Soul to Seoul!

We both love Seoul.  "Why don't people ever tell you how civilised it is?" Keith said on our second day here.  I have to agree. The city is exceptionally clean, well-organised, well-planned, with fabulous infrastructure, and we've found all the people we've met are exceptionally pleasant and kindly.  It's like Japan only without the underlying vaguely hostile Master Race attitude, and I'd say it looks and feels exactly like being in Sydney, Australia, except we found the Sydney folk most unpleasant last time we were there. The blustery winter winds feels the same as Sydney too, by the way.

Oh dear, just like in Taiwan, there's a multi-lingual keyboard and I keep pressing the wrong buttons and getting Korean script - which I totally love - but it's all so frustrating I'll have to continue this later when we're back in HK ... thus  watch this space.

Back in Hong Kong, however there's a problem because you forget so many things you think folks should know.  Blogging while away, you get so much more flavour and detail.  But here goes:

Coming into Seoul looks so much like coming into Townsville, a town in the north of Australia, that, taken aback, we had to do a quick "Where are we again?" to get our bearings. However the moment we got into Seoul's Incheon Airport there were no doubts that this was NOT Townsville, which has a "make-up on a pig" renovated airport, staffed by passive-aggressive gits who seem to take pleasure in screwing you around, and so counter-intuitive in its entire organisation it only makes sense when you realise their main job is to sell you stuff.  In fact, the best thing that can be said about Townsville Airport is that it's so much better than Cairns desperately desperately vile airport.

Oh my, Incheon is a beautiful airport!  All light and airy, glass and chrome, sane and sensible, with so much of the latest technology all geared up to just one thing: getting you through there as quickly and as pleasantly as possible. Everything is so state-of-the-art, it took us both exactly fifteen minutes to get through Immigration and Customs.  Compare that with Nakita, Tokyo's new airport, which took us six whole hours to get through because, while they had 16 counters to process Japanese, they had only five to deal with the entire rest of the world.

Hong Kong's Lap Kok Airport used to win "Best Airport in the World" every year, however we've lost out for the last few years to Incheon but, take it from me, it is DESERVED.  Everyone should learn from these guys because they get it exactly right.

However, it took over an hour to get from Incheon to Seoul by "Limousine" - which we already knew, thanks to our visit to Japan, actually means "Airport Bus" - but the trip was great: very sensible and quite beautiful highway system consisting of enormous avenues all lined with what looked to us like dead trees, BUT ... oh my, before we left for this trip everyone said to us "Why are you going to Seoul now?  If you wait two weeks it will be cherry blossom season." but that meant nothing to us. However, over the week, when we saw the buds appear and then fatten by the day ...

... and when we saw the first three trees burst into bloom ...

... it was so very lovely we were very sorry we didn't listen.  Those "dead trees" we saw everywhere ...

... were wintering cherry blossoms and the hour-long trip into Seoul would have been absolutely sublime in two weeks time.

That's something for your bucket list, people: Seoul during the cherry blossom season.

However the other notable about that hour long drive into Seoul, apart from the hundreds of miles of "dead trees", is the astonishing numbers of bridges they have.  Everywhere! There's barely a single vista where you don't see at least a couple of these magnificent 'feats of engineering' bridges. Truly, they're everywhere; across the mud flats and across everything can vaguely constitutes a water-way, and even a few which don't actually join anything to anything else and just sit there on river banks being less bridges and more like "Architecture!".

"It's like they're showing off!" I said to Keith after counting twenty-three mighty bridges, each different from the other, on a single stretch of the river.

"No." says Keith.  "I think it's more primal than that?"

"You think this is some deeply-felt expression of something that lurks in their collective unconscious?"

"Yup!"

I had to slap my forehead at being so dim-witted.  Of course Korea would have 'bridge-building' lurking right there in the forefront of their collective psyche: North Korea! South Korea!  A single nation and a single people divided by ideology.  It isn't like North Vietnam and South Vietnam who are two entirely different races that hate each other anyway.  North and South Korea are not just one people but they're actually family, with those poignant border meetings between brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, every time North Korea permits it to happen.

So those endless bridges everywhere are clearly an unconscious acknowledgement that South Korea desperately wants reunification, only North Korea won't permit it unless South Korea comes into its fold and South Korea is perfectly content being exactly what it is - a slick, chic, so-civilised, so-elegant, so-rich and clean capitalist cafe-society - and thus won't surrender.  It's all so very sad ... and what on earth are they going to do when they run out of things to bridge?  Or maybe they already have and that explains those bridges that simply sit there on the river banks.

The city of Seoul itself looks very First World and is visually very much like inner and downtown Sydney, with hills of structured gridded main streets - exceptionally pretty tree-lined avenues - lined with mirrored high-rise ...

