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I don’t usually travel to countries like this where many people will have their own experiences and takes, but the chance encounter with a man in a far away country who invited me here presented the best opportunity to experience this narrow slice of Asia which had never called out to me before. There’s a lot to say and remark about South Korea, befitting of its place as a rich industrialized nation and hearth of a rich cultural heritage. Its people have also generated this wild pop culture tsunami that has crashed into so many countries with their music, food, film/TV, and more. But what I’m typing is exactly why I don’t come to these sorts of countries: the readership of this dispatch series must certainly know all of this already. Yet here I am, and here I will be for the next few weeks.
Seoul is. That much would do it for an essay; whatever the topic. Because Seoul is whatever you need or want it to be other than, I don’t know, small. I cannot conceive of how much time would be necessary to so or do all of what Seoul has to offer even in its premier catalogue. Sure, I didn’t have time to take 1 hour and 52 minutes of metro and buses to get to the Seoul Bonsai Museum, but I didn’t even find time to see the Zaha Hadid building, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza. There are more great restaurants than any human could eat at, for as soon as one might finish half their number, some new ones would open up. For a visitor, eating the best food is merely a dream, and it’s hard enough even just finding the end to the cool neighborhoods to eat in.
But let’s do something different and talk about one of those: the little corner I lodged in. Far from anything approaching touristic, Yeonhui-dong, or neighborhood, is perhaps more approaching a home-away-from-home for expatriates and foreign students (the preponderance of bagel shops might hint at that). It has some extraordinary hilly streets, no metro stop, and, if it can be believed, many single-story homes. Coffee shops there were, more than just Starbucks, and when it rained, the residents went around unhurried, or watched from windows at the shape and color of individuals’ umbrellas. It was near the oldest university in the country, or at least one of the oldest, and catered to a youthful crew in this country where elders are more common than pine needles.
I liked Yeonhui-dong, and imagined in certain sections of it an Asia of a generation past. There were still soup and noodle shops to dive into and curtain doors to fold back. In particular though the single-story homes really stood out. They were often made of brick—sometimes patterned with clouds or cranes seen between boughs—and some even had corrugated iron roofs. It was quiet here, despite being by no means out of the city proper. A woman walks her two dogs. Two. Out of a cafe drifts some violin. Bach sits unsheathed atop a record player near a couple drinking pour-overs. When the notes hit the bonsai trees across the street, all is at peace.
It’s so difficult to make any sense of a people or a nation from the capital city, and this is why I often choose to skip them. Tunis, Casablanca, Madrid, Delhi, these are some of the causalities of my trip planning. The city is too influenced by the wider world; too influenced by the wealth sequestered by the Exchequer to carry a resemblance of the nation’s heart. If anything, Seoul is so substantial in every dimension that it is as if, to my mind, the country has sprouted a second heart that lives alongside the first. There is the Seoul heart, and one for rest of the country, for a city so vast and so dense, so in love with itself, so in tune with its own rhythm, that even in a rich industrialized nation it seems to have transcended its surroundings.
