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What I Did On My Holidays – Seoul

So, I’ve just come back from holiday!  And I have a lot to say about it, but I figured that I might as well start on something that I was going to start on ages ago; brief accounts of other places.  With my writer’s hat on, I entirely cheer for the idea that urban magic exists in every city of the world, and works in different ways in every city of the earth, and with this in mind, and since my holidays are 99% of the time in other cities, this is the beginning of my all-purpose tour of Places I Went To On My Holidays, starting with a trip I had last year to Seoul.

We flew to Seoul via Dubai in order to save money, and Dubai International Airport merits its own entry just for its own ridiculousness.  From Dubai we flew into Incheon International Airport, which is a fair haul outside the city on the coast of South Korea.  Incheon is, by the by, the scene of a very savvy bit of tactics on the part of the US Military during the Korean Civil War, when the U.N. landed troops there, cutting off an invading North Korean army.  Make no mistake; it was a landing governed by bonkers Cold War logic, but if nothing else, you gotta admire the strategy.

Anyhow, it’s a slightly strange thing landing at Incheon International.  By bus from there to Seoul, you get the impression that you’re riding a strip of road set in endless endless yellow sand with the sea washing the edges, and can’t help half-thinking any second now the whole airport will just sink.  Then there’s a short strip of low hills populated with rice paddies – which from train at least, is what most of Korea looks like, flooded paddies of either rice or cabbage – and then a city that goes on forever. 

From what I can tell, Seoul is set around two major landmarks; the Han River, which is a great wide fat sluggish thing with government and financial buildings pressed all around, and Namsan, which is a semi-forested hill in what I came to think of as the ‘heart’ of the city, topped by the red-white spike of Seoul Tower.  Get out of the airport bus at Chongmuro, at the foot of Namsan, and the first thing the unprepared tourist smells, whether you like it or not, is fish, cabbage and traffic fumes.  At first I thought I wouldn’t become used to these smells; I did.  While Seoul gets very hot in summer, every building and most public transport is also air conditioned, and every now and then there’ll be a thunderstorm and a lashing of rain to take the edge off.

It’s a strange city, to a westerner.  A lot about it seems very similar.  The hotels are pretty much like hotels anywhere, although the ‘Korean style’ room comes with no bed, but a pile of usually neon-coloured mattresses and blankets you lay out on the floor.  Oddly, the thing that bewildered myself and my boyfriend most about Seoul’s hotels were the sheer array of buttons you had compressed into one remote control.  You could control room temperature, lights, TV, alarms, and occasionally, the toilet, from a whole array of unintelligible symbols.  Our attempt to work out which of the 8 buttons on the toilet in our hotel made the toilet flush led to a small flood before we finally solved it.

Outside, the streets were both familiar and strange, and this is best summed up by pizza.  Pizza!  (We thought.)  How familiar and western!  We’ve had two weeks of rice and cabbage, as a treat, let’s have pizza!  And indeed, we went into a place that is entirely recognisable from every city from New York to Berlin, and there was fairly standard pizza on offer.  Then there was the pizza by boyfriend had; even were it not covered with an exciting array of Korean spices and pickles, the rim of the pizza was made of cookie dough.  A small pot of blueberry sauce was provided, so that the meal became a main course, followed on the same dish by blueberry cookie pudding.

Breakfast was also an adventure.  Korean food has many Good Things about it, not least the things that can be done to shredded beef.  But a few days of rice, kimchi (which is essentially fermented cabbage buried in a barrel for months on end, soaked in vinegar and allowed to mature, and which no amount of good intention could make pleasurable for me) and strange sliced of rectangular grey slime also made from – you guessed it – cabbage, pulverised and crushed with unknown nuts and chili – and we began to crave something more delicate on our stomachs.  After a little searching, we found a place called Paris Baguette, which did everything the westerner might crave from croissants to coffee.  But like all things Korean, it had a twist; doughnuts containing red bean curd stick in my imagination most.

