Korea - first impressions

After stowing our luggage below, the airport shuttle bus driver climbed aboard, turned and gave a quick, heel-snapping militaristic bow to the two of us (and thirty empty seats), and we were on our way into Seoul. Still groggy from the overnight flight, I don’t remember much from the 40 minute bus journey: rain, low cloud, flat green terrain with a few large buildings soon giving way to hilly green terrain with very many not-so-large buildings. That’s about it.

Brenda, our friend and seasoned Seoul-mate (I couldn’t resist), came to greet us at the Hyatt and introduce us to Anna, whose apartment we would be sharing for the next three weeks. Between the jetlag, the rain, and the fact that both Anna and Brenda had to hustle back to their respective jobs, the transfer from bus to hugs to car to apartment seemed to take about ninety seconds. Anna’s camo US Army uniform (she’s a sergeant) added a surreal twist to the sudden haste. Once inside the spacious modern 10th-floor view apartment, we were enthusiastically bombarded by four tiny dogs, two of which were pure white but had their ears and tails dyed in neon colours. Anna told us as she was rushing out the door that two of the dogs didn’t go outside (the white ones), but the other two (miniature Dobermans) did, and in fact needed to right away. So having had maybe five or six coherent thoughts between us in the previous ten hours, and desperately craving sleep, we found ourselves being dragged down some narrow Korean streets by two energetic dogs, not entirely sure how to get back to the building, how to get into it when we did, and what to do with the poo.

So what’s Korea like?

The first thing we noticed was that pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, trucks, scooters and baby strollers all share the same pavement, and - it works. We had to quickly learn to operate the retractable leashes so as not to permanently lose our new charges under the vegetable trucks and pizza delivery scooters that often came within inches of us. There are sidewalks here and there, but they are commonly used for overflow parking and scooter passing lanes. You’d expect to see dents, crutches and road rage everywhere, but it all moves along just fine, as long as no one loses their nerve - which no one ever does. Thankfully, it takes very little time to get over the feeling of being affronted when a motorcycle comes up behind you on the sidewalk, wanting to pass. We soon learned that the best strategy, the only strategy, is to simply keep moving, smoothly altering your trajectory when absolutely necessary. No one runs into anyone else, no one gets angry, so there’s nothing to worry about. I am permanently over my moral indignation at seeing Vancouver cyclists run stop signs, and it feels great.

As we alternated between picking up Dober-tot poo and trying to get our bearings, we wondered where we were in relation to downtown Seoul. It took a few days, but it finally dawned on us: there IS no “downtown Seoul”. The density is disarmingly consistent in every direction, as far as the eye can see. Seoul is huge, and it’s all downtown. There are areas where you’re more likely to find a department store than an old woman with a basket of cabbages on her head, but there’s no visible evidence of zoning of any kind, and again – it works. Large and small office buildings, shops, houses, markets, and apartment towers all occupy randomly-shaped building lots and share the same unmarked streets. Addresses do exist, but they’re not consecutive and have only a loose bearing on a building’s actual location. Instead, small maps and local landmarks are used to identify specific locations. It seems chaotic to our way of thinking, and it no doubt emerged organically, but it makes for a surprisingly convenient and expandable city. Every single home has most of the shops and services it needs within walking distance. On our walk, we spied a gas pump inside a tiny shop next to a seafood market, and a police station in what looked like a parking lot kiosk surrounded by houses. Modestly brilliant.

In a nutshell, your first impressions of Seoul will completely depend upon your flexibility and your tolerance for what may initially appear to be chaos. In very little time, we’ve gone from accepting it, to liking it, to understanding completely why some westerners who’d planned to stay for a few months are still here several years later. They all say Seoul is crazy, but you have to wonder if that’s exactly what our culture needs.

May 9-11: Camden, Carnaby, Korea

On Saturday morning we became distantly aware of another person moving around in the enormous flat. We eventually found and met Elena the housekeeper, an interesting woman who had been a teacher in her native Romania, but like many Romanians sought a better living in another country. She misses her mother and hopes to return for good some day.

On advice from Amari’s dad, we decided to check out Camden Town for “the vibe”. The clouds were starting to disappear as we stumbled from the tube station into the middle of a fabulously busy / punky / artsy street fair in full swing. There were street vendors selling funky clothes, tons of food stalls, jugglers, stilt walkers, a marching band, a drum circle, hawkers – a broad splash of bright colours and joyful noise. Regent’s Canal, dotted with little patio restaurants, is almost buried in all the activity, or at least until you’re standing on the iron bridge that crosses it. Neon tutus and wildly patterned tights; a man loudly imitating bird calls; T-shirts with Spider Pig, or Darth Vader trimming a topiary Death Star; an excellent busking prog-rock acoustic guitarist sitting on the ground; a handmade sign for “budget combat boots”; bright silk blankets in a dozen different elephant patterns; a former horse hospital converted into a bar (your friends can share a stall) – we loved Camden Town, and would scamper back there in a heartbeat.

