Abata Hotel

Seoul is big - really, really big. The Abata hotel is located in Goyang, which is one of the business districts of the city and most, if not all, of the guests are there to work, not play. The hotel itself is becoming a bit dated, but the rooms are large and clean. There are some quirks, such as rooms come with a big array of hair care products - in my case unused. Also the free high speed wifi had to be manually activated by a member of the hotel staff and would occasionally drop out. Reconnection sometimes could only be achieved by taking the room key out of the master switch - causing everything to shut down and then reboot. The breakfast is very basic - some steamed rice, toast, chicken nuggets. Some fruit would have been nice, but having said that there are several minimarts in the surrounding streets and it was easy enough to buy extra stuff. If the hotel staff read this - please, please have some strong coffee. The usual practise seemed to be to place a single scoop in the drip filter machine first thing and as the water compartment was progressively refilled the "coffee" became so weak as to have no taste. The staff of the hotel are excellent and try really, really hard to help out. They are also friendly - though in some cases speak very little English. This was actually a struggle in many parts of Korea and I strongly advise a phrase book. Also Korean is a tonal language, so even saying the name of the hotel - Abata, which seems simple - would often draw blank looks from taxi drivers. I resorted to having staff write down my various destinations for me on pieces of paper in Korean - and even that system was not fool proof. Regarding dining - there is not a lot of choice in the immediate vicinity of the hotel. Or rather, there are plenty of cafes but they do not appear to have menus with English translations (some exceptions are Mr Pizza and also Beerking). As you would expect from their names, these are neither fine dining nor Korean. I had a couple of nice local meals, but communication was by pointing and nodding. OK - it is Korea and I should have learned a few words, but in such a large international city the language barrier was surprisingly large. By far the best choice is to go to the Lafesta shopping complex. It is a hefty 45 minutes walk away but only $6 by cab. It has plenty of good quality restaurants with dual language menus. My favorite was a large buffet place called el Mareta, which has a lot of very high quality food available and because it is a buffet minimises the language problem. Another good bar / restaurant in the same complex is the inelegantly named Beer Bistro, which is on the 4th floor of a building with nice decor and good service. For recreation there is a big park near Lafesta and I recommend it to anyone who wants to go for a nice walk or run - especially if it is sunny. For general shopping Lafesta is ok. For something more upmarket, try the nearby giant cube of the Hyundai department store, which also has a high quality produce section in the basement. For clothes, there are a large number of discount brand outlet stores on the other side of the railway line from the Abata. It is best that the staff describe how to get there, but it's not difficult and is only 10 minutes walk. However almost all of the sizes seem to be for the Asian market and I had no luck buying shoes because I take an (American) size 12. While taxis can be expensive, if you use them wisely a trip into the cbd - which is a long way to go - can work out at less than $30. While the subway system is excellent, it sometimes requires multiple station changes. While a taxi is the lazy option, I preferred them - especially late at night - because they were very fast and provide a door-to-door service. Speaking of speed, it seems quite normal for taxi drivers to massively exceed the speed limit - sometimes traveling at up to 180kph in 90kph zones. However, they seem to know what they are doing - and unless you know Korean for "please, kind sir, I would appreciate you slowing down" there is not much that can be realistically done.

Free WIFI, clean room and not too small for 3 persons living together. Also, hotel managers and assistant are very nice and speak good English. Surprisingly, they fill the room with many toilettes like hair gel, hair spray, lotion and even air refresher. Normally, hotel of this type won’t do that. This is just little good thing. Hotel assistant, a guy was really friendly to walk me to the train station. I felt so good that service was beyond expectation. The drawback is that the room is filled with smoking odor. That is reason why we need to have air refresher inside the room.

We were ther for some business meetings for one week. It was good enough. Everything was OK, especially the staff were very helpful.