Seoul
Oh yes, my travel writing. I always forget to keep on top of things when I’m travelling in a pair, and on this trip to Seoul I’m accompanied by none other than Alisa [surnamed REDACTED because she said she didn’t want me to ruin her internet footprint], of Hong Kong parts 1 and 2 fame. As such, I can’t promise I’ll find enough time sat on the train or the bus or the toilet to keep a faithful note of what we get up to. Still, it’s worth a try.
I woke up at 5.30 this morning, showered, ate 9 dumplings and a banana, and drank coffee with milk and sugar. At 6.20, I met Alisa in a taxi outside of my building. We exchanged accounts of what we’d been up to for Chinese New Year week, then descended into our usual back and forth- stories of our youths, debates about music, references to obscure videos on the internet that do nae bear thenken aboot. This continued as we waited in line to check in, sailed through security and debated getting a fabled airport pint, before deciding it’d be too rushed for a proper first drink of the holiday. Now we’re sat in separate seats on the plane, having had take off delayed by nearly an hour. I’m sat next to a girl, and I’ve been preoccupied all flight by the knowledge that she may well have seen me pick my nose seconds before she sat down. This was particularly heart breaking, as she has a Saturo Gojo earphone case, and I could’ve discussed JJK with her had I not (possibly) humiliated myself.
Anyway, I spent about an hour reading Monkey (Journey to the West), before moving onto a bit of music and then realising that now would be a good time to get ahead with some writing. Once I’ve finished, I’ll listen to a quick podcast episode on Korean history to get me in the mood. You see, I know little to nothing about Korean history or culture beyond the very surface level (I’ve seen Parasite and Old Boy, and I know who BTS and Blackpink are), so I’ve tried to brush up on the topic for the past few weeks. I watched a few YouTube videos on Korean history and another Korean film called Burning (based on a Murakami short story) on the recommendation of my friend Jamie. I’m also halfway through the breakout film of Parasite’s director Bong Joon-Ho, Memories of Murder, but I was pirating it so I can’t finish it on the plane. Unfortunately, other than Netflix originals, there’s only one major Korean film of the streaming site, and it doesn’t have English subtitles, so I’m not exactly spoilt for choice in terms of in flight entertainment. My Korean language skills are also decidedly beginner, as I’m still learning the vowels of the Korean alphabet on Duolingo. It’s fairly easy to get the hang of, unlike Chinese, as not only does it have an alphabet, but that alphabet often represents the positions of the speech organs when forming that sound. The “g” sound, for example, resembles the tongue touching the top of the mouth. Still, I’m barely halfway through the vowels at this point, and I’ve got to conquer the consonants next before even flirting with the idea of basic phrases. Pirating and subtitles it is, then.
Our plan once we land is to grab lunch, drop our bags in our Airbnb and then venture to southern Seoul to see the Korean national museum and war museum (this plan did not materialise due to the delay). I kind of wanted to visit the demilitarised zone between the south and north, but it would’ve taken half a day, required us to wake up at 6 am, and Alisa wasn’t that keen, so the museum should be a casual, easy stand in for that missed opportunity. Besides, if I like Seoul enough I’ll just come back and see the DMZ another time.
It’s SNOWING!!!!!! I say gleefully as the plane touches down in Incheon international airport.
From there we picked up our luggage, Wowpass cards (picture an Octopus or Oyster card that lets you top up your Won balance with any physical currency you’d feasibly have when in Korea) and some snacks from CU, the Korean 7/11. I grabbed a packet of sour gummies called Nite Crawlers, as any Charlie Kelly fan would.
Oh, and for the record, Icheon airport is exactly as futuristic as every other airport in East Asia appears to be.
Anyway, we were anxious to get into the city before it stopped raining so, having collected our tickets from the Wow kiosk, we boarded the airport express train to Seoul. I’ve discovered that on Korean public transport they play 5 minute craft type cooking tutorial videos. Oh now it’s a show about fishing.
I hate to be that guy, but Korea looks just like it does in the movies (all three that I’ve watched). It’s totally flat for large stretches of land, which are surrounded by sudden snow-topped mountains. It really screams rural like nowhere I’ve been in Asia before, though my sample size is decidedly small. “It’s so flat, like unbelievably flat,” I say. “I hear that a lot,” chirps Alisa. The joke here is that she’s small-breasted, you see. Now they’re playing a cartoon documentary about Michael Jackson and the historic origins of New York City, narrated by a carton of milk and a bagel.
