As I have thought since I arrived here, Love Motels are definitely the BEST thing about Korea! Even the really, really bad ones are fab, as they are so cheap and nasty, plus tacky is definitely the way to go if you want to win my heart! So, Love Motels tick all the boxes!
Greg had heard about the Love Motels before we arrived (I had done very little research), and he delightfully informed me that they are basically very cheap, sleazy hotels that rent out rooms by the hour or by the night for premarital/adulterous/whoring sex/western cheapo tourists. I was very enthused to try them! As even sleazy places in Korea are not really sleazy, they are still safe and very elaborately decorated!! Basically, people in Korea are not allowed to sleep with each other or stay over at each other’s houses before they get married (they just live with their own parents), so they have to sneak to the Love Motels to get ‘quality time’ together... which I think is really cute!! They are also used by people having affairs (as people don’t really get divorced in Korea), and we’ve seen lots of sheepish looking middle aged couples coming out of lifts – very amusing!! Also, the hookers use these rooms (although we never see them!!), there are always lots of calling cards on the floor – kinda like Vegas! As the motels are usually just meant to be for ‘short stays’, they always provide you with all shampoos, creams etc – which makes packing v light! Plus most motels give you toothbrushes, toothpaste, and condoms (tiny Korean ones), which I find really amusing! Some have condom vending machines in the corridors, and one – the Ritz Motel (classy) in Seoul had a vibrator vending machine in the corridor! So, be warned, it’s not for the faint hearted!
Most Love Motels are towering neon monstrosities, that wouldn’t look out of place on the Vegas strip, god knows how much electricity they use up! They all have crazy names like, Bobos Motel, Motel Kiss, XO Motel, St Tropez Motel, Jelly Motel, Heart Motel to name a few – often the name is the best part, so it bums when they are only written in Korean! One thing to be aware of is that people NEVER stay for more than one night in these love motels, so it causes a great deal of confusion when you want to stay 2 nights, like we always do on our ‘minibreaks’ (especially when I forget how to say ‘night’ in Korean, which is all the time)...so they often try and give us two rooms, or kick us out after the first night – it’s all part of the fun of the Korean experience though!
The motels are great and cost on average about 15 – 20 pounds a night for the room, which is a total bargain, and a lot cheaper than the normal hotels and so we can go away most weekends without spending too much money! Motels do vary widely in Korea, from the super super basic to the super super fancy! Here are some of my high/lowlights so far.....
First Motel
The first time we tried out a Love Motel was the second weekend we spent it Korea. I spent the first weekend crying, so demanded that we escape Jeonju for the second weekend! We went to Gwangju, and stayed in the Castle Love Motel.. It was 35,000 won per night which is a total bargain, and had a cool gold bed! It also had a pc and a big plasma screen TV...all Love Motels have this huge TVs that have Korean porn on them... the porn is really rubbish though (for porn), as it doesn’t show any bits and is therefore pointless! Amusing though! The Castle Motel definitely set us up well and gave us a good impression of the Love Motel genre...There are lots of motels in the same area, and Gwangju definitely makes an effort when it comes to theming its motels!
Best Motel
The best motel that we have been to so far was in our home city of Jeonju. For such a small city, Jeonju definitely has amazing Love Motels.. I assume it’s because it’s super conservative, so people have to hide! Most of the Love Motels in Jeonju are around the bus station, so we had seen them from the bus several times, and one stood out amongst all the rest – The Beast Motel!!! Located next to its sister motel – the Beauty Motel! It was a beautiful neon structure with multicoloured, colour changing signage, and sparkled in the evening sky! (That’s me being sarcastically over romantic about Love Motels)..We decided to stay in the Beast the night before our Mega trip (see earlier blog entries) and it was amazing – it was all we’d dreamed of and more! There was a chandelier in the lobby, and a popcorn machine and all the corridors were lit up with sparkly neon lights! Our room was 50,000 won – which was a luxury room, and is a total bargain – and was themed with a really random travel theme. There were pictures of the Eiffel tower, a London underground and various people on buses etc on a mural on one of the walls. The beds had flashing neon lights around it, and there was a double Jacuzzi that had neon lights above it too – the Jacuzzi wasn’t as powerful as I would like, but that’s my only complaint! This is definitely the best Love Motel in Korea that I know of! Unfortunately, Greg was sick L so that took the shine of it a little, but we will definitely return (and go to the Beauty, which seems exactly the same but less grrr!) and I would recommend it to anyone popping to Jeonju for the weekend!
Worst Motel
The worst motel was in Daegu, at the end of our mega trip! Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of nice Love Motels in Daegu, but we did not stay in any of them! This motel (we don’t know its name as it was only in Korean), was by one of Daegu’s bus terminals at Dongdaegu, and was near a toast and fruit shop –random! It was an insanely cheap 25,000 won a night, but I’m so glad I didn’t pay any more! Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of the room so you can’t share my horror, but it was pretty bad! It was tiny and sparse, with no proper cover on the bed, which was tiny itself..plus there was a rank, smelly bathroom and a skanky green carpet outside...it also had a broken condom vending machine in the room –which they hadn’t bothered to move (though I think that was the funniest thing about the motel). The worst thing about the motel, which I discovered at 3am on our first night there (we stayed 2 nights), was that it was in the same building as a 24 hour karaoke bar! Big bad! So, I seemed to spend my whole night lying awake and listening to boom boom boom boom! It was pretty bad, and I was VERY cranky! So, I think the moral of the story is that you should ALWAYS check and see if there is a karaoke bar in your motel, and if there is you should run! (It’s a pretty easy lesson, I think!
No comments:
Post a Comment