Eventually feeling a need to escape the crowds, we made our way to the V&A to see the glass exhibit we had missed on our last visit. It’s an amazing collection of decorative glassware and sculpture covering the entire span of glassmaking history, and displayed with such light and abundance that we felt we were part of the exhibit. We also made a mental note to take a trip to Murano, the glassblower’s island, when we get to Italy next year. Because of the sunny weather (and our penchant for showing up everywhere right at closing time) there were only a few people there, including a young woman who was seated in front of one of the displays and sketching a Bohemian vase. After we were gently turfed out of the V&A, we loped over to Hyde Park and flopped ourselves down on the grass, so as to be more approachable lick-victims to the many passing dogs. We stretched and took some photos of the sky for later conversion into impossible jigsaw puzzles, then made a plan to walk to where some good Indian restaurants were rumoured to be lurking.

Following the horse trail near the edges of the park, we came across the most emotionally moving monument we’d ever seen - a quiet tribute to the millions of animals who have died serving man in warfare. A curved white stone mural depicting an endless line of horses, elephants, camels, and oxen is broken in the middle, where a solemn line of life-sized bronze sculptures – mules, dogs, horses – passes through the wall, all staring silently forward. The only lettering on the memorial is, “They had no choice.” The monument was littered with flowers. Christine and I held one another for a long time, tears running down our cheeks, remembering the selfless love we’ve received from all the animals in our lives.

Making our east from Hyde Park, we passed by the American embassy, encrusted with eagles, stars and stripes, and the Canadian embassy, which stands across the small park separating them, looking like a quaint old hotel where teatime never ends. We passed through an area of smaller high-end clothing stores, and watched some well-dressed Italian looking men loading a fridge through the front door of the Corneliani shop. Hitting Regent Street, we chanced upon the Apple Store, jammed with evening shoppers from all over the world sending emails, Googling restaurants, and doing their personal banking on the hundreds of Mac Books on display. Halleluhia! We got on a machine, transferred some money between accounts (network security not really being an issue for holders of single-digit balances), patronized a cooperative ATM across the street, then zig-zagged around the Carnaby Street area half-looking for Masala Zone, which we’d heard was great. It was touch-and-go, but hunger finally won out over window shopping for shoes, and someone handing out flyers for a nightclub directed us to our restaurant, where we had the best Indian meal we’d ever eaten. Whatever your plans were, go out and have some Indian food tonight. You’ll die happy, a long time from now.

Our Lufthansa flight to Korea (via Frankfurt) turned out to be leaving Heathrow two hours earlier than I had originally thought (dyslexia? what lysdexia?), so we scrambled to pack our things and leave a note for our host, and lugged our suitcases down the street to the very stair-intensive Marble Arch tube station. (A few of the Underground stations are apparently wheelchair-accessible now, which must be a huge relief to those disabled Londoners itching to visit Upney). Our itinerary printout didn’t indicate which of Heathrow’s four terminals was currently hosting Lufthansa, so when Christine spotted an airport information sign across a tube platform our train had briefly stopped at, she ran out of the car, read the sign, and ran back onto the train just as the doors were closing. She’s my hero.

Lufthansa has about five different levels of first class cabin that we budget travellers wade through on our way to the back of the plane. The frontmost cabin features private sleeping space-pods with every imaginable convenience built into them, including drink holders, widescreen TV’s, back massagers, ATM’s, and lighted dancing fountains of Tanqueray. The hop to Frankfurt was comfortably short, and we had what seemed like a generous amount of time to find and board the flight to Seoul. We walked through about 15 kilometers of massively wide, clean, modern and virtually unpopulated corridors to get to our gate area, where we barely had enough time left to buy Europe’s most expensive apple and figure out how to use the pay phones so we could call our moms for Mothers’ Day. We were the last people through the gate and onto the plane, which by the way is a great way to see the smiling faces of all your fellow travellers.

If you ever have a hankering to add some syncopation to your circadian rhythms, a red-eye from Frankfurt to Seoul will do the trick nicely. We did our best to sleep on the plane, but arrived in Seoul on a rainy Monday morning looking and feeling like a couple of zombies. Swine flu being the maladie du jour, we were all made to complete a health questionnaire (“have you had a sore throat in the last six months?”) and have our temperatures taken with those thankfully non-invasive infrared ear-thermometers. We picked up our suitcases, found an ATM, bought a bag of chips, and once again struggled through payphone usage, eventually getting a hold of our friend Brenda. Her instructions: “take a bus to the Hyatt, and I’ll meet you there”. The crazy Korean chapter had begun.

