Food option for Indians in Suwon

Indians working in Suwon and staying near Samsung office might find this post useful. I can’t go on even for a week without Indian food. I just love Indian food. It’s this addiction that has forced me to explore available options for vegetarian food in Suwon.

One good option for Indians working in Samsung office in Suwon is Chakraa. Chakraa restaurant is just 5 minute walk away from the back gate of Samsung office. The food is pretty decent and affordable too. I go there a number of times for evening snacks. Note that you won’t get snacks after 6PM in the evening. Don’t miss the pakora and samosa if you go there for snacks. The Masala Tea is also excellent. Lunch during weekday is buffet-style and is pretty cheap at around 6000 or 7000 Won. Buffet is not available for dinner everyday, and lunch and dinner on weekends. Check the Chakraa website here.

I heard of another Indian restaurant by name Taj. I haven’t personally visted that place. But I heard that the food is excellent and the dishes are a bit too pricey. This restaurant can be approached from the back gate of Samsung office. Heard that it is located near to HomePlus.

Got to know from a friend recently that there is another new Indian restaurant by name “Tastes of India” near HomePlus of City Hall junction. This is the next item on my list of restaurants to visit

Of course there are a lot of pizza shops which provide veg pizza. Pizza School, Pizza & Pasta, Pasta & Pizza, 59er Pizza – All these shops prepare vegan pizza. Pizza & Pasta, and Pasta & Pizza prepare vegan pasta too. Have tried the vegan pata of Pizza & Pasta. It is really creamy and delicious. Make sure that you say “Yaache pizza” when you order for a vegan pizza. yaache in Korean means vegetarian.

Accommodation for Indians in South Korea

There are a lot of Indians in South Korea. Most of them come here on deputation to work for Samsung, LG and Hyundai. You can arrange your own accommodation. Rent for a decent 1 BHK flat in an apartment is around 500,000 to 600,000 Won (around $500). This will be a furnished flat. You might have a shell out a bit more for internet and telephone, roughly around 30k to 40k Won per month.

Another option is to get into Indian Guest House (IGH) in Suwon. There are few IGHs near Samsung Mobile HQ in Suwon, mainly around the Maetan Dong area. These IGHs are maintained by people from Nepal. You’ll be provided with a flat that has a bed, AC, TV, PC with internet, telephone, wardrobe, and washing machine. The IGH workers clean the flat everyday and take out the trash. They even do your laundry.

The best part of staying in an IGH is that you need not bother about preparing your food. They provide cornflakes, bread and jam for breakfast. Lunch and dinner usually consist of chapathi with curry, rice, sambar, rasam and curd.

The flat can be shared by two people. It’ll have two beds if used on sharing basis. The cost per day is 25,000 Won per day. If you opt for a single person flat, it costs 40,000 Won per day.

Check below for the contact number of IGH.

IGH (contact person: Sudeep) -> 010-5784-5611
Kha-Eul Soon IGH -> 010-3540-5920
Park Family IGH -> 010-2372-5540
Alexy IGH -> 018-613-1280

Roaming around in South Korea

Even after spending 5 months in Korea, I still couldn’t figure out how to check for the bus that I need to take. Google Maps helps me to some extent. But even that is not sufficient since majority of the names are in Korean language. Google Maps even suggests the appropriate bus route, a great boon for non-Korean speaking folks.

If you’re not able to figure out the right bus to take, you have no other option but to use a taxi. Taxi fare in Korea is very cheap compared to Europe. I don’t remember a single instance where I had to pay more than 6000 Won (around $5 to $6), and I have used the taxi here a lot.

One tip for non-Korean folks who intend to use taxi in Korea. Always carry the address of the destination address in Korean language. I always carry a number of business and visiting cards of colleagues, restaurants and other shops. Quite helpful when dealing with taxi drivers.

It’s always helpful to carry the T-Money card in South Korea. This is a prepaid card which can be bought from the local GS25 stores or in the subway station. You can load some money onto this card and use this for travel in bus and metro. Using raw cash for travel is a real pain and you’ll struggle to find out where to get the ticket in the subway station. If you wish to use the bus service using local currency, you need to drop certain amount in the money-holder machine next to the driver seat. AFAIK the max amount is 1000 Won. Consider yourself lucky if the bus driver understands whatever you ask him in English

Subway in South Korea

Public transportation system in South Korea is very well organized. However the ease of convenience doesn’t feel as good compared to the public transport system in Germany.

Having used the S-Bahn in Germany, I expected similar kind of system in Korea too. The subway trains are on schedule most of the times. But the real turn-off is the fact that there is no subway map shown in most of the stations. The S-Bahn system was very convenient to use mainly dude to the availability of the S-Bahn map in almost all of the stations, and the demarcation of various places into zones. The English version of the subway map of Seoul can be found in: http://www.smrt.co.kr/english_smrt/index.jsp

Advance planning is required if you intend to use the subway since you won’t have the map in the subway stations. You can get a hard-copy of the subway map in the tourist information centers for free. Folks from Suwon can make use of the tourist information center just next to the subway station on the outside. It is located just right to the station.

