KULTURE SHOCK
South Korea is known as the land of the morning calm, where a landscape of hulking green mountains bestows a tranquil natural beauty on the country.
am squeezed into a lift 117 storeys above the streets of Seoul and I am going nowhere. The ultra-polite young lift operator is subtly pushing the door button while keeping a poker face, probably hoping that the 75th time will work a treat, which it doesn’t. The apparent reason for the failure of the lift that at other times floats effortlessly up and down the spine of Lotte World Tower to its pinnacle at Seoul Sky, the tallest building in South Korea, is an approaching typhoon, deceptively bestowed with the rather jolly moniker of Lingling. The total shutdown a safety mechanism, like the blaring warnings I