Fish – or things that may once have shared and ocean with fish – were also a strong theme.  Wandering the streets of Eujiro, a tight network of streets largely populated by trendy youth, the smell of fish was very strong.  By night, club signs flashed all the time, and the clothes shops never seemed to close, letting in a constant flow of kids wearing slashed jeans with copper-dyed hair.  Their older fellow countrymen could occasionally be seen, but most were dressed far more conservatively, unless they were businessmen in white shirts and black trousers out in the beer houses.  It was in the backstreets of Eujiro that I also saw no less than three of the only street fights I’ve ever seen, all between Korean gentlemen who seemed to have become so involved in debate with their rivals that the only way to settle the matter was to attempt to break brooms over each other’s heads.  Sadly – but perhaps fortunately – taekwondo, the traditional-ish martial art of Korea, did not seem to be prevalent among the population, and the mass of onlookers seemed to regard such fights as a fairly standard way of settling a debate.  A feature of Eujiro that I particularly enjoyed were the street vendors selling everything from mobile phones through to Robbie Williams calendars and my favourite late-night snack; chilled pineapple slices on a stick.

Another feature of Seoul are the underground shopping centres which seem a fairly strong feature of most major underground stations; and which make navigation around said underground stations quite tricky, as sometimes it can be easier to go through a bookshop and up through a leather clothes shop than to follow the signs for the exit.  Needless to say the majority of the inhabitants of Seoul had better English than I was ever going to achieve Korean, but there was also a lot of commercialised abuse of the language going on.  T-shirts bearing such mystic comments as ‘Hortative Remarks’ or inspirational slogans like ‘Work, Play, Family United Individual!’ or words to that effect.

Traffic in Korea is quite frightening, being a constant.  The history, while very impressive, is often also rebuilt, courtesy of various occupations, abuse and then a re-discovery that seemed to have kicked off in the 1970s.  However, accident can sometimes lead you to odd places.  A cry of ‘lets see what’s up here!’ from my boyfriend while walking through the national park that lies directly north of the city is and is easily reachable by metro, let to the accidental discovery of a 70-foot tall golden Buddha surrounded by no less than 10,000 miniature golden Buddhas, tucked away, unsignposted, in the middle of a forest.  Thinking of history, the Korean declaration of independence, which can be found inscribed in stone in a small park near Jongno Tower, is a masterpiece of tactfully never once blaming the Japanese while screaming hatred and anger for the occupation of their country between every chiseled line.

As a consequence of history, the U.S. military still has an influence in Korea, and it can be seen in Seoul, particularly in the streets of Itaewon, where the hamburger joints are rolling with American accents as much as local adventurers out for a meal.

Taking the train out of Seoul is an adventure in its own right; the line to Suwon, a city graced with one of the few surviving very obvious pieces of Korean history in the form of a thick city wall along which tourists and dog walkers alike can ramble, reveals just how much Seoul sprawls.  Allotments cling to tiny strips of land by the railways, and great pink towerblocks inscribed on the sides with letters and numbers for identification cluster round little glass clumps of communal living.  One of the most curious and striking features were the repeated blood-red neon crucifixes shining from numerous Protestant chapels and churches scattered across the landscape.  Nearly every town seemed to have a church, whether a wooden chapel or a community-hall brick building, which by night added an eerie quality to the horizon of artificial light.

With my tourist hat on, I have never ever been so impressed by a tourist office as that that Seoul boasts near Jongno Tower.  Almost entirely deserted at any hour, it was staffed by the most multilingual, helpful staff I have ever met.  This in contrast with the tourist office in the small town of Bulgoska, in the south of the country, whose answer to the question ‘where can we stay here?’ was to judiciously purse the lips, consider and then reply, ‘why you want to stay here?  I don’t think here good for you…’

One final word on the strange juxtaposition that was Seoul, and came in the form of the TV channels we watched.  A huge range of US TV had been imported, most of it subtitled rather than dubbed, and you could not turn on the TV without an episode of CSI in one of its incarnations playing.   On the channel over you could find Korean historical drama, which consisted to my uneducated eye of many men with substantial beaded hats looking judicious at each other and stroking their impressive grey beards.  On the next channel, Chinese drama continually and frustratingly failed to have any spectacular kung fu battles, despite the number of hands put on swords; the next channel was Korean modern domestic drama, which seemed an odd escapee from the 1960s school of drama; then the Buddhist evangelical channel; then the Protestant channel; then a channel dedicated entirely to the playing of one computer game over and over again and then, finally, the channel that myself and my boyfriend found so strangely compelling, the channel dedicated to playing the Korean game of baduk, or go in the west.  I cannot describe how fascinating it was watching this thing that neither of us fully understood to the ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaahhhs’ of many judicious commentators.

Seoul was a fascinating experience, one I feel I barely scratched the surface of.  Strange, fascinating, and in its own special, neon-lit, bustling, smelling, cabbage-stained way, traffic-honking, train-rumbling, fan-whirling way, deeply magical…