Mate, when you select a language on machines for transport tickets and currency exchange, the option for English has an American flag. What the fuck kind of sense does that make? God, how hard can you twerk for Uncle Sam, Korea?
Seoul station is utterly crawling with soldiers. This might be the hottest hot zone I’ve ever visited, which days a lot about how sheltered my life has been. There are even US military here. Crazy.
Fuck me Koreans are tall. This is major cognitive dissonance for me.
Ok so I’ve decided it’d be best for me to keep this succinct, given how much I tend to ramble. I want to ensure I keep up to date but I also want to be in the moment, so I’ll be brief but thorough. I love Seoul already. Myself and Alisa are sat in our room, listening to music, vaping (vapes being illegal to buy in Hong Kong, crucially) and drinking squid game soju. It’s beautifully snowy outside in the tight, fluorescent streets that echo constantly with soft, dulcet K-Pop tones.
I bought nerd glasses and a ushanka hat (pictured, along with an alternative hat option I considered, below) so I can pander harder to the white boy in Asia look (ooooooo husbant you spent all our money on soju and now we are homeless).
Hardest fucking image of me in existence, by the way.
Mario with the dreads is so utterly ridiculous.
We just enjoyed a cheap Michelin guide meal at a restaurant 2 minutes from our motel.
As a matter of fact, everything is cheap as fuck here. I’ve also heard that English teachers are paid better here than anywhere else in Asia. I’m thinking some thoughts. Generally, I think Alisa and I are feeling a warm glow of excitement at strolling through streets that buzz with life, but manage to keep that buzz to a low hum rather than the ecstatic, harsh clamour of Hong Kong. It somehow feels like Prague if Prague had been built in 2045 rather than the Middle Ages- it shares the same welcoming cosiness that offsets the bitter cold. I really love it.
We just navigated Korean Netflix to pre drink to squid game. I LOVE KOREA.
Following said pre drinks, we got ready to some 2016 hip hop throw backs then walked 2 minutes down our street to a bar called BOUND.
The two beautiful Vietnamese waitresses served us 3 beers and a Korean honey liqueur a piece, then stood giggling in the corner as one pretended to DJ on the other’s belly.
The TVs played DJ sets where they mixed Afro beats and classic rnb to cute little cafes. The bar itself was neon neon neon with a gorgeous little smoking area overlooking a cat café and the street below.
The cats were off work, given it was 11 pm, so we watched them palling around by the window, unbound by their responsibilities.
After BOUND, we walked another two minutes down the street to a traditional karaoke place, where you pay a fee for a private booth for an hour, and we sang our hearts out to When the Sun Goes Down, SICKO MODE and hotel California.
Around 1 am, we grabbed a box of “condition” a famous Korean hangover cure, then walked back to our hostel. Alisa made ramen with some kind of terrifying vacuum sealed meat, and I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I LOVE KOREA.
Ok, as is typical of my two man trips, I did not keep on top of my account as the action occurred. As such, now, on the flight home, I’ll attempt to recall our comings and goings as best I can.
On our first morning in Korea, we went for breakfast in a place down the road from our hotel. I had kimchee and pork bulgogi stew with a side of rice, fried egg, seaweed and sesame oil. If this sounds like a lot for breakfast that’s because it is. Portion sizes in Korea appear to be insanely large, especially in relation to the laughably cheap prices.
Well, the hefty portion prepared us for a day into which we intended to cram two museum visits, a traditional village visit, a temple visit, a palace visit and a heavy night out. Obviously this proved a little ambitious, but as we stepped out of the subway to face the Korean War museum, we felt confident enough in our plan. We stopped first to grab coffee. I went for a condensed milk latte and Alisa got some kind of iced americano type deal, if I remember rightly. I’d never heard of a condensed milk latte, but I’d recommend it to anyone lucky enough to come across one. The barista, an old Korean man, was lovely and smiley too. I’d been told by quite a few people to expect Koreans to be fiery, racist and generally dismissive of foreigners, but this trip has suggested the complete opposite.
Outside of the museum, the first of many protests we witnessed over the weekend, was taking place in spite of the snow and cold. Now, we never figured out what exactly they were protesting, but you have to assume it has something to do with the attempted military coup a few weeks ago. I’ll say it once again: I hate living through major historical events.
So, we skipped past the protests to play in the snow in front of the museum for a while, before strolling around the garden areas, which are dotted which decommissioned tanks, helicopters, boats and other armoured vehicles that saw action in the civil war.