A copy of the subway map is available on almost all of the mobiles here. But the irony is that all these maps have station names in Korean language, which makes it difficult to use for outsiders.

Help for foreigners in South Korea

Outsiders really have a tough time in South Korea. Life gets hard when you can’t communicate with others.ou run into this kind of problem.

I found out a free interpretation service in Seoul that you can use when in need. The number is 02-120. I have personally never tried this service, but got to know about this from a friend of mine. And yes, this service is absolutely free !

There is a helpline number for tourists too. Dial 02-1330 to reach the helpline number of Seoul, and 031-1330 for the helpline number of Suwon.

Life in South Korea

I have been in South Korea for quite some time now. Have visited few places and am getting more and more comfortable with the people and the surroundings.

One thing is for sure: South Korea is not such an easy place to live compared to other countries. This uneasy feeling comes because as an outsider you find hard to interact with people. Most of the localites here do not speak English. Even few of them who do speak English cannot put across their opinion and take annoyingly long time to understand what we say. The main reason for this might be because of the fact that the people here give huge importance to their native language.

I have been told by my colleagues here that the situation is fast improving. Children here are being taught English from a very young age. And since Korea does not have many good English speaking people, schools are getting teachers from other countries to teach English here. No wonder I get to see people from many nations here.

The Last Castle : A Review

Just finished watching this movie. Not such a great movie, to be honest. The storyline goes like this: An army officer gets fired from his position for having ignored his superiors orders, and in doing so, gets his men killed. Hence he’s sent to a max-security prison.

Here he finds that the prisoners are ill-treated, and starts an uprising by building an army of prisoners. Finally he succeeds in his mission.

The movie has a lot of goof-ups. First of all, none of the prisoners bully this General when he’s brought there. Everyone calls him as either ‘Sir’ or ‘General’, which can happen only in the fantasy world. And two, all the prisoners listen to whatever this guy says to him, as though they worship him.

New browser from Google – Chrome

Google has come out with a new browser – Google Chrome. Click here to go to the download page.

Finished the installation just a few minutes back. One feature that really stands out is that the browser occupies a major part of the screen. This means that you’ll be able to see more content at a stretch when compared to other browsers.

The installation was plain easy. It did a good job by importing all the bookmarks from Firefox. Even the bookmarks on the toolbar were imported, which is a welcome addition. Also the stored passwords in Firefox seemed to work in Chrome.

Another interesting feature is that you can create shortcuts to your favourite pages on to the desktop, Start menu or QuickLaunch bar (titled ‘Google Gears’). I personally won’t be using this feature, ‘coz there’s no point in cluttering your desktop with shortcuts to web pages when you can directly open them from the Bookmarks tab in the browser.

There’s an option for safe browsing, called ‘Incognito’. This launches a new window. Looks like this feature has been copied directly from Safari’s stealth mode. This keeps no trace of your browsing history or offline saved data. This can be really helpful in cyber cafes.

However this App is still in its Beta version. Looks like IE has got another major competitor here. Goodbye IE.

Indian Air Force at its best!!

The power of IAF n French Air Craft Mirage 2000

Schedule your router to turn ON/OFF

You can use this tutorial to turn ON/OFF your router. This can be used effectively if you want to go online and disconnect at a particular pre-determined time. For this purpose, batch files are needed. This guide is written for Huawei MT882 router. The scripts will work for other routers as weel, with some minor modifications. Place all the files in C:\RouterSwitchfolder.

Step 1: Download TST10 from winsite. Click here to download it.

Step 2: To turn OFF the router. Create a text file named disable.txt. Include the following lines in the file.

192.168.1.1
WAIT “Login: “
SEND “admin\m”
WAIT “Password: “
SEND “admin\m”
WAIT “–> “
SEND “pppoe set transport 1 disabled\m”

Step 3: To turn ON the router. Create a text file named enable.txt. Include the following lines in the file.

192.168.1.1
WAIT “Login: “
SEND “admin\m”
WAIT “Password: “
SEND “admin\m”
WAIT “–> “
SEND “pppoe set transport 1 autoconnect enabled\m”

Step 4: Create a btach file labelled routerOFF.bat, with the following text:

chdir C:\RouterSwitch
c:
TST10 /r:disable.txt /o:last_log.txt

Step 5: Create a batch file labelled routerON.bat, with the following text:

chdir C:\RouterSwitch
c:
TST10 /r:enable.txt /o:last_log.txt

Step 6: Now schedule the routerOFF.bat and routerON.bat using the Windows task scheduler