It had been nineteen years. A fleeting three day
visit on a circle-Pacific airline ticket, back in the time of the
dictators. I had known little about Korea, and the images of Seoul
which stuck from that drop in were mostly about being frozen to the
bone on bleak grey streets, a yogwan with tiny incubator rooms,
everything papered over including the windows, a single frozen tap
in the courtyard, and a toilet that was painful to think about.
I remembered a pedestrian underpass, with a big
bookshop below ground level where I bought a linguistic study of
Korean verbs. And then there was a restaurant on top of the Lotte
hotel/department store where the waitress airily declared that they
only had servings priced for at least two people. I promptly started
to walk out, and she changed the policy on the spot.
On that trip too, I was lugging an SLR camera with
one of those cumbersome telephoto lenses. Later, when the photos
came out of some Sunday shoppers in the streets, I was astonished at
the number of people who were looking into the camera with hostility
and suspicion. How innocent we were of the realities of life in a
police state. Perhaps it was the memory of the cold which kept me
away from revisiting Seoul all winter in 2000-2001. That and a
reluctance to go stomping around the countryside until I had some
feel for the rhythm of Korean life and custom.
Plans of travel multiplied as I became more at home
in the culture, and could manage some rudiments of the language. But
now the days were warming, and suddenly eight months had slipped by
since I first came to work in Busan. Korea, after all, was a
geographically small country, so it seemed a bit silly to be hiding
in one of its corners without having made a pilgrimage to the
centre. People kept telling me that anything and everything
worthwhile was to be found in Seoul. The rest of the nation was
merely an afterthought.
Some individuals can walk out the door at a moment´s
notice, with just the clothes they are standing in, and land up on
the other side of the world with no sense of nakedness. I´ve been
moving all my life, yet books, appliances, gadgets and even packets
of food nag to follow every step. Though I try to be severe with
this clamorous following, some of them always weasel their way at
least into a shoulder bag, so that like the Ancient Mariner, I carry
a burden wherever I go.
Whatever lies forsaken in a draw has its revenge,
for true to Murphy´s law, if I don´t take a camera, the photo-op of
a lifetime will slip away, or if I don´t take a torch, the city of
destination will be plunged into darkness. Thus, even worse than the
burden to be carried all day are the pre-departure arguments which
rage with the spare pullover, and phrase book and the pocket
compass. Time wasting too. Any fool knows that the wise traveler on
a long journey makes an early departure. Yet here was a lousy five
hour trip to Seoul, and it was already 8 a.m. before I´d made it out
the door.
A brief train trip from Busan to Haeundae a few
weeks before had left a comfortable feeling. Rail should be the best
way to go. The fast luxury trains were called saemaul-ho, but were
nearly double the price of mugunghwa-ho, while the 4th class
pidulgi-ho came in at 30% of the cost of fast trains. All of them
were advertised as very frequent, so I wasn´t expecting problems on
this weekday. Just getting to the central station takes over an hour
from Bansong-dong. There´s a tourist information office right on the
concourse at Busan Station, which is really useful for the
language-handicapped. On this morning though, the lady on duty
seemed to be feeling sour, or was it Murphy´s Law kicking in again?
She punched some keys on her display and snapped "first available
mugunghwa train in an hour and a half, standing room only".
Standing, to Seoul? It seemed hard to believe, but trading through
the good grace of an interpreter in an unknown language, you have to
cop it sweet. Luckily there was an alternative. I sighed and headed
for the express bus terminal, maybe another forty-five minutes by
subway and city buses...
Intercity buses, in almost every country, are at the
bottom of the prestige stakes. Families hate them, because kids are
hard to keep tied down for hours, whereas they can wander around
trains a bit, or whine for dad to stop the car for a hamburger and
fries. No businessman worth his cufflinks would be seen dead on a
bus, and civil servants spending the public's money expect at least
a plane ticket or a hire car.
So buses are for backpackers and office girls and
pensioners, prisoners on leave and labourers visiting their sick
mothers. I've traveled on some awful buses -- windowless
contraptions packed with peasants in the Sumatran jungle,
knee-cracking death machines hurled down winding mountain roads in
the Philippines .... But also some fairly good deals. So-called
luxury buses are too expensive for the poor, and uncool for the
rich, which means in some countries that you can often score a
couple of empty seats to sprawl across. China, my last waystop, has
some of the world's worst buses, but also some of the best -- lush
Volvos loping along the new networks of motorways. Korea, as a small
country with good roads should be ideal for fast intercity bus
travel.
Busan express bus terminal will be on a subway link
in a year or two or three. At the moment you have to juggle local
buses to get to it. More time lost. Still, it looked pleasingly
uncrowded. Although the railway station was claiming to have
standing room only, there were no signs of mass migration at the
intercity bus terminal. It took about a minute flat to land a seat
on a "luxury bus" which was departing immediately. Just as well too,
for by now "immediately" was 11.30am. For W25,500 I had an
exceptionally spacious seat in a bus that was two thirds empty.
There was even a seat belt, even if I was the only passenger who
made any move to use it. Alas, that was the end of the luxury. The
bare linoleum floor and scruffy fittings had the appeal of a public
rest room. The vehicle's transmission was rough, and the suspension
was designed for a fifteen ton container lorry. (Thinking about this
later I realized that the tyres were almost certainly overinflated
to minimize tyre wear and maximize fuel economy. The downside of
course to overinflated tyres is reduced road-holding and a rough
ride ... ).
Although the day was almost hot, inside the bus the
air had that fetid quality of a refrigerator which has been turned
off for a week. A kind of warm, dead, suffocation zone, but the
other passengers seemed indifferent to it. They seemed indifferent
to everything. I put up with this insult for an hour and a half,
then walked up the aisle to the driver. "Aircon!" I growled, using
one of those magical words which now seem to appear in all human
languages. His head snapped back with surprise, then feigning an
"oh, of course!" apology, he flicked a switch, and we could breath
again. Until a repeat performance on the return journey, I thought
it just may have been a slack driver. Now it is clear though, that
like the overinflated tyres, it was the bus company's half-smart way
of saving money. Or maybe, running to brainless rules like most
organizations everywhere, some nit had marked a date on the calendar
for turning on the air conditioning.