This provided Alisa the chance to take one photo kicking her foot up fruity style whilst manning an antiaircraft turret and another drinking her iced coffee in the back of an armoured car. I found it highly distasteful, a sentiment I expressed to her whilst vaping next to the decommissioned carrier plane.
Unfortunately, we chose the one day of year on which the Korean War museum is closed, so after taking some photos of the place (very neat architecture), and reading a few casualty lists, we took the subway and moved on to the national museum.
The National Museum has even neater architecture. It’s colossal, sits by a lake which sports a tasteful, ornate little band stand type deal, and has a huge gap in it that intentionally frames the snowy, mountainous skyline on which Seoul tower sits. I cannot stress enough how pretty this place is in the winter. It’s really a blessing that it snowed the day we arrived. It just added such a charm to the city.
So, we headed into the museum, which is free to enter, and spent a few hours trying our best to get a grasp on the tumultuous history of Korea’s various kingdoms. The prehistoric and Iron Age exhibits were closed, which left us starting our tour adrift and disoriented in the mid Bronze Age. It took us a while, but in the end i’d say we’d sort of come to terms with the chronology. By far the most interesting periods, to me, were the two periods in which Korea was united (discarding the short lived Korean Empire, that is)- the Goryeo and Joseon kingdom periods (the latter followed on from the former). Goryeo united the country through Buddhism and produced some striking art that particularly appealed to me due to its resemblance and homages to Buddhist motifs that run through anime, such as the divine generals (see Jujutsu Kaisen’s Eight Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga), the nine-tailed fox (see Naruto) and Yama the fifth King of Hell (again, see Naruto).
Joseon’s rulers, however, abandoned Buddhism and modernised Korea in accordance with Confucianism over 500 years of benevolent rule. This benevolence included the invention of the hangeul alphabet system still in use today, which massively improved literacy among the poor, and a spy network that investigated local leaders to ensure they were treating the peasants well. Joseon survived wars with China and Japan (armed with bows against flintlock rifles no less), coming to end an only when the ill-fated Empire of Korea began. Oh, I also saw a kid in a Haaland city kit. We are massive.
The walking and mental stimulation worked up an appetite, so we opted to move onto the traditional “Hanok” village for a snack. Bukchon, the Hanok village in question, is a residential area that has spent the last hundred years committed to maintaining the traditional architectural style, building short houses and shops with wood or white stone walls and ornate tiled rooftops.
Only a few buildings stand higher than one floor, but even these have been designed with the aesthetic in mind, even if some have brought a modern take to it. In our infinite wisdom, we went for the first place that offered Korean mulled wine, discovered they were sold out, then decided we were too committed to the decision to leave. Now, our decision was also motivated by the striking view of Hanok rooftops and an orange sunset offered by the venue, which was one of the aforementioned taller, more modern buildings. So, we sat on the rooftop sipping baked leaf green tea and ate a matcha cheesecake and tiramisu.
Here, I asked Alisa what her five favourite cities in the world were, and this question dominated the conversation for the following hour. I believe she said hers were Hong Kong (naturally), Berlin (naturally), Budapest, Seoul and either Tokyo or Rotterdam (she lived in the former during her year abroad however many decades ago she was at uni). I think I said Manchester, Hong Kong, Paris, Seoul, Boston and Cordoba (I can never stick to my own parameters), but in hindsight I really should’ve swapped the last one for St Andrews (I think it must’ve felt too small to even call a city). We then discussed where had the best nightlife we’d seen, then the best food, both of which gave rise to lyrical yarns of debauchery and delight (think Ayia Napa and San Sebastián). It’d be amiss of me to not emphasise just how pretty Bukchon is though. It has all the quaintness of a little Asian mountain village and its slap bang in the middle of a mega city. Once again I LOVE KOREA.
Full of warm tea and matcha cake, we walked to the nearby Jogyesa temple to take in all the good energy we could before getting up to some distinctly bad things in the evening. Jogyesa is beautiful, a masterpiece of colour co-ordination and lit up magically in the evenings. I didn’t feel quite as at peace there as I did at the Big Buddha back in HK, but that might be related to the fact that the temple is in the middle of a commercial area of Seoul.
Next we headed home to change, then took the subway to Itaewon, the party district of Seoul. When you hop out of Itaewon subway station, the energy of the place hits you immediately. Joe's girlfriend, Caitlin, described Seoul as a place that feels like it should be incredibly intense but is actually quite calming and, for the most part, I agree with her. Itaewon is different; it throbs with tremendous joy and life. Seoul is a nocturnal city, though, so the throb wasn’t in full effect at a meagre 10 pm. Bars here stay open 24/7, so things in Itaewon only really pick up around midnight.
