20.09.2007: rubber dragons and tiny people

You've no idea how much I've had to resist making puns on the word "Seoul" on this website. It surely has to be one of the world's most punnable city names, and it's been extremely difficult to avoid titles like "Seoul Survivor", "A Window on The Seoul" and various others. But you'll see: I can show restraint when my heart and Seoul are in it.

Oops. Sorry.

Anyway, I guess most of you will be reading this fairly soon after yesterday's entry, so we might as well just pick up where we left off. From memory, the Word Nerd had just taken a reasonable request to a foreign embassy and been beaten over the head with it. (I imagine a few of the people reading this have had similar experiences, and believe me, I'm Empathy Boy now!) As I mentioned, my first visit to the Embassy of Kazakhstan was on Wednesday (yesterday) and they need me back there on Friday (tomorrow), so today became my Designated Tourist Day.

Of course, my impressions of this city are pretty vague so far, but one thing I can say confidentlyis this: Seoul is definitely not small. If you include its various 'satellites', Greater Seoul is home to something like 22 million people; it's a vast, vast and, above all, utterly vast area. In satellite photos you can clearly see the large, grey, Seoul-shaped splotch at altitudes from which no other Korean cities are visible at all. And so far I've had just two days to explore the giant splotch at ground level, so don't expect anything too insightful in this entry. Having said that, I've seen a lot of stuff in a short time. I'm finding here (much as I did in Tokyo, although the two cities are very different) that every time I turn my head there are a dozen new things vying for my attention and contemplation. It's all a bit of a 24-hour sensory fun park at this stage.

Speaking of senses, the place where I'm staying is in an area called Hapjeong. It appears to be a fairly working class neighbourhood, where the streets are a happy clutter (or a dirty chaotic mess, depending on your perspective) and where smells of rotting garbage and sulphur mingle with the fragrant aromas spilling from late-night eateries. When the garbage/sulphur smells are winning, the stinkiness can be quite overpowering. At other times, though, the food smells waft in my direction and evoke pleasant memories of Korean meals I've had with students in Australia and NZ. It's a good place to walk through the streets and just watch people cooking, eating, sitting at outdoor tables and chatting to each other, shopping, cooking again (a lot of food gets cooked around here), and generally going about their everyday lives.

However, since today was my Designated Tourist Day, the first thing I did was get on the (extremely efficient and user-friendly) subway and leave Hapjeong behind, heading for the centre of town to book myself a city tour. This turned out to be quite a good idea, because - although the tour itself was only slightly more informative than a Windows help file - it was one of those 'jump on, jump off' things that passes through a gazillion places and gives you the basic layout of the city you're in.

The tour began on the main street outside Gwangwhamun subway station. This was the first time I'd been into central Seoul, and the Absolute Everywhereness of things rather dazzled me. There was a sudden sense of "Wow, I'm really at the heart of things here, in the centre of a big, important capital".

I found the bus, jumped on at Gwangwhamun and got off an hour later in the Myeongdong shopping district. I must have missed the good bits of Myeongdong, because Koreans have told me its a must-see part of Seoul, but I didn't really think much of it. (Plus it was strangely full of pet shops that sold only puppies, which I don't get. I mean, what's the point of a pet shop without kittens to go aaaaaaah at?"). However, Myeongdong backed onto the Namsangol Traditional Korean Village, which had all the potential to be incredibly cheesy and embarrassing, but actually turned out to be pretty good. I think that's mostly because the buildings were all 'real' historical structures, not Plastic Paddy* re-creations. Also, the place was mercifully free of hokey craftspeople in fauxnational dress, operating looms and doing other terribly 'earthy' things like that.

What Namsangol did have was a pretty sizeable collection of stately period houses, replete with elegant curled eaves, beautiful, dark-stained wooden furniture and ingenious use of natural light to create a suitably harmonious atmosphere. As I was wandering amongst all this stuff it occurred to me that, from an Australian point of view, places like Namsangol are the 'anti-Europe' in a sense. See, for Australians, the Big European Holiday always comes packaged with some 'freakiness of antiquity' moments - the ones where you find yourself leaning up against a stone wall somewhere and thinking "Wow, I can't believe this thing was built in the 8th frikkin' century!". You just don't get that in our Wide Brown Land, so the concept of something standing for over a thousand years tends to boggle the mind a little. In Korea (and likewise in Japan) I've experienced the opposite thing. The traditional dwellings of both countries look so venerably ancient that I get a slight shock when I'm reminded that many of the ones I've seen are scarcely more than a hundred years old. It's amazing to think how completely these societies have transformed themselves between that time and this, as revealed by their architectural heritage. By comparison, the journey from Gothic to Bauhaus seems leisurely almost to the point of laziness.

I won't infotain you too much with the details of Namsangol, but I do want to show you a pic of one specific thing that tickled my sense of novelty. In the house of a senior 19th Century military commander, I looked into a small reading room with a cute little bookshelf and writing desk and, in front of the desk, I noticed a sandpit. An odd thing to have in a reading room, I thought, until I read the sign explaining that Mr. Military Man had this sandpit installed so his kids could practise calligraphy in it. Don't know why, but this little detail really brought the place to life for me. I guess it's a teacher/Word Nerd thing - like me in St. Petersburg, salivating over the 5,000-year-old Sumerian stone tablet that showed a student's writing practice and their teacher's corrections.