Nobody had taught them that word-of-mouth is the
most powerful advertising medium known. No wonder the bus was two
thirds empty. At the risk of a generalization, I have to say that it
is a fairly common failing in Korean commercial life. One recalls
the Asiana flight from Australia, a ten hour trip which serves no
food for eight hours, or on a more local scale, the milk cartons
masquerading as a liter, but really only containing 930 ml ,
envelopes just too short to take an A4 sheet of paper,
shrink-wrapped ginger root in the supermarket, sold by the gram with
clods of earth still sticking to it .....
The motorway road trip from Busan to Seoul gives a
strong sense to an incomer from Australia (where distances are vast
and settlements sparse) of just how compressed South Korea is.
Traveling up the centre of the peninsular, much of the way follows
river valleys, wide and narrow, with only a few road tunnels . The
road is rarely out of sight of human habitation, and much of the
habitation is urban or semi-urban. You can see that the time may
come when there is urban strip development for the whole corridor.
That is, there are few visible rural villages, but many clusters of
older 3 or 4 story apartment blocks, and a creeping rash of tall,
thin concrete tower blocks of up to 20 stories, white or pastel,
projecting nakedly from the landscape in clusters, or sometimes
alone.
One wonders at the social systems (or lack of them)
which are likely to evolve in these vertical towns of self-contained
people boxes, each with its cable-TV, and unmbical cords to the
national power and water grids. A small voice in my head says there
must be something uniquely vulnerable about incubating 47 million
people in breeding and feeding pens like this, but maybe it is the
only way. It is apparently the next stage in human planetary
evolution. I just hope they never have to flee to the hills again,
because most might not survive the deprivation.
Parts of South Korea's indented coastline and
waterways are very picturesque. It is not an adjective you would
apply to a trip up the centre in April (this year anyway). Moving
north, the land becomes drier. The tower block settlements have that
barren, unloved look of industrial development zones; (in a nation
of individual bungalows like Australia, family gardens and pride of
ownership are on public display). At least as early as the 15th
Century, Korea was infamous for its barren hills, stripped for
firewood, and also apparently to make the land appear as
unattractive as possible for invasion; (see Hamel's Journal, a
description of the Kingdom of Korea 1653-66 by the shipwrecked
Dutchman, Hendrik Hamel; pub. Royal Asiatic Society, Seoul 1984).
Mercifully, there has been a massive, very
successful reforestation program. Wooded hill trails are the best
feature of this country.
At street level in cities though, greenery usually
has to struggle to claim any space at all. The city suburbs rarely
have sidewalks, let alone space for trees, while the straggle of
tower blocks along the highway stand desolate, dwarfing the
occasional shrub. Since individual urban dwellers don't have land,
they can hardly make flower gardens. Therefore beautification is
left to the bureaucracies, meaning several concrete tubs outside
each public building, planted with multicoloured cabbages in winter,
and violets in summer....
The bus trip to Seoul is advertised to take a little
over five hours. Koreans tell me that in peak holiday times that can
become a grinding all-day saga. On this Tuesday morning we were a
bit luckier than that. The traffic moving out of Busan was steady,
but brisk. Then, perhaps an hour and a half up the road, the little
bubbles of side settlement began to stretch back across the plain,
the strings of tower blocks became dense nests, and the air steadily
clouded to an industrial smog. This had to be Daegu (Taegu in the
old spelling), South Korea's third city. We skirted it, but the
skirts looked unpromising to say the least. Maybe there's beauty
hidden somewhere under all the makeup. However, hurry past with eyes
averted we could not, for Daegu corresponded with a traffic
bottleneck which lasted the best part of 40 minutes. This was about
the point at which I invited the driver to give us some breathable
oxygen.
When I was a boy, my old man would take mum and the
kids for Sunday drives sometimes. It was a clever scheme because in
those days in Sydney, only "genuine travelers" could get alcohol on
Sundays, and a genuine traveler had to move thirty miles. This meant
of course that on all roads leading out of Australian cities there
was bumper to bumper traffic to a ring of hostelries at the thirty
mile limit. Dad would slip in to down a beer or six while mum and
the kids sweated in the pub carpark under the summer sun outside.
Then, on the way home there'd be a trail of accidents by drunken
drivers.... The main intercity roads were narrow strips of bitumen,
with a single lane in each direction.
Well, the upside to this story was that enterprising
orchardists, market gardeners, poultry farmers, and hucksters of
every description, set up roadside stalls in remote unpopulated
parts of the route (often the roadside gates of farms), where fresh
produce was available at below city retail prices. Some of the more
popular spots also grew roadside cafes. To mollify their fuming
wives and mutinous children, the slightly tipsy fathers of countless
families would pull into these stalls to buy buckets of sweet
apricots or newly picked strawberries ...
As we barrelled down the dodgem tracks of the
Busan-Seoul Expressway, which is a generic version of expressways
the world over now, my mind drifted back to the rewards and
frustrations of being a "genuine traveler" forty years ago. As an
A-to-B exercise, the modern version was definitely a winner. In the
matter of side distractions, it lost out completely. Orchard stalls
there are none. Nor do you pull up to stretch your legs in little
country towns. If they still exist somewhere beyond expressway
vision, it is only as a haze on the horizon. You don't bump across
rickety bridges in open farmland, and yield to a sudden impulse to
pull off the road for a nap under some shade trees... Our luxury bus
to Seoul allowed one break, the franchised stop with a huge carpark
that sits in identical copies beside the world's expressways, and is
frequently owned by a large petroleum company. There you could choke
on a five minute bowl of noodles or buy a coke and fries, before
returning to hibernate in the bus.
Another sudden increase in the density of buildings
had to be the outskirts of Seoul. And as with Daegu, the silky blue
rural sky had turned to muddy grey. Cities as large as this embrace
many almost unconnected living spaces. In all great conurbation
around the world, most inhabitants will only go to the downtown
heart of the place occasionally, if at all. In Seoul's case, that
centre is a confluence of valleys -- obviously of strategic
importance as a control point in centuries past. Now settlement
spreads into the hazy, polluted distance, smothering these radial
arms which on the ground are no longer obvious to a traveler. The
administrative line somebody has drawn on a map as city limits
encloses around twelve million people. Just as life spilled beyond
the stone walls of castle towns, so perhaps another twelve million
continue to multiply along natural corridors, that area to the south
being most fashionable (or perhaps furthest from the silent menace
of armies massed over the near northern border). When I saw a large
Walmart sign close to the expressway my interest picked up, and it
seemed only a couple of minutes later that we passed through the
toll booths, those bland modern equivalents of city gates, which
still collect the king's tithe on hapless subjects.
