, we were taken a ride in the Incheon Airport Maglev train. A maglev train an electric-powered train that uses magnetic levitation (hence “maglev”) to move without making contact with the track. Due to that, it is very quiet and and considered “clean”.
Our flight back to Malaysia was at 11:20PM on Singapore Airlines. After being outside the whole day, I was hoping to use the shower facilities at the airport, but to my surprise, almost all shops and facilities at Incheon Airport was closed at 10PM! Even most cafes and restaurants were closed! Perhaps it’s a workers union requirement? Well whatever it is, it is of great inconvenience to late night travelers!
Imran Jaafar 