Yeah, I know. Spot the married-to-his-job guy >:-[

The other highlight of Namsangol was less serious and historical than silly and recently-spawned. As I was checking out the residence of Queen Sunjeonghyo a primary school group came swarming past, and since I was the only Westerner in the place all of them immediately noticed me. Suddenly I had dozens of miniature Koreans - many of them missing teeth - grinning shyly and yelling "Hi!" at me (though it was more like "Haaaaaiiiiiii!!!"). This was repeated several times as they passed me in different parts of the village, and it was super, super cute. There were actually moments when I thought I might have to give up my long-held conviction that Japanese people are the ones whose special talents include the ability to create the world's cutest mini-humans.

Proceeding to my next cunning segue: the last time I ran into the toothless brigade was at the bus stop outside Namsangol, waiting for the tour bus to whisk me onward to N Seoul Tower, which is the Sydney Tower/Skytower/Fernsehturm of Seoul. And in case you're wondering, yes I am aware that visiting a city's tallest tower is a painfully touristy thing to do. Much like, say, going to a traditional village. But this was my Designated Tourist Day, so I went.

In my defence, I didn't actually go up the tower - there were too many other things around to distract me. Like the exhibition being held in one of the tower pavilions called the 'Junkart Festival', whose promotional placard read "We, members of Junkart, make a beautiful world with junk". Naturally I couldn't resist that, especially since there was an 8-foot-high transformery-looking thing standing next to the placard, with a motorbike frame for a spinal column. So I paid my W10,000 and went in. It was amazing. I saw, quite literally, hundreds of artworks made from garbage, ranging from hedghogs with spark plug quills to Seoul Tower dioramas surrounded by enchanted chain-link forests and angry robot mothers with rice-cooker heads (about to boil over, of course). On top of which - this being South Korea, Land of the Extremely Helpful Person - my interest in the Junkart exhibition automatically scored me a personal tour with explanatory comments on every major work. My favourite piece was probably this dragon, whose skin was almost entirely fashioned out of rubber from discarded tyres. Incredible.

Meanwhile, outside the tower is an elevated deck designed to give visitors a view of central Seoul, and here I got my first glimpse of the Han River, which divides the city into North and South. All very good to see, but what I most enjoyed here was the ingenious (and probably illegal) way in which visitors had turned the viewing deck into an unofficial outdoor visitors' book. As you look at the wire mesh that prevents people from falling or leaping to their deaths, you see hundreds of padlocks fastened to it, all bearing messages. Of course, I can't read hangul** (yet), so I'm not sure what most of the messages say. Are they specifically addressed to friends who might visit the same spot at a later date, or general messages of goodwill to anyone who might read them? No idea, but either way I really liked the concept.

So, er ... guess what I then had to spend the next half an hour searching for?

Yep, you were at least half right. First I had to find a padlock, but then a marker pen was also necessary (because you can't use a normal pen to write on metal). After that it was just a question of practising the hangul characters until I had them right, then finding a moment when there was no-one around who might alert the authorities. (The two cute twenty-something women hanging out on the deck seemed fairly safe - especially after they asked to have their photograph taken with me.)

Of course, afterwards I reflected on the idea that "tiny things please tiny minds", and thought that if you were looking for a test case to prove the old saying, my Designated Tourist Day might be a good place to start. I mean, a padlock, a sandpit and a rubber dragon: hello? And I flew for more than 10 hours to be here! Meanwhile, the person in the room diagonally across from mine at the hostel had spent her day touring the D.M.Z., one of the most potent political symbols of our time. (You'll recall that I'm not allowed to go there because the Embassy of Kazakhstan has my passport.) So yeah, I felt a bit small when we compared our stories of the day. But still, I had fun. So there.

Okay, that's it for now. Time to sleep. You'll hear from me again tomorrow, but it won't be as long and winding as today's entry. No really ... I promise to be brief next time!

Take care :-)

Anthony.

* "Plastic Paddy": an expression I heard ages ago from an ex-boss who was into the Irish trad scene in Sydney. It's apparently used to denote Irish kitsch of the type that tourists consume with great enthusiasm, but which Irish people themselves find horribly distasteful. Several years ago I invented a similar phrase to describe the Australian equivalent: "tradgy dadge". This is based on the Australian expression "ridgey didge", meaning "genuinely Australian in character". It didn't catch on. Shame, since there's SO much dreadful kitsch down there just crying out for the right insult to adequately describe it.

** "hangul": The Korean writing system, and quite a unique and interesting one. Up until about 900 years ago Koreans used Chinese characters, but then King Sejong (one of the nation's historical luminaries) commissioned scholars to create a clear and logical alphabet for their nation. It's been streamlined a bit since then, but it remains basically as King Sejong envisioned it: ingenious in its construction, yet very easy to learn and use. (Later postscript: it took me three or four days to get up to about 60% literacy.) And it'd have to be. I mean, imagine if your government said to you tomorrow "Hey guys, we've got this whole new writing system worked out, and everyone has to use it from now on, so we're thinking you'd better learn it ASAP." Wouldn't that just be bizarre?