I went to Seoul on Saturday morning to meet some friends, sightsee, and celebrate the coming of the new year, and what an eventful weekend it was! I am exhausted now and not looking forward to starting another week of work (especially since I plan to complain to my school about them attempting to short me $150), but it really was a great weekend and totally worth the empty wallet and physical discomfort in the aftermath.
My ride up there was completely uneventful—fast and without incidents of any kind, for once. I had taken my guide book with me and read about the sights of Seoul on the way there, so I was more than ready to take in some historical and cultural sights. I’ve seen a lot of things there so far—palaces, mountains, museums, and markets—but with a 600 year history as the nation’s capital, there’s a lot more there than can be taken in and appreciated in a few days. In reading, I discovered that the historic downtown area where I’d been spending most of my time was actually quite small. I thought all of these things were much more spread out because I’d always taken the zip-zagging subway, but after consulting a good map I found this is not the case. For someone who loves to walk like me, I don’t even need to take the subway much at all! At least, not for the sightseeing I had planned for that weekend.
I met Anurag and his friend from home at Korea National Folk Museum. Anurag is originally from New York and teaches middle school near Gwangju, a couple hours south of me. The folk museum features the standard staples of ancient, quickly tedious artifacts, but it had a lot of really interesting dioramas. At any rate, we were entertained for a couple hours, at which time we decided to attend a free Korean dance performance offered by the museum. It was a lot like the one we saw at Gyeongju (at the Fulbright conference). I remember not being that impressed at first, but Korean dance is gradually growing on me. It features a lot of slow, deliberate movements….well, it’s hard to describe exactly what it is. The opposite of the excitement of breakdance, I suppose. Anyway, that performance was pretty good and we had a great afternoon seeping in Korean traditions and culture.
We then went to Insadong, a busy area with a small street market featuring traditional goods (ceramics, paper, etc.) that I love, and met another ETA, Nika (who went to Pomona with me). First we went to a temple nearby (according to my guidebook, this temple is the heart and soul of Buddhism in Seoul and is a fantastic place to visit on the Buddha’s birthday sometime in April). It was pretty, but definitely much smaller than I am used to. All of the other temples I’ve visited have had massive grounds and many buildings, but this one was very compact. I suppose this is due to the constraints of its location. Anyway, according to my guidebook, it’s pretty amazing it still exists in the city considering all the crackdown on Buddhism in the early years of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910—this is when Seoul was made the capital so most of the historic sights there are Joseon-era relics. The dynasty ended with Japanese colonization and many Koreans are still very bitter about that period in the country’s history.) We were planning to go to a famous vegetarian restaurant in Insadong run by an ex-monk. It was incredibly expensive, but very delicious and the atmosphere was incredible. It was a very beautiful and friendly place where the architecture had been done in such a way to make you feel you were inside a temple, looking out over the grounds. In the center was a performance area. At eight, a calligraphy/dance/music performance began and we had the best seats in the house. They were literally right next to us the whole time. As a matter of fact, the first dancer sat next to me during the performance and gave me a fan he had covered with calligraphy earlier in the evening. I never win at things like this—I was pretty pleased to be picked out of the crowd to be part of the show! At first I thought I was going to have to dance, but the whole joke was really that he gave me some coy glances and his friend pulled him away. It was really funny to be pretend-seduced by a man wearing lipstick.
Afterward, we met two other ETAs. Jonah and Kiehl and Kiehl’s brother Chubbs had been doing a quick drinking tour of Korea and were determined the debauchery would continue this weekend as well. We met another girl, Aelee, a former ETA who now works at the embassy, and went to a traditional bar in Sincheon, the hip young area near Yonsei University. We discovered a traditional drink I’d never dreamed existed. I forget what it’s called now, but it’s made from bamboo and tastes like spiked apple juice and is incredibly delicious, especially when you are accustomed to the foulness that is makoli or soju or mekju. It was a bit of heaven served in a large bamboo glass. Everyone got pretty tired after that, but I decided to go out with the drinking boys for a while. In retrospect, perhaps this was not the best idea because I ended up so tired I cut my New Year’s Eve short the next night, but it was fun anyway. I’m just geeting too old and decrepit for wild, all-night partying, I guess. We went to a bar and proceeded to play this game they had made up last night. You fill a glass with beer and place a shot glass in it, floating on top. You then take turns pouring soju in the shot glass until it sinks. The person who makes it sink has to drink the whole thing. It’s really a brutal game and it got pretty wild. At one point, Jonah had won a bunch in a row so we made a rule that if you won two in a row you had to play the third one blinded by my fan, and then if you lost to the blind man you had to toss three bottle caps and drink additional shots of soju depending on the outcome of the toss. It was like being back in my freshman year of college! But now I am evidently too old for that kind of “fun.” We were out until around 4, but then on the way home I mentioned that my birthday was coming up so Jonah insisted on buying me a birthday bottle of beer (let’s keep in mind that this birthday “bottle” is a plastic 1.6L jug) and a soju flask. He also made the Family Mart cashier help him sing “Happy Birthday” to me in English. It was hysterical. Since everyone else was sleeping in our room, the two of us sat on the stairs and drank until 7 am. I have no idea how it got to be that late and that was really my downfall there. I don’t regret it—it was the first time I’d really talked to Jonah one-on-one—but I wish I hadn’t been so tired!
