seoul survivor
week three in south korea
Unlike being on holiday, when you go away for work you don’t get to pick where you travel. Our tour is taking us to four towns across South Korea that the average tourist might not visit: Suwon and Pyeongtaek, both satellite towns of the capital, Gangneung on the coast and rural Andong in the middle of the country. We’re not going to Busan or Jeju Island, and we’re not going to Seoul.
However, coming all this way and not going to Seoul always seemed a bit of a missed opportunity, and given that Suwon and Pyeongtaek are both close to the capital, I was hoping I’d be able to swing a day off and make a flying visit. That day came on Wednesday when Misha, our production manager, and I took a leap of faith (a bus, the metro and a rickety Korail train) to the city.
What an amazing place. It’s futuristic and historic all at once, with palaces and old fortress gates penned in by skyscrapers and office blocks. It’s all neon lights and sprawling shops, street food markets on top of clothing stores on top of grand churches, all flanked by beautiful mountains and the wide Han river. It’s busy, but it’s clean and spacious too, and I think I might have fallen in love.
Everyone is so well dressed. Everyone looks like they’re having a good time. Admittedly, it was a gorgeous 25 degree day on Wednesday so that might make any city look pretty, but even if it had rained I think I would have swooned for Seoul.
I took the Namsan cable car up to the tower to see views across the city, ate pancakes from some very stern aunties at Gwangjang Market, shopped in Hongdae, walked along the beautiful Cheonggyecheon stream, checked out the night market in Myeongdong, saw the Sungnyemun Gate and almost fell asleep on the steps of Seoul station waiting for my train back. A proper classic touristy day.
One thing I noticed in Seoul that I haven’t seen much of in the three weeks I’ve been dotting around the rest of the country, however, is tourists. It didn’t even occur to me that I might see other non-Koreans, that in the capital city I would hear more English spoken, that I wouldn’t need to fumble my way through ordering something in broken Korean or get out my phone to try the ever-unreliable Apple Translate camera feature.
The idea of the capital always intimidated me a bit when preparing for this trip. I thought it was a good thing that we were starting the tour in Suwon and didn’t have a date in a theatre in Seoul. Imagine landing, trying to orient ourselves, doing a get-in and tech day in a foreign country and when you pop out for lunch, you’re greeted by over half the population of Korea?
But it turns out actually we’ve been playing Korea on hard mode. We’ve not had the familiarity of other tourists around us, lumping along with their backpacks and their suncream, also struggling to work out how to top up a T-money card or trying to pay for things with 50,000 won notes, much to the disgruntlement of every GS25 shopkeeper. Perhaps it would have been preferable to have started in Seoul, to have done our tourist ticklists of palaces and shops, to have had a bit of English in the air whilst we oriented ourselves at the start.
But I also realised on Wednesday that actually, I’m glad we’ve done it the hard way. The tourists annoyed me; they got in the way. Every time I saw them taking the same Instagrammable photos of the same streets and buildings as everyone else, I just thought, there’s so much more out there. Don’t miss that stuff too!
It’s been fantastic to venture out, off the beaten track a bit, to see how other parts of the country function. Pyeongtaek Arts Centre is in a weird suburb that’s still being built - it’s all fast construction and empty streets, feels a bit like Canary Wharf - of a town that is already an odd commuter off-shoot of the big city. It’s like we’re in the Canary Wharf of the Milton Keynes of Seoul. It’s mad! I can’t wait to get to Andong, with its genuine historic folk village of hanok houses and the museum of traditional masks too.
How cool to say I’ve had a bit of both? How lucky to get that experience, to get any of this experience. Going to Seoul was such a balm, a much needed one after a crazy week in Gangneung. Odd that the venturing out, the big scary trip to the capital, was actually in some ways the reverse: everything else has been the hard bit, Seoul was actually really simple.
So simple in fact that I might go back. If you’re reading this on the Friday I post it, I may well be queuing up for the Gyeongbokgung Palace, or strolling through the Jamsil Olympic Park. I’m even wondering if I can squeeze in a DMZ tour, but that might be pushing it.
서울, 사랑해!
Welcome to our city.