For this reason, it wasn't quite time to delve into Itaewon's LKF-like strip. Conveniently, we'd worked up an appetite walking around all day, and we thought it'd be best to build up to bar hopping at a Korean BBQ place I'd found on a local navigation app called Naver. I can't remember what it was called, but it was great and if anyone needs the recommendation I'd be happy to dig it up (I now have the name in Korean, but I don’t fancy typing it out on here, so let me know if you want it). Something butchers', I think, and the exterior certainly resembled one, with pictures of meat upon meat upon meat adorning the glass doors.
Alisa and I found a table that offered a view of two TVs playing the Premier League, then ordered beef and pork belly to eat, and beer and original soju to drink. KBBQ is always a fun little treat, but the addition of actually being in Korea only adds to the novelty.
Alisa, despite being the worst cook I know, handled the cooking as I kept burning the meat (too busy watching the footy), while I ostensibly dealt with the drinks. You see, as she's my senior, I'm supposed to serve her with two hands on the bottle, but I neither used two hands nor served her very often (see, bloody footy). I haven't a clue what we talked about, but I do know we played a little drinking game called Titanic. In this game, you pour a glass of beer, then float a shot glass in it and take turns adding soju to the shot glass. The person that makes the shot sink loses and has to drink the whole thing. Alisa was very shit at Titanic, so, being the considerate friend that I am, I started to lose on purpose. That way she wouldn't peak too early and I wouldn't peak too late.
Then, having eaten our fill of kimchee, other pickled veg, noodles and meat, we moved onto a bar that I found on Reddit called Thursday Party.
The redditor that recommended it suggested playing beer pong there to make friends with the locals, and, after ordering a pair of giant Hoegaardens, that's exactly what we did.
About five minutes into playing, two stunning Korean girls approached us and started watching Alisa wipe the floor with me. Alisa asked them to join us. They protested for all of two seconds that they'd never played before, then divided and joined our teams. The girls were PhD students at a university in Seoul, where they'd also studied their under and post grad degrees. The one that joined my team studied something remarkably boring, but she had a lovely smile and sank far more shots that I did during our short-lived partnership. By the end of the game (Alisa's team won), it was approaching midnight, so we decided it'd be best to make a move elsewhere, either to the DJ set we'd planned to see or to another club on the way to said set. The girls we'd played with said they wanted to stay for a few more drinks, so they left us with some club recommendations and their Instagrams, and we powered on.
At this point we were both buzzing sufficiently to feel at home on the lively Itaewon strip, rammed with locals and tourists alike making an incredible racket and queueing for every club on the street. I'll attach a picture because my memory for specific details is failing me, but thing Black, Neon, Black Neon, Night City, Cold Ayia Napa, LKF but good etc. A man in a very steamy club room drew a love heart on the window addressed to Alisa, at which point she became convinced that that club actually really looked fun and she fucked with the vibe a lot. I protested that the club did not look good, and the club the girls had recommended was right next door, so we ought to try there first. Alisa, if that was a cock-block then I'm retrospectively sorry but the club did look like it smelled awful. Anyway, we went next door only to find a giant image of teenage Justin Bieber projected onto the bizarrely neoclassical interior, and Baby blaring from the speakers. We agreed to take a wee break to wait out and assess the next song, though it turned out to be Barbie girl, and I conceded that maybe the other club would've been better after all.
Instead of turning back, though, we agreed to try to find a hip hop club on the way to the set. Conveniently, about five steps beyond the club we came out of, I spotted a sign advertising an underground venue quite literally called hip-hop club. Here, the typically cheap and strong drinks we devoured in that basement, along with the 2016 vibe the DJ was evidently trying (key word, trying) to cultivate, got us in a very, very good mood. I'd say 1 in every 3 songs was a banger, even if they often played 30 second of said banger before switching abruptly to some shitter and never returning. Still, it was a relatively high hit rate for a commercial club, and they served my favourite Long Island Iced Tea. Of course, this was where the trouble began.
I think we decided to leave after realising that a turning point in our sobriety levels was rapidly approaching. Alisa bought two jaeger bombs for the road, and we headed off to the techno club. Outside we bumped into a girl that was leaving the club. I asked her why she was leaving so early and if the set was any good. She responded by complimenting our style, hugging Alisa and quite literally begging us to go to the club. We simply had to, she said. Naturally, we collected her Instagram too, then abided her instructions. We paid the £20 ish entry, and I bought us drinks while Alisa went to to the toilet. On her return, she made the genius decision to not drink hers, while I downed mine before we finally reached the set room. The DJ, a Spanish fella called Héctor Oaks, played techno that must've been fairly good, as it prompted Alisa to drag me to the very front of the room, right next to the DJ booth.