I woke up at 11 and decided it was past time to get up. I really hate sleeping in as a general rule, even though I am a night person and usually can’t manage to go to bed until past midnight. This has changed somewhat in Korea as I’ve adapted the habits of the countryside and started going to bed earlier, but still past 11. I hate to sleep in, even though I sometimes need it, for two reasons. First, I feel incredibly lazy when I do so and feel like I’ve wasted a whole day. Second, I think it really screws up my internal schedule and makes it that much harder to wake up early when I need to for work. Thus, even if I stay up very late, I usually try to wake up by nine at the latest. But then again, I don’t know when I’d ever in my life stayed up until 7 am before, so I was entitled to a little more sleep. I didn’t sleep well anyway, unfortunately, but I figured I’d feel better as the day went on. Usually I do.
With what was left of my afternoon after showering and arranging another hostel (the hotel we were at was going to charge us double for New Year’s Eve!), I decided to walk toward some big Joseon-era palaces. I only managed to visit one that day because they closed at 5 and I had to wait for an English tour at this particular one, Changdeokgung. It’s the best-preserved palace in the Seoul area, I believe, and they open it to tours only to keep it that way. What really attracted me to it, to be honest, is the fact that it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I figured it had to be worth seeing, in that case! It was a really nice place. I guess I’d live there if you twisted my arm. It has humongous grounds but we visitors only got a peek of them due to time constraints and their preservation status. Afterward, I went shopping in Insadong to pick up some presents for my co-teacher, and then to Kyobo bookstore to get some new books. I actually didn’t need any at all—I have a backlog of 10 books I have yet to read, plus 2 more promised to me by friends, and I’m not planning on bringing any reading material on my trip with me—but I really like to look and they had some impressive titles on sale. I got Ulysses, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time, and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, which appealed to me as Indian mythology. I really wanted to pick out a book for my co-teacher, but Kyobo was literally packed with people and the odds of finding a great book in Korean were very slim indeed. I did try, but gave up after claustrophobia hit.
I met Anurag and Jonah and we went to Sincheon to a cheap Mexican food place. The food is not plentiful, but it’s relatively cheap and heavy on the cheese (read: delicious!). And we had Krispy Kremes for dessert. This is perhaps the definition of mashisoyo, in my opinion. And then it was time to begin the New Year festivities. I was feeling really tired by this point, but I still thought I’d rally. We met Kyle, his brother, his girlfriend’s Korean cousin, and Aelee and found a bar called Hobak that had really cheap imported beer. Then we went to a place for Korean drinks. By this time it was nearing midnight and we watched the official countdown on TV. There was a big celebration on the streets not far from our hostel where a big bell rang at midnight, but it was cold and crowded, so we decided not to go. The crew then opted to hit the hookah bar I missed last time when I was on my “date,” but I was so tired I went home instead. The hookah bar keeps evading me! Jonah and Anurag finally came back at 6:30 or so and man o man am I glad I didn’t stay out with them after all…that’s so late! I would have been a mess!
Instead, I got up early and went to the palace I missed out on the day before. It was right next door and built for queens and the king’s other relatives. It was pretty nice, too, and I’m sure it’s much more spectacular at any other season—I’ll have to go back another time. The best part is that it’s connected by a pedestrian overpass to the royal burial grounds I also wanted to visit and you can see both for only $1. Unfortunately, I missed the overpass and walked all the way around, backtracking tremendously in the process. Yet another instance where it’s a good thing I enjoy walking! The burial grounds are also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was nice enough to walk around, but the buildings were all closed so you could only see the outside, anyway. I want to come back in May when they perform the worship ceremony. The music is said to be Korea’s Intangible Cultural Asset #1. If I have yet to mention this before, it’s important to note that nearly everything of value in Korea is classified and numbered as such. Many of the buildings and relics I saw on the palace grounds were National Treasures of some number, etc. It’s a funny system.