 

Not a representative photo.

On our last day in Seoul 

the Gobi Desert rolled in 

from the North.

... and tiny winding interesting back streets of low-rise red brick small shops selling interesting things in between nail-bars and coffee shops.

Fabulous infrastructure too.  Beautiful roads, wonderful Mass Transit System, and, best of all, genuinely safe and sane traffic, something virtually unheard of in most of Asia.

But the main feature that makes Korea so different would have to be those coffee shops.  Oh my, you have never seen so many coffee shops in your life.  About every second shop.  Everywhere. And they're all full of people, day and night. In fact, I think you can safely say that Seoulites use coffee shops for every social and non-social function imaginable.  Perhaps they're like the Cantonese and don't like to invite people into their homes, but whereas the Cantonese meet at restaurants for meals, the Koreans meet at coffee shops just for a cuppa.  And they also do their computer work in these cafes, and read books, and read newspapers and pluck their eyebrows and put on their make-up or just sit around and watch the world go by.

But do you think I could find a decent cup of tea?  Oh boy, cafes serving every single type of coffee imaginable but the only tea was Japanese oolong and I detest oolong. It's darjeeling for me everytime.

 Although when I couldn't get a cuppa 

at this Bukchon artist's cafe, 

they offered to make me a Japanese green tea latte 

and it was AMAZING!

And so the hunt turned desperate and it wasn't until the second day we discovered the chain "Tom n Tom's Coffee" made a magnificent cuppa and thus the little one in a backstreet near our hotel became our base-of-operations for the duration.

I'll do separate posts on our different adventures, but what else I should throw into this overview?

Oh, I loved how folks dress up in Korean dress to go about their lives ...

 

....although I did notice that a lot of those had American accents so I'm just guessing that they're visiting Korean-Americans in Seoul to learn about their own heritage and making the most of it.  However, as you'd expect, everyone connected with the King's Palace wears Korean clothing ...

 I meet The Officer of the Guard.

 ... as do random folks you meet on their way to-and-from something Korean-related.

Keith asked this fellow if he could take a photo of him

and the lovely fellow called me into the shot.

My favourite Josean Emperor is there in the background.

And they do do a lot of Korean-related stuff as they obviously have for millennium. Like, that Korean stuff is old; really really OLD. Take a look at this ring connected with some Korean ritual.  How many centuries would that take to make those grooves in that granite?

These grooves blew us away.

And everyone is so gosh darn proud of their history.  Their accepted history that is.  There is also a hidden history that they deny ...

 A "votive offering" found in a Korean well.

You tell me that this isn't Ganesh, 

the Hindu god of New Beginnings.

 ... which I've noticed all over China and Indo-China and other bits of non-Indian Asia; destroyed relics of a past full of Hindu deities.  (In fact, I should do a separate post on this.)

But as far as accepted history goes, you couldn't go anywhere even vaguely connected with something historical without seeing little groups of kiddies clustered around an adult who was telling them all about it ... and whenever you show the slightest interest in Korean history, everyone clusters around to tell you all about it.

And they have great history too.  I loved some of the stories, like the 7th century Josean Emperor ...

This lovely fellow.

A new hero?

... who is such a big deal, I should do a separate post on him.

And I completely loved all those Elderly Korean Power Ladies.  Oh man, the young Koreans may seem vapid - although very stylish and chic and fashion conscious and with the most amazing skin that seems so pure it reflects the light so they all glow - but those Power Ladies were anything but.  Stylish as all-get-out, nth-degree elegant, all noblesse oblige and kindliness ... but with this almost-scary air that they could and did run everything in the country, only discreetly and behind-the-scenes. 

Keith and I quickly began to take real pleasure in them, and whenever we'd see groups of them gathered in coffee shops, in elegant and subtly nuanced conversations, we'd imagine what they were talking about.  I kept insisting they were talking about politics and how they were going to lobby - only discreetly and behind-the-scenes - to make stuff happen, but Keith insisted they were talking about recipes.  Men really don't grasp the concept of how women do power, do they!  Oh, and we both particularly loved their stiletto heels which they still wear into their nineties and decided it was all "You don't take my heels until you prise them from my cold dead feet."

So that's the overview of our lovely week in Seoul.  It's a city I can't recommend highly enough.  We are going back soon, mainly because we couldn't get to DMZ over the border in North Korea because of the rocket launch tensions, and we've both decided we really really want to.  And we also want to see the tunnels that South Korea found, dug by North Korea to send hundreds of thousands of troops into Seoul to destroy the city, and which are now a great tourist attraction ...

... it's just a great pity that we arrived only weeks too early to see the cherry blossom trees in bloom.  And THAT is now definitely on our bucket list.

P.S. All these photos were taken by Keith.  He appears once again to have lost all of mine!