London & the "other" Marble Arch

My daily commute to Croydon didn’t seem to be having a great deal of impact on my client. In fact, I probably could’ve stood naked on the water cooler and sang “Smoke on the Water” in Flemish without causing a stir. So, Christine and I decided that I should finish up whatever work absolutely had to be done there in the next few days, and she would see about finding us some plane tickets to Seoul, where our friend Brenda had lined up some work and some digs for us.

We had a nice final dinner with Lucinda, signed her bulging guest book, and said farewell to Balham, without having once taken in the rather upscale-looking pizza place on the corner. Christine had lined up our next couch-surfing destination: the London apartment of her dance buddy Amari’s parents, in Marble Arch. Now, my only association with the name “Marble Arch” was the seedy hotel on Richards Street where I used to play drums in a blues/R&B cover band way back when. It was one of the more lucrative gigs for bands in our, um, “echelon”, mostly because the place was absolutely packed on “welfare Wednesdays”. People would cash their cheques at the bar, and the more frugal drinkers would have enough left over at the end of the night to take a cab home. The rest are probably still there.

Anyway, the reaction we got when we told people we’d be staying in Marble Arch the next three nights suggested that we might be seeing a better sort of clientele than the Richards street drunks of yore. What an understatement. The suite we were given keys to was massive, beautifully and artistically decorated, and had sweeping views in all directions. We knew we were in for something unexpected when the elevator opened into the suite itself, but we still wandered around slack-jawed for over an hour. We had been given the master bedroom, which was larger than many London flats. The ensuite bathroom looked like a particularly upscale spa. Incredible.

We finally got to meet Amari’s kind and wonderful father the following evening, as he made a brief stop between work and sleep. He made us feel extremely welcome and comfortable – almost as if he was the houseguest. We slept like babies there, partly because it was so incredibly quiet in amongst all that plushness, but mostly because the enormous bed made you feel like you were in your very first grown-up bed, where the corners took some time to get to.

The next day, Christine took a Contemporary Ballet class at Pineapple Studios then roamed around the Natural History Museum for the afternoon. We had cheekily agreed to meet up at Trafalgar Square, and sure enough, we found one another in short order and strolled off for a pub dinner near Leicester Square. Our after-dinner walk was filled with endless romantic-movie London moments. Hearing some sprightly chamber music, we walked up to the closed doors of St-Martins-in-the-Fields just as the music ended and two ushers pulled the huge doors open right in front of us, engulfing us in warm light and a wave of energetic applause. We stood in the doorway, looking straight up the aisle, and watched the smiling musicians take their bows. It felt like it had all been staged just for us.

Walking towards the Thames, we went through part of the City of Westminster and passed by several beautiful old pubs, one of which was gently emitting “Tears of a Clown”. We rounded a corner and were suddenly confronted by a looming Big Ben, looking utterly magnificent with all its lights on. It was five to ten, so we waited for the famous chime. There was a dramatic pause after the expected two-part melody, then the deep thunder of the huge bell (“Big Ben” itself) just sort of emerged into the night, the effect not becoming any less awesome over the course of its ten slow BONGs.

The banks of the Thames were alive with lights and people, including a group of non-English speaking women who seemed to be involved in the late stages of a meandering stagette. We kept bumping into them, and helped one lost pair find the rest of their pod before we crossed the river again and climbed onto the busy tube to make our way back to our temporary palace and our grown-up-grown-up bed.

Tuesday, May 5 – a London Work / Life Experiment

We got up uncharacteristically early ( although not as early as Lucinda, who likes to get into central London before the Tube crowds get thick and stinky), and prepared for what might be a normal weekday (for us, at least). Christine geared up to take a Contemporary class at “The Place”, a dance studio near King's Cross, and I threw a shoulder bag of electronics gear together for a day at my client's factory in Croydon, the opposite direction. To complete the commuter experience, I threw on my headphones and painted the walk-tube-walk-tram-walk with a completely incongruous sonic landscape of live funk a la Maceo Parker. It was hard not to smile the whole way.