I decided to be a little adventurous and attempt to find my own way back to the hostel by cutting across some streets. I was afraid I would get lost in the winding streets of Korea, but I managed to find my way with no problems and even walked by the hostel I stayed at in the summer, thus orienting me a bit better to the geography of Seoul. I really love walking for that reason…you really get to know a place. Subways are really nice, but if possible, I prefer to walk. I also bought some baked goods for my fam to convince them to still like me, even though I am leaving them for so long. The end result was that I had an obscene amount of luggage. I like to travel using only my tiny daypack, which was crammed when I came in preparation of a weekend out in Seoul—makeup, heels, etc. So I had no room for the books and bread and knickknacks I bought. I barely made it across town and my stuff kept falling out of the overhead compartment on the bus ride back to Buyeo. I think the bus driver was really mad at me and was making some rude comments, but I couldn’t understand what he said anyway.
But first, when I was on the subway this lady stopped me to ask for directions because I had a “friendly white face.” I was happy to help at first because I thought she was a tourist, but I found out later that she is a teacher too—an EPIK teacher, another teaching program in Korea that the ETAs in bigger cities make fun of because its candidates tend to be of lower caliber. I certainly wouldn’t know, as I’ve never met a non-Fulbright English teacher before. So this lady, Gail, has been in Korea for longer than I have (she mentioned that the first six months were the hardest) and apparently comes to Seoul more often than I, but can’t find her way on the friggin subway! So she asks the girl who lives in the middle of nowhere in Korea and has no public transportation experience otherwise. Man, how incompetent IS she??? I guess this wouldn’t bother me except that she made a few comments that really turned me off (besides the one about my “friendly white face”). I think she thought we were allies as Americans in a foreign land, but she looked to the wrong person. She seems to have this attitude of superiority over Koreans in general, which is EXACTLY what I hate about American tourists. She complained to me about the rudeness of Koreans, as if every single Korean is rude! Sure, I’ve had a few encounters, but it’s not like everyone is polite in America. There are differences in how people are rude—many Koreans aren’t shy about pushing around a stranger in a crowded place, for example—but she seemed blind to the fact that Americans do things that are equally or even more offensive to Koreans. She took for granted that Koreans have our same value system and they were just uneducated. She said, and I (nearly) quote, that “most of them will apologize when I protest, but some of them just push me out of the way!” It was like she felt the need to point out what she thought of as errors in behavior, never realizing that she was in her subtle way contributing to the unfavorable perception of Americans. I am probably overreacting—she wasn’t blatantly disrespectful or offensive and I suspect she was a little more vocal about it to me, a fellow American she assumed detested the same practices—but she seemed to lack the flexibility I think is necessary to be a successful traveler. I pretty much just go with the flow of what is happening around me. If someone pushes me, then I just move! It’s worked pretty well and I wouldn’t say that anyone has actually ever been rude to me. On the contrary—I’ve had many people go out of their way to help me! Maybe I cut a striking figure, looking around hesitantly, never sure quite what to do. Or maybe I’m just more accepting of what Gail sees as intrinsic faults on the part of Korean people. Whatever it is, it’s people like her that make me cringe while abroad. While they may mean well, they never even try to assimilate themselves to the local culture and in fact make it a point to remain distant and disdainful. It’s a wonder Americans are received as well as they are, with representation like that! She was complaining, too, about being stuck in a “small” town of 500,000 where the people weren’t as nice as the ones in Seoul. OMG. You are talking to the WRONG person, lady. And as a matter of fact, I often find people are nicer outside of the city. Well, maybe that’s hard to say. But I would never claim that Seoul people are the nicest! So in conclusion, Gail was a nutcase. We ended our little chat with her complaints about Korean food. She cooks for herself, I gather, and can’t seem to find adequate food supplies except in Seoul. Oh, boo hoo. You poor Jew…you can’t eat pork?? You must be starving! I think she was taken aback when I said I was a vegetarian and had no problems finding food. Seriously…there’s a lot in the grocery stores here. Even in the beginning when I was convinced I was starving or at least malnutritioned, I could always find enough delicious things in the supermarket in Chuncheon, which is much smaller than the city she lives in. The only reason you’d need to go to Seoul for food is if you absolutely needed taco shells or some other ridiculous and superfluous foreign food. OMG. Some Americans…drive me nuts.
But in the end, I had a fun weekend and got home safely, so what more can you ask for? Now all I have standing between me and freedom is this darn winter camp…