The express bus terminal in Seoul is conveniently
above a subway station, and incorporated into a large shopping
complex. Barely pausing to look around, I caught a train to
Jongno-3-ga station near T'apkol park. This was going from Korea's
version of the very modern to a stone's throw from an umbilical cord
to dynastic history, Unhyeongung Palace, hangout of the Heungseon
T'aewongun, regent and last independent despot of the Yi Chosun line
in the 19th Century. The T'aewongun had stone tablets placed by the
roads, ordering Koreans to kill any foreigner on sight as a
patriotic act. No one, however, attempted to swing a broad sword at
my neck.
I was nevertheless perplexed and helpless, for Korea
shares with Japan the world's most idiotic addressing system.
Buildings are numbered according to their order of construction, not
location, and only a handful of thoroughfares are marked with street
names at all; (there's a law of human nature that the most
pathological traditions are those most fiercely defended against
change...). Anyway, no amount of careful orientation seems to
survive emerging like a rabbit from a subway burrow in a strange
city. Nothing appears as imagination has expected. You are
immediately lost.
Seoul subways have lots of exits. A day later I was
able to figure out that I had come out a whole block beyond the
brief caricature of a map in my guide book. Slightly dazed, I
wandered along a busy roadside in the late afternoon, hoping for
some sign from heaven. Presently this brought me to a large park
where all kinds of people hung about doing nothing in particular.
Sometimes it pays to stand out like a neon sign, as any European
does in this part of the world. As if to prove that atmospherics had
improved since the T'aewongun's xenophobia, I was approached by a
middle aged woman with circles of care under her eyes and a
sympathetic manner. In very good English she asked where I wanted to
go.
That was a tough question. Whenever I had asked work
colleagues about a good, cheap place of lodging in Seoul, they waved
their arms airily and said "stay in a yogwan". Yeah, but ... there
are yogwans and yogwans. The brain module for practical details was
missing on the assembly line where fellow foreign teachers were
made, it seemed. So I didn't really know where I wanted to go. I was
trading on a few accommodation names, listed in a guidebook and
coloured with a careless adjective or two. The friendly lady looked
over my shoulder, but the telegraphic descriptions perplexed her. At
last, I pointed at a telephone number, and relieved to be useful,
she seized her cell phone.
Given the long centuries of intrigue, murder,
witchcraft and general harum-scarum that had passed over and under
the ground we stood on in this ancient part of Seoul, you would have
to expect a busy population of ghosts in the area. Some must have
learned to get their radiation tingled in the new cell phones that
now hung from every neck, and my new fairy-godmother found her own
instrument engaged with extra-terrestial beeps. No matter. With
scarcely a pause she put a solid arm out to block the path of a
gangling young man who was hurrying by. His mind was obviously
abroad on other matters, but he came against the arm, rocked back in
mild surprise, and focused on the owner, then registered my foreign
face.
There were several short, flat sentences of rapid
Korean, and the young man located his cell phone in a back pocket.
At least the phone worked, but the number was dead. I pointed him at
the next number on the list, and actually scored a hit. Did the
place have a vacant room? Yes, no problem. How to find it? Aaah, big
problem. Well, it was apparently only a few minutes walk away, but
how did you tell a foreigner to turn left at old Kim's noodle shop,
and take the left track of two branching alleys, where bald Choi and
young Park would be playing Korean chess on top of an empty oil
drum... ? There were after all no street names ....
Another conference in Korean began, with the young
man mediating the voice in the cell phone and the lady with circles
under her eyes. Eventually a solution was packaged, wrapped and
sealed, and put to the foreigner. Wait, they said; the "motel" would
send someone to collect me (the skipped phone number had moved us
upmarket a fraction from the yogwan). The lady nodded, and hurried
off. I waited for the young guy to follow her, but he stood there
shyly. At last I understood that he had been told to stay with me,
to make a proper Korean link in the human relay. Now that I was a
recognized obligation, a known human being, I could not be simply
dumped.
He was, he said in halting English, a university
chemistry student. I once had a flatmate who was doing a Ph.D. in
chemistry, was apt to give sardonic chemical exposes of of the
breakfast cereals I ate, could do a mean Tae Kwondo kick, and liked
to dash off Faure scores on the piano. My new friend had a bad case
of acne, and a hollow chest that would fracture on impact, but his
heart was in the right place. We waited under the old palace walls,
where late afternoon shadows cut the trees with sharp angles.
Feeling guilty, I did my best to keep up a conversation. After ten
minutes the lady of the circled eyes sauntered back. If I called
into Seoul City Hall, she said, she could find me a good map, and
they had some free computers for Internet access too. Right now she
had to go.
After another call, the motel said someone would
surely be there right away. I was expecting a dude on one of those
ubiquitous maroon motor scooters to sweep me up for a
life-threatening dash through the laneways. Instead, a bent old lady
in cotton pantaloons and slippers suddenly waxed from an unobtrusive
shadow. With a cackle, she motioned me to follow, then did her best
to seize my shoulder bag. Relieved of his duty spell, the chemistry
man hastened to depart with barely a nod (but when I got back to
Busan there was a "hi, my name is .." e-mail waiting). Wizened she
may have been, but my guide led a cracking pace through the twists
and turns of narrow alleys. If we really were going to a witch's
coven, my bones would be added to the soup, because there seemed no
way to find a way out of this maze again.
In fact we did come to a kind of castle, a compact
five stories of neat brick with candy-sugar window sills painted
cream, and little turrets for the birds of warning. It was a genre
that I had come to recognize in Korea as the "love hotel", a
practical convenience in a culture where privacy and secrets were
both hard to come by (and as in so many small things, a
never-to-be-confessed echo of Japan). Couples on a short time lease
may have been the house's daily staple, but they had clearly hosted
foreign travelers before. A small black & white sign by the door
listed the establishment's virtues in English. We pushed through a
glass door, and waiting in a tiny glassed in box was the manager, a
man of unctuous courtesy who was sure he could find me a room on the
4th (top) floor.