At this point in the night, I'd reached that crucial point of drunkenness where I'm confident enough to talk to anyone but have absolutely no desire to chat anyone up. I don't know whether these two things are mutually inclusive, but I can't recall a time that I've ever found a sweet spot in between the two. Anyway, Alisa was busting her ass stupid style and I felt it was the right time to go and talk to some strangers in the smoking area. It was a tiny little room behind the bar, and I spent the rest of the night there being obliviously chatted up by a fairly cute Korean girl and having my ear chewed off by two insufferable arseholes that went to Harrow. The Korean girl joined me as I sat on the floor of the room vaping like an honest-to go maniac, and proceeded to gaze into my eyes and tell me over and over again how much of a shame it was that I wasn't staying in Seoul longer. In my drunken state I was like yeah you're right, I love Seoul, but in hindsight I *think* she probably wanted me to ask her to dance and give her a smooch. That's ok, we live and learn. She departed and left me open to the advances of the aforementioned arseholes. The first was a Chinese guy raised in London, who sneered at me when I said I was from Manchester, and beamed with pride when he told me he was a Chelsea fan. I hope he gets testicular torsion. The second was a white guy who, after a offered him a hand to shake, responded: 'mate, I wouldn't touch that hand, I've just fingered a bird in the toilet.' That about killed my mood, so I left to find my friend and tell her that I was gonna fwow up very soon. An hour after I moved to the smoking area, I found her exactly where I left her, and she graciously offered to order an uber for us and take me home. Now, this description might make it seem as though I didn't like the club or have a good time, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The venue was cheap, fun, and looked great, and I think I remember talking to other people that I quite liked, but I don't remember them well enough to describe. I think Seoul might have the best nightlife of anywhere not designed to be a hub for nightlife (i.e. Ayia Napa) that I've ever seen.
The following day we opted to cure our skull-fucking hangovers by getting as much Korean fried chicken as possible at 2.51 PM.
I can't quite remember what we talked about, as we were both almost certainly on auto-pilot, though I do vividly remember being offered a beer by the Saleseman from Squid Game, weirdly enough.
I said no, then dug into a two mountains of saucy chicken using the plastic gloves that the restaurant wisely keeps in a box on every table.
This needs to be a thing every sauce-heavy eatery- it's practical and offers the fun novelty of letting you feel like the girl from the blink 182 album cover. In the end we got nowhere close to finishing the absurd amount of meat we'd ordered, so we took it home in a little box that sat untouched in our fridge presumably until the cleaner came to our room after we checked out the next day. Now any time I'm hungry or broke or both I remember that huge box of delicious chicken we wasted and it makes me extremely depressed.
Anyway, we knew Sunday would be a bit of a write off due to the antics we'd anticipated the night before, so our plan was to hit the Hongdae neighbourhood and shop all day. Most shops in Korea stay open as late as bars in the UK, so we wouldn't be in a rush, you see. We arrived in Hongdae around 5 and witnessed an utterly ridiculous sight that set a tone of hazy absurdity for the remainder of the afternoon:
We stopped for a coffee, since the mountain of chicken we'd just dented, in addition of the lingering hangover, left us borderline comatose. We headed to a café on the second floor of a building overlooking the high-street.
Alisa got a café Vienna, which was quite delicious, and I had a classic oat vanilla latte. Here, we sat for what must have been 45 minutes discussing one topic almost exclusively: a guy stood on the street. The guy was shortish, racially ambiguous and VERY well dressed. He stood on the high-street doing absolutely nothing other than looking hot for probably half an hour, then went across the street to a funko pop store towards the end of our time observing him. We talked about his outfit, his height, his hair, his goals and plans and of course his race, never coming to any solid conclusions beyond agreeing that his primary objective was aura farming. Takes one to know one, I guess. Besides him, we chatted about the fashion trends that we noticed from our perch, which are very obvious in Seoul. I think I mentioned that South Korean girls very frequently get plastic surgery to meet an extremely specific facial beauty standard, but they also all follow extremely specific fashion trends, which results in a sea of people that look virtually identical flooding the Hongdae high street every day. Now, fortunately, the fashion trends they follow and the beauty standards they meet look stunning, so it's not something I'd complain about, though I imagine if I lived in Korea I'd get very insecure very quickly about looking so different.
