You are never going to get food poisoning in Korea

In Seoul, people are pretty germ-phobic, so you can guarentee that food preparation is of the highest standards, and very lovely, especially the Korean Barbeque. People are also very courteous - if you see someone wearing a surgical mask, it is not because they are protecting themselves from pollution, but because they don't wish to spread the germs they may be carrying if they are not well.

And speaking of pollution, Seoul has a lot of traffic. So much that all the roads look like the M25 in the rush hour - but all of the time. Yet there is no smog and the view from the windows are an unobstructed, natural high definition. There are hardly any smokers either. In fact the city is very clean. One of our hosts - a lady as it happens - remarked that this was because they had a female president.

Arrivng at hotel after being caught in traffic, we were ushered straight into dinner where we were greeted by distictly foreign food.We could tell it was foreign because it came in lots of little dishes rather than one big one, and the only utensils were metal chopsticks and a spoon. I have never used chopsticks for real before - playing around with them at the local Chnese at home really doesn't count, but its a great way to eat, making sure your mouthfuls are not too big, and that dinner passes in a gently civilised manner.

After dinner, we ushered ourselves to our rooms. I had a long hot soak and went to bed, utterly exhausted. I slept soundly for about three hours. At which point I woke up ready for the day. At 1am. I put in three hours work before feeling tired enough that I might sleep, and I did. But that's jet lag for you.

Having aroom on the 28th floor has its drawbacks, none of which detract from the amazing view. Mostly it's the lift stopping at every other floor on the way down, which makes that essential journey to breakfast labout five times longer than you'd think - which may as well be decades when you're desperate for coffee.

We spent the day with our hosts. It was a long hard, but enjoyable day punctuated with very good food. I don't like kimchi, by the way, which is something like pickled cabbage. I won't go into the work day, except to say that this city makes the UK feel like a dirty old backwater island. Everyone is highly educated - which is a problem because its underpopulated and the Chinese are coming in to do the low level jobs that the Koreans consider themselves too educated for - but the Koreans also don't want to be relying on foreigners to do those jobs. Everywhere is very clean and people are constantly looking to the future, how to make things better, smarter.

Seoul is the digital city, and although the technology is no further ahead than what's available in the UK, it's much more widely adopted. The technical toilets are commonplace. Bluetooth devices are used routinely for workers to communicate around larger spacesfor example. Buidings go up faster than it takes for a UK architect to think of an idea - and while the apartment blocks are quite ugly, the commercial buidings are all architectural wonders. The amount of money that is clearly spent on and in the city is phenomenal.

But the business lounge at Heathrow T2 is better.

We had a Korean Barbeque that evening, which, surprisingly, was indoors, with a charcoal burner built into the table and serving staff cooking meat over it - you just helped yourself to some when it was pushed to the edge. It was divine.

Jet lag was pretty much gone by the following day when there was more work and more food. Until we got to Gyeongbokgung  Palace, which was beautiful. I don't really know what I expected, something big and stone probably, and it wasn't. It covered a fair area, but it was no higher than one high storey. It's in the process of being renovated, but with every piece of timber being hand painted, its taking a while.

The day was rounded off with dinner in the Top Cloud - a donut floor suspended above its rather tall building, so it feels like you're not attached to anything on earth. The food, as always was beautiful, but its not a place for those who don't like heights. Actually Seoul isn't for those who don't like heights really. Because everything is built high.

I'm on my way to the airport as I type. It's been a brief visit, and largely taken up with work, but this is  a country that is far advanced , bigger and better than you would expect, and filled with a people that work fantastically hard, and are gracious, friendly and accommodating. South Korea is not smewhere I had ever thought of as a holiday destination, but is now firmly on my list.