We went on an inspection tour, just to be sure, up
the steep staircase, past shelves of what seemed to be soft-porn
videos for the titillation of dull lovers, to a door which opened
directly onto another door. Was this double insulation to keep the
cold fingers of winter out, or the S&M squeals in? Not for me to
know. A square meter of linoleum inside the second door was taped
off as the polluted zone, where you removed your shoes, and most of
the rest was for a double bed. A bathroom nested in one corner, free
skin lotion and two condoms supplied, and a satellite TV set perched
on what may have once been a dressing table. OK, it wasn't the
Waldorf, but I wasn't royalty either. It was clean, quiet, and the
hot water worked. For 25,000 won a night we called it a deal.
I went to the window to see how the world had
changed, and was charmed to find a varnished sliding sash of small
panes behind the workaday street windows, reminders of the
rice-paper partitions were once so picturesque and fragile. Now it
was early evening, and any colour had bleached from the buildings
crowding close. Dark outlines suggested the blocky, practical walls
of 20th century concrete, hemming in older chaotic roofs of swooping
tile, some hidden behind high walls, others ramshackle little shops
facing into alleys. There were, however, few people to be seen in
this quarter at this hour. Even with a 4th floor view there was no
easy way to orientate. Somehow I had to find a way out of the
confusion to big-town Seoul and dinner, then find a way back
again.
As a direction-seeking animal, I'm reasonably
equipped, unlike my mother for example, who has trouble remembering
which way to turn on a water tap. Since coming to the northern
hemisphere though, I've discovered ruefully that many subtle cues
which I hadn't even been aware of, are frequently miscued, and
unless I plod through the logic of a location, doggedly noting
landmarks, I'm apt to get things exactly 180 degrees out of whack. I
don't know if it is because shadows fall on the wrong sides of
trees, or the winds are different, or whether some chip implanted in
my brain like a magnetic lodestone between the eyes needs resetting.
Regardless, even in the best of all possible worlds, it is dead easy
to get lost in a new city, especially one that has almost no street
names, and no house numbers that are in any rational order.
I circled out of the Jongnoton Motel with a good
deal of caution, making little forays in different directions,
gradually expanding the perimeter of knowledge. Mine host had kindly
supplied a kind of hand-drawn locality map. It mentioned such useful
things as a fruit store, a rice-cake store, a store (sic!), a
bakery, a pharmacy, a Korean restaurant, and a hair shop. No doubt
they were spots where he had friends. But with the disarming logic
of a local denizen, he had failed to note down that there were other
fruit stores, rice-cake stores , stores general, bakeries,
pharmacies ... and so on. Nor had he bothered to mark in anything as
boringly obvious as a railway station or a bus route.
After about twenty minutes of exploration I had
deduced that we were somewhere in the hinterland of a larger block
of major roads. One of these roads, to the north, led past
Changdeogung Palace, and on to Angut Subway (Line 3), while a
parallel road to the south held one of the exits of Jongno-3-ga
Subway (Line 5). A further block south again was the major artery of
Jongno Road itself, with the Jongno-3-ga exit for Line 3. Jongno
Road was pulsing with traffic and pedestrians, mostly youngish. The
general mood of the area was reminiscent of Nampodong in
Busan
I strolled past the multistory frontage of Pagoda
Language School, ablaze with white neon, and welcoming clients into
a couched lobby with a scattering of trendy computer screens for
internet access. It would have done any international hotel chain
proud. Language schools have a special place in this society,
consuming up to 30% of middle-class incomes, and Pagoda is playing
its privileged role to the hilt. Just past this landmark, the narrow
side alleys became ablaze with neons of many colours, restaurants,
game parlours, clubs, cinemas. Swarms of teenagers and
twenty-somethings were out go get their idea of a life.
Decades of a barely adequate income have ingrained
in me the habit of avoiding any establishment that looks like
charging for the ambiance of its lighting, or massaging the
fashion-conscious egos of their patrons with a hefty bill. On the on
the other hand your plastic takeaway hamburger and noodle joints for
single office girls are also hardly the place to go for a balanced
meal. Sooner or later in every city one finds a few honest,
unpretentious cafes offering good food at workingmen's prices. But
the first forays into a foreign place can be a finickety business of
disasters and serendipity, of trial and error, and often settling
for anything before starvation sets in. It's no easier if you can't
read the billboards, or speak the language to ask questions.
On this evening I finally surrendered to a
fishburger and a plate of salad selections which was weighed out
gram by gram by a solemn middle-aged man. To either side of me were
pairs of teenage girls driving the poor fellow to distraction by
asking him to add a little of this or subtract a little of that as
they calculated their calories and weekly budgets, unsupplemented on
this occasion by the financial bravado of a boyfriend in tow.
Up some narrow stairs you could find the wiped-down
splendour of a McDonald's-type eatery. The patrons perched on chairs
fixed to laminex tables, and I managed to claim one above the
streetline, where I could watch the local wildlife in its mating
rituals below. Since I don't know a soul in Seoul, there didn't seem
much else to do but to keep trudging up Jongno Road as a rubberneck.
What's to be seen depends upon what you are looking for I suppose.
Just as a nondescript middle aged man lumbering along the pavement
is invisible to teenagers on a mating drive, so their brand of
street theatre only fleetingly engages him. Still, central Seoul at
least has its architectural compensations. It has more class than
Busan, less the air of a functional rush job, prefabricated from
concrete slabs since the 1950s. Tonight though the only place to
draw me in was a large bookshop with an English language section
somewhere in the basement.
There's a certain morbid fascination in the prices
of English language books in Korea, at this time in its history
anyway. Except for a few of the staples from "learning English"
sections, notably a clutch of out of copyright 19th Century novel
translations, the price of imported books is astronomical. There's
every reason to give authors a return on their sweat (heck I write
myself, and get sweet nothing for it), but these elitist prices have
nothing to do with that. It's all about charging what they think a
small coterie of highly paid foreign executives will put up with,
and bugger the rest of us. Korea is not unique in this. Hong Kong is
probably the worst offender. But it does go to show how
well-intentioned legislation, like copyright, is always bent and
exploited by the hustlers.