Well, given that everyone else was doing it, we thought it'd be best to knock about the shops for a while and try to follow some of the trends we'd been observing. We hit every vintage store we could find and observed a trend that I feel applies internationally: in terms of vintage stores, the better the music the higher the prices. Any time we stepped into a store playing Channel Orange we knew by primal instinct that they'd exclusively stock M and M racing jackets and Harely Davidson tees.
Guess what was playing in this place? That’s right- A$AP Rocky.
But when we were greeted by the dulcet melodies of any Ed Sheeran song released post 2015 we knew we'd struck gold. We bore this in mind whilst Alisa searched for a pair of really great, ten year investment jeans, and I scoured the androgynous t-shirt sections looking for anything vaguely 2000s Beckham, hoping to put my buzzcut to good use. Unfortunately, everything we tried fit weird- which might have been to do with our distinctly non-Korean bodily proportions- and our search was entirely fruitless until we stepped into multi storey shop ran by a famous Korean streetwear and homeware brand: Aland. I guess it's a lot like urban outfitters in that it generally outfits the urban: whether that's with mass produced fashion that manages to keep it's finger on the pulse of what's cool, or with mass produced posters and coffee table books that are just quirky enough that you can see beyond their mass production. It's also like Urban Outfitters in that it has a vintage section, and it was only here that I found something I was willing to splash on. I've wanted a cool racing jacket for ages, I love the way they puff out and then cinch your waist like all good bombers should, and I like that they're always colourful enough to be a statement piece. The problem I've always found is that they cost an arm and a leg, and they're usually ruined by one really stupid sponsor (like M and Ms) that makes them look even tackier than they obviously are. In Aland, I found one with a grey base and sponsors that I don't think are *too obnoxious* (Mountain Dew being tastefully silly, in my eyes) for about 70 quid. Alisa insisted I bought it and hyped me up enough that 70 felt like a steal. I'll treat my lovely readers to a picture of said jacket when I come to describe our final day in Seoul, as I had to christen my new piece as soon as humanly possible. Aside from the jacket, I grabbed a really ridiculous book of posters called 'All the Cute Furry Friends is Here,' featuring classics such as graphic of a silly white dog captioned 'I'm Totally Concentrating Right Now. Please Don't Disturb Me. You know I'm really serious,' each sentence dotted sporadically around the page. I think describing the posters would kill a bit of their fun, so if you want to see them you'd better hope you're lucky enough to see my bedroom one day, as it's literally covered in them now. Alisa sadly didn't find any jeans, and left our shopping expedition with only a small, aesthetic multipurpose metal tin adorned with some kind of witty caption about medicine or the like. So, not quite empty handed, we took the subway home, stopping only to pick up some cute little keychains and other trinkets to bring home as presents for my co-workers.
Back in our ends, we indulged in some of the street food we'd been eyeing up since the night we arrived. I have to say I was pretty whelmed by it. I didn't expect it to blow me away, and I didn't expect it to disappoint, and it did neither of those things, it was simply quite yummy.
I guess gimbap (Korean sushi, in layman's terms) was the only real surprise because it's served warm. It feels like it shouldn't work, but a kimchee pork gimbap roll is a thing of beauty. You usually get about five rolls as a portion, and they're around four inches long and half an inch wide. Eating one scractches the same itch in my brain as eating a cheese string like a sausage. Oh, and speaking of cheese, I would advise everyone to avoid the cheese an egg rolls that seem to be super popular in Seoul, they really suck. Koreans aren't bad at cheese per se, but it's still something I think should be left to Europeans and South Americans where possible. I guess having a pleasant and unpleasant surprise apiece confirms my diagnosis of whelmed. Get Korean street food: it's good, but you already knew that. Oh yeah, and look at this guy real quick:
What a laugh.
When we finally turned in for the night, we knew we had no option but to turn on the game of squids, having warmed up to the idea by hitting a number of street food vendors with the all powerful line: 'I'll have the squid. Hold the game.' Now, it was whilst winding down like this that the concoction of alcohol, vape, fried chicken, hours of walking and street food finally reared its head, and I spent half an hour throwing up. Don't worry though, all that meant was I felt fresh enough afterwards to vape and watch squid game in total comfort for the remainder of our final night in Seoul.
