On the plane to Korea I sat next to a 17-year-old Korean boy in a long black coat and long, thin, square black leather shoes. The effect was exotic, stylish, and intriguingly old-world. He had been studying in Russia, and he knew a little more Russian than I did. We talked in Russian for quite a while.When we got to Korea, everything was suddenly very clean, bright, and polite and came in a convenient, single-serving can. Liz and I put our baggage in storage (which was shockingly expensive--something like $25 for three days of storage), then she got some sugar cane juice and bought me a tiny can of Pepsi. We sat there soaking it in for a while, still waiting for the anxiety of that last hour in Russia to wear off and trying to adjust to the sterile finery that now surrounded us. After all those months mastering the basics of a foreign language, we were once again in an environment which, despite its bright western appearance, we couldn’t begin to understand.
After a while we finally got up to try to figure out what to do. Everyone was polite, and the service desk tried to help us find a place to stay. We decided to stay at the Taewon Yagwon, a nice, clean little hostel with reasonable rates. To get there we boarded the pristine subway with its silent tracks and digital signs and heated seats. Only somehow we ended up at the Inn Daewon instead.
It was tucked in a tiny alleyway in the center of downtown Seoul. The lobby looked more like a shed, and it was freezing cold and covered in shoes and potted plants. Our room was a dungeon-like place, stuffy and hot, with massive comforters and a small, dark window that didn’t seem to lead to anything. The floor was heated, so it kind of felt like you were walking on something alive.
It was rapidly getting dark by now, and we were both starving. The little mistress of the place led Liz all around the surrounding blocks showing her the various restaurants. Liz came back and showed me to a little place in the back of a grocery store with an English menu.
What amazed us most about the place was that they gave us a little cup of warm water with our meal, absolutely free. The fact that it was warm was a little weird, but the fact that it was free was astonishing. Drinking water is a luxury in Russia; it’s usually more expensive than soda or juice, which was always annoying to me because I like to drink water or milk with my meals, and Russian milk didn’t agree with me very well. But here, not only could we get warm water for free, we found we could go up and get cold water also. By the end of the two days, I began to think warm water was actually kind of nice. Unless, of course, you order kimchi, which I did the first night. It was boiling hot when I got it, and also spicy enough to kill a small horse. As I ate, the balance of excruciating pain slowly went from burning hot temperature to burning hot spice. But it was delicious. I kept craving it until I was in America long enough to forget what it tasted like.
On another note, back when I studied history in high school, we kept hearing about the spice trade, and I always thought, what’s the big deal? You want marjoram, you go to the store, right? I could never wrap my head around how spices could be so valuable, sometimes even more valuable than gold. But after spending time in Russia, where the only kind of flavor you get in your food for months at a time is dill, it all became clear.
We spent the next two days blearily wandering around the downtown and palaces and town hall and mega-malls of Seoul. We felt pretty travel-worn by now, but walking around Seoul was endlessly interesting. Every single large building had a jumbotron on it playing high-tech-looking advertisements that seemed to be trying to sell more jumbotrons. Millions of people lived in exactly identical apartment blocks (even the Russians can’t say they’re exactly identical) because about five corporations basically run South Korea, and one has a monopoly on building the housing. Scattered among the highways and skyscrapers of downtown Seoul were majestic town Gates and palaces with intricate carvings and awnings, all complicated and Oriental, beautiful and ancient and incongruous.
If Liz and I stood on the street looking confused for long enough, some Korean citizen would inevitably come up to us and ask in English, “Hello, do you need some help?” It was amazing to have people walk up to us and be polite and helpful. Even if you corner a Russian, you’re not likely to get such a response.
We met a few American servicemen, especially in the nightclub district where we stopped to have some pulgogi (a delicious Korean barbecue) and ginseng chicken soup. The malls were like something out of a movie, like meta-malls, and eerily spotlessly clean. They were filled with stylish youngsters, brightly-colored halls with names like ‘Rainforest Path,’ and Hello Kitty merchandise at exorbitant prices. I wanted to buy a Psychedelic Bus Cat from the film My Neighbor Totoro, but the little five-inch beast cost $18.
Most of what we saw was very clean and polite and modern except for the occasional specter from the past roaring out, helpless and dwarfed by the artless skyscrapers surrounding it. We saw beautiful, exotic artistry and vapid modern homogeneity. It disturbed me somehow after the comfortable chaos and impolite realness of Russia. I kept scratching my head, wondering how it all fit together.
And that’s about it. Thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to sign my guestbook and leave a little note saying you stopped by.
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