Welcome the day when there are print-on-demand
terminals on every street corner, linked to the personal databank of
each writer and directing subscriptions straight back to him.
Bookshops could be mere sampling libraries, taking a small fixed fee
on each purchase, and publishing houses could compete in terms of
what they really are today: special purpose advertising agencies. If
the writer really wanted such an "advertising publisher", he could
either pay them a fee, or offer them a cut. In either case, they
would be business clients, no better or worse than the ad agencies
hired by breakfast food companies and politicians, Above all, we
have to get rid of the idea that the publishing house selects and
arbitrates "quality" in a godlike manner, then dictates price and
access to the market .... but I'm digressing at a tangent to the
wonders of Seoul ... (smile). As things stand here, the best trick
is to scan shelves, then build a wish list for international
Internet ordering: enough to reduce the impact of shipping
charges.
As a Korean language naïf, I'm mildly interested in
learn-Korean books, a much tinier market than the monster demand for
learn-English stuff. Miscatalogued in an irrelevant section, I
eventually came across a book/tape set on Korea from the "Teach
Yourself" series. I rather like the style of this series: the
dialogues let you get a handle on a chunk of the language, plus
there are comprehensive vocabularies, and coherent explanations of
what's going on. Even the exercises in the Korean editions were more
imaginative than usual. Most locally written language learning books
for foreigners in China and Korea have explanations written in
Chinese or Korean, no doubt satisfying for the authors, but useless
for the elementary learners. My ruminations had burnt the time. By
now they were pushing us out of the store for the night, so I made a
mental note to decide about buying the book later.
After a long trek back to my love motel, the hot
shower was a luxury compared to the lukewarm dribble that my
dormitory in Busan could manage, when it worked at all. The two free
condoms remained unused, but I experimented with a slather of skin
lotion, and wondered doubtfully about my new aroma. The pocket
handkerchief of floor space mocked any thought of routine push ups,
body presses and stretches, so the double bed had to do double duty.
Its twangs and groans no doubt sounded appropriate and familiar to
any voyeurs attached to hidden microphones in the
lampshade.
Breakfast self-catering in a place like the
Jongnoton is a bit tricky. True, they did supply a mini-fridge
hidden under the desk, and even two free samples bottles of the
vitamin "fibre drink" handed out by chemists in Korea. On the other
hand there was no sign of a way to boil water, or even the hot water
flask usually ubiquitous to Asian hotels everywhere. I had bought
some "gang neng-i", unsweetened puffed corn, apples and milk to kick
the day off. That could be supplemented later with a roll or two
from a corner takeaway. The morning schedule of satellite TV seemed
to be a choice of meaningless infotainment grabs from CNN, and the
swarms of boneless, bloodless animation critters that all children
under nine are supposed to crave daily. Cut.
Out on the streets, sobered by washed morning light,
the subtle greys and greens seemed peaceful. The city had a certain
dignity, even grandeur. The barrage of traffic had not yet begun.
Here and there a street sweeper pushed her cart. I walked towards
the diplomatic quarter of Angut, and at the subway entrance stood
two watchful policemen in navy blue, a reminder perhaps of deeper
social tensions than a casual tourist might suspect.
Well, what was the agenda? For a brief day or two in
Seoul it could have been the prescribed tourist circuit of palaces
and museums and quaint markets. I lived in-country though, and could
do the museum bit anytime. I had no obligation to take National
Geographic photos of people in funny clothes or snakes in baskets
for the school projects of middle class children in Pittsburgh or
Chicago. In fact, after three years in Asia, the quaintest thing I
could think of finding was a Walmart discount store, and had a vague
plan to find a way back to that long blue roof our bus had shot past
on the outskirts of the city. The truth of course is that a city is
not constructed from its official tourist highlights. Every city has
infinite faces, and will scan differently for the stamp collector,
the bird watcher, the gourmet, the dealmaker and the lecher. Cities
as accretions of concrete and refuse have much in common; also as
taxi stops between Hilton Hotels and the glittering glass facades of
banks and corporations they have much in common.
For me, each city was bound to play out according to
the mental state I bought to read it with. By nature, I am the
quintessential outsider, living between the cracks in the
floorboards of both the richest and meanest environments. As a very
poor, suntanned, scruffy nine year old on the outskirts of Sydney,
rubbish tips were my greatest delight, and I can remember bringing
home a set of abandoned cooking pots for my mother as a major
triumph. To this day, I feel like an impostor even in an upmarket
department store. I mock these inhibitions in myself, look into the
dull eyes, the tinsel fashions and silly self-importance of people
who take to palaces of affluence as to the manner born, but in the
end, inescapably, I am more comfortable nibbling a takeaway bun
alone on the pavement, than sharing a "power breakfast" with the
self-appointed masters of the universe. So learning Seoul in my way
had to be a marathon of street streetscapes, of long walks down
roads that might lead nowhere in particular, and just occasionally
might yield up a memorable vignette or an unexpected
encounter.
One priority had to be to lay hands on some kind of
city map. Luckily the station at Angut had a little tourist office
which was able to oblige. Angut station itself had some pretensions
to class : subdued wall murals, a traditional music store, and so
on. It was unlikely to be the busiest spot in town, but it was a
self-conscious gateway to "traditional Seoul". The lady of the
circled eyes had yesterday invited me down to Town Hall for access
to free e-mail, so that also seemed like something to put on the
list. But first I wriggled through the subway system to a big
bookshop I had heard about, the Uji Book Center at Ujiro-1-ga.
I had barely emerged from the subway steps, maybe
looking a bit bewildered as usual, when a pudgy young man in a light
grey flannel suit introduced himself and asked where I would like to
go. My destination, the bookshop, was an easy take since it fronted
into part of the subway, but he insisted on searching out the
shelves where I might find what I wanted. The counter girl was
sulky. It was five minutes before her official starting time, and
she wasn't doing overtime for anybody. My host persisted primly, and
she waved her hand vaguely at one corner of the store. Actually they
didn't have what I wanted, but that had become secondary to the
relationship with this stranger. Was he following a diktat of
hospitality conscience, or did he have some other agenda? I finally
guessed that my helper really was a man in a hurry who was doing his
bounden duty as he saw it. I thanked him effusively, and freed him
to rush off to salaryman-land. It was beginning to seem though that
there were people in Seoul who were willing to help strangers in a
way that almost never happened in Busan.