The next morning we woke up bright and early hoping to make the most of the time we had left before we had to leave for our flight. We packed, had a coffee then deposited our bags at reception to collect later. Given we'd skipped the palace on Saturday in order to get to grips with a bit of Korean history at the museum first, we thought it'd only be right to end our visit with a visit to the great living monument to that history that sits slap bang in the middle of the city. Gyeongbokgung palace was built in 1395 and served as the palace of the century spanning, golden age of Korean history, the Joseon dynasty. Now, it dominates the landscape of the Jogno district of Seoul, putting the modern government building across the road from it to shame.
Alisa and I arrived a little later than we'd hoped, as I walked us in the wrong direction after leaving the subway for about 15 minutes. Fortunately the walk led us up a beautiful, winding alleyway decorated with antiquated signs for local businesses and intricate white lanterns suspended from the telephone wires; an alleyway that boasted views of the snow-topped mountains that surround Seoul.
You would be excused for thinking that this sounds like I'm deflecting the attention of my reader from dreadful sense of direction, but it really was very pretty.
Anyway, on the approach to the palace's front gate, you feel very strongly that you're travelling back in time. Of course, the area opposite the front gate of the palace is as modern as any in Seoul, with a skyline that wouldn't be out of place in Wan Chai, but the entirety of your attention is pulled in the other direction by the energy of the palace complex. To the left and right of, and behind the complex (which must be a kilometre squared), are tiny shops selling traditional memorabilia, restaurants with terracotta rooves, and- mostly importantly- hanbok rental stores. Hanboks are the traditional clothing of Korea, and any attempt I could make to describe it in words would probably be woefully inaccurate ("it's a bit like a dress I suppose") and possibly offensive, so I'll attach some pictures to give you an idea. The government incentivises people, Koreans and foreigners, to rent hanboks by making entry to the palace free if you wear one. Evidently they're entirely aware of the massive visual effect that crowds of people in tradition dress lend to a genuine historical site, and it's far cheaper to have excited tourists take on the role of pseudo extras in their real life historical drama than employ professionals. The hanboks, combined with the spectacle of the various ceremonies conducted by the palace guards (think Korean beefeaters) make entering the front gate of the palace feel as though you're leaving modernity behind.
The walls are high enough that you aren't distracted by anything outside of the complex, and the colourful wooden towers that so intentionally penetrate the striking silhouette of the mountains behind ensure that turning to face the skyscrapers of the modern government district is almost inconceivable.
Wandering the peaceful gardens, crossing bridges over frozen streams and crunching my feet in the days old snow I couldn't help but feel like a medieval Korean prince, the heir to the throne, seeking solace in nature to distract himself from the schemes and machinations of the court eunuch.
I almost regret not renting a hanbok myself, but a. I cannot describe how cold it was that morning- the temperature dropped about 5 degrees overnight and the wind made it feel much worse- and I didn't want to wear a hanbok with a coat over it like so many people had been forced to do, b. I'm saving myself for when I marry my Korean wife one day and c. my fit went hard anyway.
All of this probably makes it sound like Alisa and I spent the morning in awe-struck, dignified contemplation, but I regret to admit that that isn't the case. You see, I also imagined what it would've been like to be the daughter of a Korean nobleman being courted by said Joseon prince, wooing him with windswept hair, stolen glances and flourishes of a really dainty umbrella, or something like that. That got me thinking about bonking in the castle, which got me thinking about whether it'd be possible to bonk in the palace nowadays, and then about how many people had done it. I mean, the complex is huge, and even on a busy day you could easily walk for ten minutes without seeing anyone. So, I asked Alisa how many people she thought had fucked in the castle recently, and she said zero. That shocked me. I know someone personally that fucked in St Andrews castle. Twice. This wasn't that different, I argued. She insisted that Asian people are more dignified than that, but I don't think there'd be anything undignified about it if you weren't caught. Especially if you were Korean and especially if you were descended from the Joseon royal family. Throw on a Hanbok and go to town in the bushes for old times' sake, I say. Then again, I think I also said the exact same thing about Versailles, so maybe I just have a fetish for having sex in historical monuments. I really should've done it in St Andrews when I had the chance.
Well, after exploring the grounds for a few hours, we'd worked up a very healthy appetite and decided it'd be best to grab some food at the nearby Insadong Culture street, the only area of interest close enough to us to cram in a visit to before we had to leave for good. We found ourselves in a beautiful little wooden restaurant, where the waitress brought us menus, paper to write our order on, and a giant heater to sit next to our table. This, along with the complimentary tea, returned the feeling to most of my body, and thawed out my brain enough to decide what I wanted to eat. As I've said, all Korean food is delicious and far cheaper than it should be, so I wasn't too worried about what I ordered. Instead I worried vaguely about how to order it. It's certainly true that English isn't very widely spoken in Korea, and this restaurant didn't offer an English menu for us to point at either. This meant that we ordered by using Google translates lens function to decipher the menu, and then copying the Hangeul letters onto the piece of paper we'd been handed.
