Love Hotel

There were about five buildings within site of the Funeral Centre, the remainder of the landscape being fields, mountains and sea. Aside from three hotels, there was a church and a 'funeral supplies department store', although in truth I think had it been merely called a shop it would have been suffering delusions of grandeur. Clearly though, this was an area very much geared up towards funerals, so we didn't think much more about the first hotel we came to.

In retrospect, architecturally it did appear somewhat eccentric with its Greco-Roman theme, and perhaps the statues of naked women at the entrance might have provided a further clue, if we hadn't been so tired. As it was, a brief conversation in a dimly lit reception corridor with the owner half-hidden behind a curtained window revealed that they had a room with an Internet-connected computer and that's all we needed to hear. At 40,000 won (about £21.64) for the night it was cheap by British standards but perhaps on the expensive side for Korea. The owner continued to sell us on the whirlpool bath, but little did he know we were sold at 'Internet connection' so he was wasting his breath.

In the elevator as we neared the sixth floor my wife said "you know, I think this is a love hotel", at which point all the clues suddenly clicked into place, I realised it was, and the doors opened to reveal a bookcase full of porn videos - the rooms had video players as well.



I had some trepidation as to what we might find when we entered the room - would it have some outlandish theme? But it was almost ordinary, save for coloured lighting which might have been employed to give the room a suggestive air. In fact, the only thing really out of the ordinary in the room was the TV that was clearly marked with the numbers of the adult channels. Putting down our bags, we also discovered that the small package handed to us at reception along with our key contained - hidden amongst the toothbrushes, razor and hair products - two condoms and a sachet of "Inner Clean - The Vaginal Wash - Cleans, Deodorizes, Refreshes". OK.



After admiring the view for a couple of minutes and checking the room for hidden cameras (which we didn't find) we changed into more comfortable clothes as discretely as we could, bearing in mind the possible existence of particularly well-hidden cameras in places like these. If we were being filmed then the owner was certainly in for a surprise - I set about the important business of getting the computer up and running, wiping 110 spyware files of the machine by running three different programs, installing Firefox, a firewall and other miscellaneous tools to provide me a semi-secure connection - I'd no intention of doing anything too sensitive such as trading from there but at least I could access my real-time data feeds.

We ordered pizza, which came quickly and was excellent - actually so good that we began to feel guilty about abandoning everyone else to their hardships, especially my wife's cousin, who turned out to be the only other grandchild (and therefore person of our age) there. Because the food being served was the kind that the older generation tend to like and the younger generation not, we decided to order pizza and take it to him as he had not eaten. Korean Mother had also told us that the funeral centre was now very busy so we thought we could go back to help out.



Because it was now dark, the selective lighting on the love hotel perhaps left even less to the imagination.