The City Hall was a mere whistle stop from
Ujiro-1-ga, although I didn't realize that immediately, popping up
out of gopher holes from the underground. The edifice stood almost
alone, marooned at a corner of the Deoksugung Palace grounds, where
great tides of fast roadways cut it off from the skyscraper heart of
the new city. It was clearly preserved as a relic of ornate colonial
granite architecture, with sweeping steps, and brass doorknobs, and
a uniformed commissionaire to welcome respectable citizens. One of
its most interesting features for a visitor with a sense of
geography was the large city relief map against an outside wall.
Little lights went on when you pressed buttons next to a list of
landmarks, but it was especially useful in showing up the radiating
river valleys which the city's development had overwhelmed.
Immediately behind the airy lobby was a very modern
display area-cum-information bureau. A young lady fluent in English
dug me out yet another city map, and showed me how to get to various
places, although she was flummoxed for a minute by my enquiry about
Walmart. Tourists, after all, were supposed to come to look at the
Deoksungung Palace. Sitting at a table around the corner I found
yesterday's guardian angel. Apparently she was a volunteer worker,
together with another older lady whose language skills were useful
to redirect straying Japanese. Their common language was Korean,
which alas I didn't share, but in the rickety way of cross-language
conversations we struggled on for a few minutes.
Somehow the talk got around to bedsheets, for I had
complained that they couldn't be bought in Korea, or at least were
never displayed. Nonsense, my domestic experts said. You just had to
know what to ask for. If you wanted a bed sheet, you had to request
a "rug". Hmm, mysteries of the new Asian Englishes. A good place to
buy "rugs" the ladies continued enthusiastically, was Namdaemun
(South Gate) Market. That was about ten minutes walk away, and they
gave me elaborate directions.
I actually had no plans to spend the day walking
around with an armload of bedsheets, but after checking my e-mail I
did traipse off in the direction on Namdaemun. It was a pleasant
morning of bright sunlight, and the air was still a little crisp.
The shops on the way down to market had cluttered display windows
and dark interiors, the kinds of places about which you say to
yourself, "surely they have to be a front for dubious activities, or
the last retreat of some family inheritance". Nobody could make a
living out of such somnolence. Namdaemun Market itself seemed
relatively compact, although it ran to several bustling levels. It
was exotic, perhaps, for package tourists from the West, if such
creatures existed in these climes (I saw no sign of any in Seoul at
all), but oriental markets were as familiar to me by now as any
franchise in an Australian shopping mall.
The road continued on to Seoul Station, which sat a
little abjectly amidst a clutter of traffic overpasses. The station
itself was an uncomfortable marriage of Japanese imperial domed
architecture and red brick, upon which had been brutally glued a
great cream rectangle of utilitarian non-design, the place where
nowadays rail-terminal type things actually happened. Nothing could
disguise the fact that this corner of the city was definitely
down-market. Down-and-outs, living in the clothes they stood up in,
hung about the small car park, while a police van waited discreetly
off to the left. I hurried inside, past the pillars of ATMs, and the
ubiquitous coffee machines dispensing minuscule paper cups
half-filled with brown liquid. The main concourse was brightly lit,
though I had little to offer me. I did buy a couple of hot flapjacks
off a cheerful woman, who slipped them steaming into a plastic bag
for a thousand won. Then somewhere deep in the bowels of the place I
found a walkway to yet another subway entrance.
As a traveler, you must have a Quest. It doesn't
matter much what the quest is. This is a kind of psychological
equivalent to the boring job that everyman plods off to each day, or
the routine of housework which every housewife persuades herself is
central to an ordered universe. It is also why tourist agencies stay
in business, inventing routines for people who lack the imagination
to dream them up themselves. You can hunt for unusual bottle tops or
collect kinky cigarette lighters. The point is, when you have a
goal, you have an excuse to kick in other people's heads, starve
yourself for a world record, or head off to the South Pole. Once
embarked on a journey of the heart, or of shoe leather, the world is
coloured with meaning, no matter that your destination may be, after
all, a mirage.
Ah, but it is the tragedy of a skeptic, such as I,
never to be blessed with amnesia, to always remember that the end
probably doesn't matter, and therefore become castrated of any sexy
killer instinct. Like a world-weary gambler who goes to the casino
just because it is open, I'm apt to embark on journeys that are
absurd and dispensable. So my perverse goal, short-term today, had
become the mythical Walmart. According to the lady in the Town Hall,
that was quite an adventure. Catching city buses, it would have
taken forever, but the huge subway system snakes its way everywhere.
In this case it meant going pretty well to the end of one of the
lines, to a place called Ori on the very southern outskirts of
Seoul's conurbation.
When I am appointed emperor of all things below
heaven, one of the offerings I am going to require of subways is an
electronic vista-window in the ceiling, which shows you just where
you are going in the upper world, as you burrow through the bowels
of large cities. Today, being entirely subterranean, I had to travel
blind like a mole, through roaring tunnels for an hour and a half,
as people came and went. The passengers seemed to change as we
progressed from the yuppity business centre to the dreary suburbs.
By the time we got to Ori, my fellow passengers were mostly
retirees, and doughty ajumas, those urban peasant women who hunt in
packs and form attack V-formations to commandeer whatever seat is
available, or whatever doorway happens to open. Anyway, when I
emerged once more, blinking into the sunshine, it was late
lunchtime.
Ori was obviously a rather modern creation in Korean
terms. The boulevards were broad, there were footpaths, but few
people. This wasn't the scene of crowded dongs (wards) with narrow
alleyways, and little shops without awnings facing bluntly onto the
street, or old ladies sitting behind bundles of cabbage and thawing
piles of fish. No, this was the new urban landscape of the
international megalopolis.
