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I arrived in South Korea on June 1, 1995. I had departed Los Angeles International Airport in the early afternoon, and what always seems surreal to me, the almost ten-thousand-kilometre, twelve-hour flight touched down at Gimpo International Airport in northwestern Seoul that same afternoon. We flew in low over Seoul. The day was clear and sunny. I peered out the window at the beauty below: a smattering of craggy, rugged granite ridges covered in the full bloom of trees, in stark contrast to the innumerable clusters of white, high-rise apartment buildings. The juxtaposition: nature versus concrete, of two dominant vivid colours: dark green and white — was visually stunning. I immediately liked Seoul.
For the first few months, I lived in Cheonho-dong, in the eastern reaches Seoul, along the shore of the Han River, which divides the city into approximate north and south halves. When I looked across the kilometre-wide Han from Cheonho-dong, my view was of the long, low ridge of Acha Mountain that followed the river. The academy where I taught was in nearby Myeongil-dong.
I soon discovered that within a ten-minute walk of my front door, I could find almost anything I could possibly desire. There were drycleaners; supermarkets; hardware, grocery, convenience, drug, and clothing stores; chicken, pizza, and Chinese food delivery restaurants; barbers and hairdressers; academies; saunas and fitness clubs; and outdoor markets supplying fresh fish, vegetables, and fruit at good prices. Nearby, there were also wooded trails, red earth tennis courts, and a multiplex movie house. Olympic Park, site of the 1988 Olympics, was within a twenty-minute walk. Running alongside the Han River was a forty-kilometre walking and cycling path. In my free time, I’d rollerblade along the path or play tennis on the courts.
But the day I arrived, this was all unknown to me. The sun was setting, darkness enveloping the city as I was dropped off on the main street by the Cheonho subway station, and headed toward my little room in a yeogwan (old traditional inn) located along a back lane near a bustling outdoor market.
Cheonho-dong at night is abuzz with lights and colours, of rapid movement and palpable energy. I had never seen such packed sidewalks. Many in the crowd were young women decked out in the latest fashions — often miniskirts and high heels. There were schoolchildren in smart uniforms coming and going from the various academies, and women out shopping or socializing in ubiquitous coffee shops. The streets were crammed with old city buses, cars, and taxis, horns honking. A constant stream of buses screeched to a loud, squeaky halt at the bus stops. The sound of traffic, of bus and car engines, was a constant, and at night the haze from the diesel hung in the yellow illumination from street lamps like a cloak of London fog.
I was not used to all this energy and mass of humanity. Not at all. I loved the urgency and visual delights. The multi-storied commercial buildings that lined the streets were plastered with neon signs in greens, oranges, reds, and yellows, advertising coffee shops or restaurants or other businesses. Red neon crosses rose high above small churches across the city.
In residential suburbs across the West you don’t see people out on neighbourhood streets. After arriving home by car from work, a North American won’t be seen again until the following morning. They camp out for the night in their carpeted basement rec rooms on their recliners and surf 150 channels on their big-screen televisions while eating TV dinners. Maybe the room has a bar and a billiards table. During winters — November to March — such citizens hibernate and perhaps do all sorts of unnatural acts. You rarely see them outside, though occasionally they’ll poke their heads out the door to see if spring has arrived.
To me, it is the opposite in Korea. People view their apartment/homes as a place to simply lay their heads for the night. When I visit apartments there, often the only furniture in the living room is a sofa, chair, and a big flat-screen TV on the wall, not much else. I think Koreans prefer to be with friends, to talk and have fun out and about at coffee shops, cafés, restaurants, saunas, bars, and shops. That’s perhaps why the streets, cafés, and restaurants are busy well into the night.
About 10.5 million people live in Seoul, and about 26 million — half the country’s population — in the Seoul Capital Area, which includes satellite cities built with armies of high-rise apartment buildings. Consider that Australia, seventy-seven times larger in area than South Korea, has just 24 million people.
Korean cities employ a concept that I find appealing: residential and commercial areas intertwine, so that from my flat in Myeongil-dong, I could walk to the hardware, convenience, or grocery store, tailor, barber, bike shop, restaurant, or outdoor market along adjacent lanes in a jiffy. Having people out and about is how a residential place is supposed to be. I enjoy the interaction, hearing kids squealing in delight, school students gabbing loudly, housewives chatting, grandfathers debating. If North America decided to upgrade their moribund and tomb-like suburbs from their current catatonic status, to one in which people out for a walk don’t feel like the last human on Earth, they ought to check out the Korean system.
There are lots of positives about living in Korea. It’s generally a safe place. There are stringent laws here to ensure that owning a gun is a near impossibility. A good thing, too, I say, because with Koreans’ quick temperament and penchant for drinking, there may not be many people left in the country if purchasing a firearm was as easy as applying for a library card, the way it is in America.
For reasons I can’t explain, the homicide rate seems to be a closely guarded secret. I had asked my good Korean friend, Heju, to try to acquire the statistics, and she visited several local police stations. Officers informed her that they weren’t at liberty to divulge the information. To obtain it, they insisted, she’d need to fill out a form and send it to the “Shady and Secretive Department of Homicides.” She didn’t bother. But judging from newspapers, homicides are certainly not an everyday occurrence, and those that are committed seem often to be a crime of passion.
Young kids freely play outside and have little fear of approaching, for example, a stranger like me, to have a go at practising a few words of English. On subways and buses, strangers who sit down beside mothers holding babies or with young kids will sometimes touch or hold the little ones.
Korea has historically been a peace-loving nation. Unlike countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United States, Korea never attempted to colonize a weaker nation or to plunder another’s natural resources and riches. Korea did not send armies to Japan or China. It did not seek grand foreign conquests of land or power. For the longest while, in fact, it was an international outcast, like the school loner who sits off to the side and keeps to himself. I suppose this could be viewed as a collective lack of curiosity and sense of adventure. If every other nation engendered a similar inward-looking ethos, North America, Australia, and other major land masses might still remain largely unsettled. Historically, Korea’s citizens rarely ventured past neighbouring China and Japan.
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I was smitten with Korea. It would be a while, though, before I was aware of why I had an instantaneous attachment to the people and the country. My eventual conclusion: Chaos. Disorder. Energy. Koreans are hustlers. Not in the sense of Paul Newman in the classic film of the same name, but in a positive way. They bust their butts to succeed and rely on guts, determination, and sheer will.
After I read Bryson’s books, I realized there wasn’t a similar English-language travel book about Korea. Roger Shepherd, a New Zealander, penned Baekdu Daegan Trail: Hiking Korea’s Mountain Spine, in 2010, but it was predominantly a hiking guide. British international travel writer Simon Winchester walked the length of the country and published Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles in 1988. Without the benefit of a translator, though, the view seemed to be of Korea from the outside. Perhaps owing to the fact that from 1910 to 1945, Korea was a colony of Japan, and from then until 1987 it was ruled by a series of authoritarian military governments, there seem to be no travel books that I was aware of written during this period. One of the most thorough and accomplished travel adventures written was by British intrepid world traveller Isabella Bird, who after trekking through Korea’s interior