I got off the (remarkably clean, smooth and enjoyable) tram at a very small station on the northern outskirts of Croydon, not far from their Ikea, which features a huge old brick smokestack decorated up top in their trademark blue-and-yellow. (Why is it that Ikea stores are always located in places with virtually no sidewalks? I thought Swedes walked everywhere.) Without Maceo and his band gleefully shouting “Soul power!” in my ears, Croydon could've been quite depressing. Hopeful rat traps had been tossed into weed- and litter-choked forgotten landscaping along leaning fences and graffiti-covered walls. Cars and trucks roared past me as if desperate to be somewhere else, so I adjusted myself onto what appeared to be the world's least-used cycle path.

One day in a 9-to-5 environment was enough to remind me why I had long since chosen to abandon that world, but the industrial/suburban flavour of the decidedly cynical UK psyche added something I was all to happy to leave behind when 5 o'clock thankfully showed up. I still had lots to do there to keep me busy for the remainder of the week, but Christine and I had great plans for the evening, so I threw the headphones back on and scuttled to the tram.

Christine has the ability to completely vanish in the smallest spaces in a matter of seconds. It's amazing. We can plan to meet up after we each grab an item from adjacent grocery store aisles, then spend fifteen minutes aimlessly looking for each other. No strategy has ever been able to counteract this effect. This makes it all the more brave that we had agreed to meet at the entrance to a museum we'd never been to and knew little about, several streets away from a London tube station neither of us had ever been to, sometime within a half-hour time fame. Ridiculous. Impossible. A disaster waiting to happen. But as I came around what I'd hoped was the right corner, there she was, beaming, at the head of a long queue to get into the most amazing little museum we'd ever seen.

Sir John Soane was a architect, freemason, classicist and avid antiquities collector whose will contained a clause that his museum-like home be left exactly as it was the day he died, which eventually came about in 1837. And apart from cataloguing the house's amazing contents and putting the tea things away, that's exactly what the bright-eyed old character's executors did. One day a month, the house is lit entirely by candles as the limited number of guests make their way through the house, marvelling at the bulging collection of ancient books, stonework, sketches, carvings, paintings, clocks, manuscripts, etc. But far from being an intellectual's arm's-length collection of curiosities, the house virtually explodes all around you with the boundless and joyful enthusiasm Sir John obviously had for the creative output of all humankind. Full marble columns are piled in the house's tiny remaining outdoor space. Constantly needing to expand to accommodate the growing collection, the house itself is punched up and out everywhere, with forward-looking skylights throwing a natural dusky glow on the near-chaos within. The limestone sarcophagus of King Seti I is at the bottom of a towering three-story atrium, lined with a jaw-dropping array of unlabelled artifacts from multiple millenia. A centuries-old and impossibly creak-free floating spiral staircase joins room after room in the world's least-boring museum. The place is almost too remarkable to describe, and seeing it in candlelight was an extraordinary experience. Google on Sir John Soane's Museum, or better still, make a promise to yourself to go there someday. Like most London's museums, admission is free or by donation. Amazing.

Luckily for us, it was two-for-one meat pie night at the Ship Pub just down the street. For all we knew, EVERY Tuesday had been two-for-one pie night since the place opened its doors in 1549 (yes: 1549). There's nothing like having dinner in a real pub. TV sports off in the corner are far less intrusive when you're surrounded by wood, brass and worn-out rose-coloured fabric. The pies were fabulous, especially washed down with a pint each, and we made our way back out to Balham just radiant from a great evening.

When our tube rattled its way to Balham's Undergrond station, a tired voice honked from the train's metallic speaker's that we wouldn't be stopping there, as the station would be closed early for a couple of months for maintenance. Hmm. Sure enough, as we loped past the platform, we could see a handful of droopy grey workers resigning themselves to the fact they'd be spending their evenings there for a while. We exchanged worried glances, having no idea what the actual distance between stations was at that far end of the Northern line, and scurried off at Tooting Bec (how'd you like to say you lived in a place called “Tooting Bec”?). Most of Tooting Bec was either sleeping at home or throwing up within a few yards of us, but someone told us which bus to take, and the red double-decker thankfully appeared just before a witch-like woman staggered to our end of the bus queue.

If you've seen the night bus from Harry Potter, this was it. We sat up top to intensify the experience, pushing aside some old potato chip bags to clear the frontmost seat. I filmed part of the ride, and if I ever become technically savvy, I'll post it wherever people post those sorts of things. The short of it was that we weren't very far from our Balham digs at all, and amused ourselves on our way home by reciting, “Wot you sy yoh nym woz?” and “I didn't”, over and over again.

A Resolution

I, Robert James Robson, being of mind and body no less sound than anyone else's, hereby resolve to resume this blog.  The stories and notes are piling up, and I'd rather be writing than coding, so nyah.  It's near bedtime here in Seoul, but I'll resume the lost thread tomorrow.  How else would anyone know about...oh, you'll see.