After walking around a block or two I found the
surprisingly quiet entrance to a Carrefour mega-store. Playing the
usual caricature of language fragments, I enquired of bemused floor
staff how to find the competition, Walmart. It took them a little
time to twig, but eventually one of the ladies took a piece of paper
and drew me a kind of map, which seemed to suggest catching a bus
for eight kilometers or so into the never-never of a highway out of
town. There was a general impression that the bus was not too
frequent. Then a floor manager came along, and pompously corrected
the lady's map, putting her arrows to face in the opposite
direction. It all sounded too hard. I didn't know which bus, or what
direction.
Let's face it, did I REALLY want to go to Walmart?
What did I want to buy anyway? No, it more of a nostalgic cultural
expedition, like visiting a famous museum with mass produced
artifacts. In 1982, passing through Hawaii, there had been my first
and only encounter with a Walmart, so in the hierarchy of
interesting shops it had the virtue of novelty (Walmarts don't exist
in Australia).
At the top of that hierarchy the all-time winner for
me had been a kind of craftsman's hardware store called Tokyo Hands,
five stories of fascination in Tokyo's suburb of Ikekaburo. At the
bottom I rated the Japanese/Korean notion of a department store --
those mirror, glass and marble halls of lipstick and Luis Vuitton
handbags, the vacuous floors of so-called designer clothing at
ridiculous prices, and a pathetic incapacity to supply materials and
tools to make or fix things with. Places like Walmart, K-mart or
Carrefour were at least part-way towards being useful, though what
I'd seen of the Korean versions fell sadly short of their Australian
cousins. Maybe the making, fixing, tinkering ethic didn't go with
living in twenty story apartment blocks, or maybe it was that old
Confucian derision for fashioning anything with your
hands.
I considered the short amount of time I had left in
Seoul, and getting sensible at last, decided that it might be a
richer contribution to enlightenment to head back towards the centre
of town. I did have another absurd errand in mind, to hunt down some
electronic bits and pieces. That implied a trip to Youngsan, which
the map said wasn't far from Itaewon. For my fellow foreign teachers
a trip to Seoul seems to be code-speak for a visit to the foreigner
bars of Itaewon. I had no particular enthusiasm to check out the
reputed expatriate heart of Seoul, or at least the off-duty stamping
ground of 38,000 American GIs (not that they were likely to be
visible in anything like that mass).
In the main city itself, let alone out here at Ori,
there were very few foreigners at all to be seen. In those terms you
could scarcely call Seoul an international city although it
certainly outshone my recent waystop of Wuhan with its hundred odd
big noses amidst a Chinese ocean of seven million... (perhaps my
rarity value had encouraged the surprising courtesy which the
citizens of Seoul had demonstrated). Most places were bound to seem
monocultural alongside my hometown, Sydney, or even Australia itself
with its 24% foreign born population (double the American ratio). In
Sydney the word "foreigner" was an anachronism, but in Seoul one was
definitely a foreigner, albeit kindly treated. For example, the
surprise of hearing any foreigner speak a Korean word often means
that regardless of pronunciation many Koreans have great difficulty
in tuning in to the simplest requests.
In Ori subway station I asked attendant for a fare
to Youngsan. He blinked twice and handed over a ticket to some place
I had never heard of. Once again though, fortune smiled. Behind me
in the line was a dignified be-suited gentleman who quickly
intervened and snapped something at the unlucky ticket seller.
Corrections were hastily made. In elaborate English my new friend
introduced himself and told me to "follow him". He was a retired
official of some kind who gave me his name card, featuring a spare,
elegant script printed vertically.
When I pulled out a miniature subway map we both had
to squint, so then he insisted on making a gift to me of his small
folding magnifying glass. He wasn't going quite to where I was
going, he explained, but something would be arranged when the time
came. I wasn't at all worried. After all, a subway system is a
reasonably rational set of squiggles, and I could more or less see
what I had to do. There would be a change needed at some place could
Oksu, apparently to an above-ground line. Oksu was just over the Han
River bridge. I tried to make some cordial conversation, and did the
usual self-promotion of handing over my net site address; (I really
do want feedback from knowledgeable Koreans, but few are both
English-literate and Internet-literate).
As we came towards Oksu, my warden looked around the
carriage, and fixing a beady eye on a young fellow who was standing
nearby, tugged the front of his coat imperiously. There followed a
brief conversation. It emerged that the young man was also going to
Youngsan, so was therefore instructed to accompany and direct me. He
looked a little unhappy about this, but etiquette forbade him to
ignore such a senior gentleman. Since my new assigned guide spoke
not a word of English, neither of us could decently extricate
ourselves from the obligation. At the point of departure, I shook
hands with the old gentleman, then mutely followed the young fellow
onto the platform. It was quite crowded and I fully expected him to
lose me in the crush of bodies. However, each time he got a few
steps ahead he would pause patiently, mutely, never meeting my eye,
but turning slightly like the owner of a dog which has darted off
for a moment in the wrong direction. So walking two steps behind I
tracked him up steps and down steps, waiting on platforms, standing
in the next train. He was always there, never speaking a word, never
looking at me, never losing me.
The exit at Youngsan itself is, well, rather
remarkable. It is a nondescript platform in an old industrial
landscape, grimy, with spidery steel steps clawing up to an overhead
covered walkway. At the head of the steps though there is no ticket
collection, no barriers. Rather, the walkway leads off in either
direction, quite a long way on the arm we chose. A busy river of
bodies flowed for several hundred meters it seemed, and emerged into
a kind of cavernous hall which looked for all the world like an
international border crossing into another country. We clicked our
way through the turnstiles. Now surely, I had to release my guide. I
clapped him softly on the shoulder and nodded "thank you". Obviously
relieved, he managed a quick smile and disappeared into the crowd.
The place where I had found myself was in fact a
large merchandising hall for the Korean universe of computers CD
players, cell phones and other electronic gadgetry. This was Hong
Kong on the Han River, although the prices unfortunately were by no
means tax free. For all its glitz, the electronics market at
Youngsan has your typical (limited) Korean range, and nothing that
looked like the electronic component stores that interested me.
Beyond the large merchandising hall at the railway turnstiles, the
area was accumulating a collection of electronic/electrical
retailers and wholesalers, old warehouses converted into warrens of
nestling agencies, nearly all selling the same as their neighbours.
One section might be given over to electric fans, or air
conditioners, or PC computers.