Honestly this was quite a fun novelty, though the persistent cold made writing far harder than it needed to be. Besides, everyone knows that difficulty ordering is often directly proportional to quality of food, and this place did nothing to dispel that impression. The waiter prefaced our main course with a dazzling selection of banchan, including sheets of pickled radish, cut veg, miniature omelettes, sesame bean sprout salad, some kind of tasty peanut thing and a block of seasoned silken tofu.
All of it slapped, but the main's blew them out of the water. Our seafood soups came out literally boiling hot, brimming with octopus, tofu and seaweed, and our meat dishes- pork bulgogi and beef something or other- were succulent and generously portioned.
It all came together to dazzle our palettes and warm us up from the inside out. To top of an excellent dining experience, the restaurant played a mix of traditional Korea string instrument music and covers of classic Western songs (including Mama Mia) using these string instruments. You can't beat that.
After filling our boots, we thanked the host for a lovely meal and stepped back into the artic winds outside, though only long enough to find somewhere elevated on culture street to people watch and grab a warm drink. We found a little café overlooking ssamzigil shopping centre, which is more of a modern art installation than a building, and the heart of the street. It's probably a shame we didn't get chance to explore some of the shops and art galleries that the street is known for, but we really had neither the time nor energy by that point in our trip.
So, having nursed a glass of mulled wine, reluctant to admit it was time to go, we walked to the nearest subway and returned to Myeong-dong. Here, Alisa insisted we called in at Olive Young, the famous skincare store, as she needed to pick up specific products that are vastly more expensive outside the country for Megan and various other friends of hers. I found myself far too confused to buy anything, and very disoriented by the fact that the employees, at seemingly random intervals, will blurt out, one after the other "thank you for coming to Olive Young!" Alisa says it's part of the whole Asian hospitality thing, but I found it very unnerving and artificial. Imagine having to shout a phrase every time your co-workers decided to, all day every day. You'd be on edge all shift. You couldn't zone out whilst stacking shelves. You'd feel like a deer waiting to hear a branch snap, I bet.
Well anyway, that proved to be our final glimpse at Korean culture before picking up our bags and returning to Seoul station. There, we found ourselves a little confused by the system for buying tickets for the airport express, and bought tickets for the indirect train, which takes about ten minutes longer but costs half as much. We thought this was actually a win: we weren't pressed for time and 5 pounds saved was 5 pounds to spend on an airport beer. In fact, we soon found out why the train was half the price: because it's wank. It's effectively a subway car on over-ground tracks, unlike the direct train which sports forward facing seats and the bizarre TVs I described earlier, and it's overcrowded beyond belief. We spent forty minutes like sardines, running low on energy and patience, felling that sombre, growing sense of dread that always clouds the end of a great holiday.
At the airport we found ourselves in slightly more of a rush than we'd hoped to be in, and we had to wolf down a pork cutlet and a bacon egg and cheese respectively, washing them down with a Stella apiece. Weirdly, Stella seems to be the only beer that they sell in Incheon airport's food court. The man next to us evidently agreed that this was a weird choice, as he instead opted for straight, original soju, which he shotted on his own whilst enjoying dinner. Koreans appear to be incredibly based.
The last note a took during the trip goes as follows: On the flight now. I’m seriously considering moving here. They have the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen. It's cheap, the pay for English teachers is high. It's beautiful. It's calm. The weather is more varied than Hong Kong. The only issue is the kind of foreign people it attracts. It feels like the people that move here are a lot like the people that move to Japan, but even more invested in the whole “idol” culture of deified pop stars with short shelf lives. Maybe that's just an assumption, though, as the only insufferable foreigners I met were those Harrow gimps. Anyway, to put it simply, Korea is a feast for your eyes. The people, the fashion, the architecture, the landscape, the weather, it all combines to give an aesthetic effect that should be unbearably stimulating but somehow isn't. It's like watching a sunrise all day every day, or seeing the first snow of the winter float peacefully onto your nose. I don't know, it's just so wonderful, and I won’t forget the trip I took to Seoul with my dear friend Alisa any time soon.
