Got my bag back...rifled, but intact and nothing missing. Nuff said.
My enforced two days in Seoul has been very interesting. As I said to a friend the other day, I cannot believe it is possible to travel only 10000miles from home and find an environment that is so, so alien. As I was eating my barbeque pork meal on Tuesday evening, I kept expecting to wake up from a weird dream or for the director to shout 'CUT' and for all these strange looking, alien-tongued people to walk away. I've only got a few minutes in the bus terminal internet cafe before heading off to Seoraksan National Park, but I just wanted to put down some general impressions of the place...a more detailed account of what I've done and where I've been will follow when I get to Sokcho - maybe this afternoon...
Firstly, referring back to my previous post about the size of the city. 'sprawling metropolis' is a gross understatement...sitting in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Seoul tower last night, I was completely gobsmacked by the size of the place. Nestled between and around an endless succession of bonsai mountains (someone else may have coined this term before - if so, I've never seen it. By it, I mean that these mountains give the impression of the scale of the Alps etc. (thickly forested, craggy and an endless sea of them receding behind each other into the distant horizon), yet only being max 1200m high), Seoul maximises ground space with countless tower blocks. The sheer concentration of humanity is staggering...little wonder that those that can, head to the hills at the weekends.
The subways during rush hour are every bit as rammed as the London Underground. Everyone seems to bear the squeeze with a stoicism that many Londoners would admire. Seoul's subway seems a lot friendlier than London's - a constant babble of chat and laughter...not to mention the inimitable muzak and Flatscreen TV adverts. A lot of the conviviality could be an illusion caused by the fact that (read it and weep, Londoners) mobile phones work underground.
Eating has been, er, interesting. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm partial to the odd Jalfrezi or Madras...when the nice Korean lady asks if you want your tempo hot, you'd better mean it...it helped me shift this cold/flu thing I've got anyway ;-) It's often difficult to eat alone in Seoul - a lot of the Korean traditional dishes are for sharing...either go for another option...or eat for two. Guess which I did...;-) Drinking is not a bad past-time here...Cass Fresh is the local brew...very refreshing and three bottles definitely has an effect. Anybody had green tea before? If you had a little sugar it tastes like - get this - shredded wheat! Strange, but pleasing.
Final impression...the denizens of Seoul are friendly and eager to help...particularly towards stupid looking foreign tourists. I've been saying a lot of hamsa gamnida to all the folk who've helped me out, believe me. The other thing that is undeniable about the Koreans is that the work ethic is well and truly engrained. Rush hour seems to last from 6.30am until 10.30 and then from 17.00 to 20.00...I'd hate to see what it'd be like if everyone went to work at the same time! I suspect there are two reasons why they work so hard...firstly, the tradition of hard work and mutual respect features strongly in their history. Secondly, there is no social security system here. Everyone works there asses off to ensure they have enough to retire and that their children are well-placed to look after them in old age. Those who manage this can look forward to a comfortable retirement living with their children - or in a retirement apartment if they've done particularly well for themselves. Those who don't manage it end their days trying to eke out a living by collecting cardboard or bottles for recycling, running street stalls selling fried nibbles for a pittance or living on the street and begging. In between these two extremes are the families that run street-level eating shacks, which double as living room and bedroom once the punters have gone home. In this respect, Seoul is like many other capital cities in developed countries...sparkling technology, skyscrapers and limousines on the outside, but scratch beneath the surface and the underworld of poverty and hardship is never far away. The difficult thing to understand, coming from my culture, is the lack of empathy / sympathy that successful well-to-do citizens seem to have for their less fortunate compatriots. A lot of this may be to do with the dominant religion of Confucianism, which teaches that status is everything. There is not a conscious process of ignoring lower status people, so much as a total obliviousness to their existence in the first place. Perhaps a small part of it is also to do with the fact that so many Koreans are self-made successes...is it hard to imagine that those who have achieved their success through hard work and initiative may look down on those who have failed? I'll be interested to see what the coutryside has in store...
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