Most proprietors seemed to spend their lives sipping
coffee and reading newspapers. Perhaps they had salesmen out in the
field, or a few loyal customers. Being slow-witted, I've never been
able to understand how many small businesses (anywhere) actually pay
the rent. The municipal history of Youngsan has not been on my
reading list, but looking around at the decaying industrial
environment, overlaid with enthusiastic projects like the
electronics retailing hall, one could almost smell the political
hyperbole about a new Silicon Valley. In China, probably Korea too,
the city elders of any burgh which has a collection of computer
shops talks of its emerging Silicon Valley as a coming saviour to
the treasury.
Now what? Still a few allotted hours to spend. Maybe
I should take in a fleeting glance at Itaewon after all, to confirm
every prejudice. How nice it would be to insert an "however" here.
Well, it was even tackier than I had imagined. A half kilometer
strip of forgettable shops, and on both sides of the road, a ragged
straggle of tourist stalls, selling a mixture of clothing and the
universal kitsch which you find in tourist stalls everywhere.
Perhaps Itaewon had grown to cater for all those mostly
not-too-bright GI boys, who could feel right at home in a good ol'
American holiday spot. It amazed me that anyone else would come here
just to buy a pizza from an English language menu. The signature
personality for this corner of town seemed to be an aging American
officer, scrubbed pale and pink with laundry soap. As he stepped off
the curb he held the elbow of his Korean lady, now perhaps his
Korean wife, who was on the cusp of transformation into a middle
aged ajuma with carefully permed hair. In public she looked
distinctly edgy as "the foreigner's woman". It was all a little sad.
As the day slipped away I made a hasty exit down the
electric gopher hole, and emerged once again to a darkened
Jongno-3-ga. My little shopping chores had been an unreserved
failure if getting the goods counted, but now I decided to retrace
last night's expedition, and splash out on the "Teach Yourself
Korean" book. Back in the spacious basement of Youngpoon Book Store,
almost sure this was the right place, I tried to repeat the previous
accidental find. The object of desire had no homing beacon on it, so
getting scientific the salesgirl consulted her computer data base,
and assured me earnestly that there was no such publication for sale
here.
Doubtful, puzzled, I retreated to the street and
slogged west for another half kilometer, to yet another
intersection. Foot weary, like a cheated conquistador, plunging ever
deeper into the unmapped wilderness, time and opportunity were
slipping beyond grasp again. With failure came a caveat on my plan
to catch an early morning bus the next day. Discouraged, I turned
east yet again, plodded sulkily past the Youngpoon store, and just
before closing time reached the only other obvious candidate, the
Jongno book centre. One peek into the lobby persuaded even my
confused memory that this wasn't El Dorado.
Time to go home. Time to eat. Not another bloody
cardboard takeaway though. Lady Luck showed a twinge of compassion.
A few hundred meters to the west of Jongno-3 station I gambled on
one of those cafes with coloured wax mockups of their meals in the
window. I could even stroll in and pretend to be knowledgeable by
memorizing the Hangul label on the display. Dinner came in a lacquer
boxed tray : the spicy soup, the steel bowl of rice, little dishes
of pickled vegetable, and salad. The agassi briskly snipped up some
lightly crumbed fish with her shears. It was good, honest fare for a
modest price.
After several minutes a florid fellow in the centre
of the cafe apparently took a different view. In a loud voice voice
he summoned the manageress, and stabbed his finger angrily at the
offending food. At first she tried to conciliate him, but when that
didn't work, stoutly defended her chef's cooking. The altercation
went on and on, with the whole kitchen staff hovering at a doorway
in the distance. Eventually the florid man stumbled to his feet, and
still arguing furiously, he was edged out the door. Public honour
was now at stake, so the mama-san brusquely seized the guilty tray,
and carried it to a table near her cash register. There she plumped
down and proceeded to finish the serving off, munching grimly. From
time to time a waitress would perch birdlike on the edge of a chair
at the same table, and take a peck from the food too, to show proper
loyalty. With a roadshow like this thrown in, the indigenes won
hands down over the previous night's insipid snack.
It's amazing how a good night's sleep improves the
world's complexion. As I bounced down the stairs of the love motel
next morning, the unctuous host lisped that final word in every
hotelier's vocabulary : "checkout?". Well no, not quite yet. I
really did want to find that goddamned book. Figuring on a house to
house search, I studied the map and caught a subway to the farthest
point west I could conceivably have wandered two nights before. That
was Gwangwhamun station. Home to the final Quest had to be somewhere
along this strip, or Seoul was a gremlin's box of illusions.
Right off the train this time was the Kyoto Book
Store, a prosperous place whose layout looked vaguely like a
possible match. Yet once again, the hapless presence of a foreigner
attracted swift help from a stranger. She was a wiry madam of at
least sixty, taut as a bow string, with short, sensibly wrapped,
iron grey hair, and wearing a little knapsack. Nobody could have
been further from the squat cabbage sellers of Busan's pavements.
She was probably some kind of academic. Without fuss, she asked what
I was looking for, and immediately set off to find the floor
manager, confiding along the way in perfect English, that with a
wink and a nod in this shop, I could wrangle a 10% discount.
Alas, they had never heard of the book either, so it
was back to walking in the sunshine. At last, coming abreast of the
Youngpoon store, I looked at it darkly and on an impulse clattered
down its steps. This time, ignoring all official help, I half closed
my eyes, invoked any mediums, muses or other friendly spirits who
might happen to be drifting by, and invited my feet to move by
instinct to some likely spot in the wall of books. And there it was.
Not on the database indeed! The clerks were of course happy to
accept a cash donation, but entirely uninterested when I dryly
pointed out the failures in their organization.
No matter, now I was free to head out of town, back
to the other end of the Korean world, where the citizens of Seoul
only ventured once a year in the heat of a few days of summer
holiday. Remote Busan, my home in the steep valleys of Bansong-dong,
but for these soft-speaking northerners, merely a place for the
annual migration, where after endless traffic jams they packed
shoulder to shoulder on baking sand, by the tepid waters of Haeundae
Beach.
.
* Note on personal
names: all names in this Diary have been changed to protect the
privacy of individuals, unless stated otherwise.
"Scouting Seoul"... copyrighted to
Thor May 2002; all rights reserved
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