Tag Archives: Seoul

3:52 am, Seoul Station

Adventures, Seoul, trains and train stations, Travel,

Not too long ago, I took a day-trip up to Seoul. Seoul is nearly 300km from Daegu, so it’s a fairly long way to go just for the day. In Korea, in fact, it’s almost clear across the country. It was worth it to see a old friend I haven’t seen for ages and who was in the country for just a few days from Japan.

I took the bus up (3 and a half hours), managed to find my way through the rat-maze-chaos of Seoul Express Bus Terminal and navigated the Seoul subway system (which is huge and confusing) to reach Itaewon perfectly on time (amazingly). In order to manage it, I’d woken up at 7am, which will become important later in the story.

I had a great time with my friend. It is so nice to see someone with whom you have common history, to just talk and talk for hours and explore a new place together. It was particularly nice to be able to talk about where we are now and compare experiences. I read something recently (and cannot remember where I read it unfortunately) about how meeting up with old friends sometimes turns into a largely uninteresting litany of ‘remember when’ stories. This wasn’t that. We share a lot of common history but most of the afternoon was new memories and new experiences. It was lovely.

After dinner with two of his colleagues from Japan, I said my goodbyes and headed off to catch a late subway to Seoul station and take a train home. I had settled on taking the train back to Daegu because I wasn’t sure of the bus schedules and the train system is the mode of Korean transport with which I am most familiar and most comfortable. I managed the subway just fine and found my way to Seoul Station.

The first inkling that I may have miscalculated was when I walked into the airport-hanger-style station building and saw a departures board that seemed to indicate that the next train to Daegu wasn’t until 5:30am. I got a bit of a fright but was sure this must be a mistake. I had checked the schedule a few days earlier and was certain there were several late trains. The automated ticketing machine unhelpfully said there were no tickets, so I went to the counter and asked the rather harassed-looking ticket salesperson. He confirmed that the last train to Daegu had left 10 minutes earlier. Perhaps I looked at the train schedule for Daegu to Seoul, not Seoul to Daegu. Either way, I was clearly wrong.

I turned away from the ticket-counter and looked across the room. I will admit to a moment of panic before my new-found sense of adventure and humour in the face of crisis kicked in. I laughed it off: I’d simply wait for the next morning. It would be a little bit of an adventure. Plus, I had a brand new book to start reading and a pen and paper – more than enough to keep me busy for a few hours.

The thing they don’t tell you, and which I imagine very few people ever have occasion to learn, is that Seoul’s extremely busy train station does not, in fact, stay open all night. This was a surprise. The train station really is a major transport hub and I think it just didn’t occur to me that it would close. Also, they have a 24-hour McDonalds and a 24-hour Lotteria.

At around 12:45, the police and station security began rousing and clearing out the homeless people sleeping on the station floor. I frantically did mental calculations to try and figure out a way to afford a taxi and somewhere to stay and still get home. It was after midnight, so my bank card was of no help. There was no way I was going to be able to do it. Just then a kindly security guard came over and confirmed that they were indeed closing and throwing everyone out, but, perhaps taking pity on the bewildered foreigner, said earnestly that they’d be opening again at 2am.

Relieved that I’d only be stranded for an hour, I swung my pack onto my back and headed out into the night. Outside, it was dark and raining. Distinctly thankful for my less-than-trusting relationship with Korean weather, I pulled out my never-leave-home-without-it umbrella and pulled the built-in rain cover over my backpack. As the last people straggled out of the building, I watched the lights of Seoul Station go down.

The slightly less damp areas around the building had been firmly claimed by groups of homeless with cardboard for beds and their belongings firmly tucked up as pillows beneath their heads. I looked around. I’m a South African. Every muscle in my body was coiled in tense anticipation. I was alone on a dark, damp night on the side of the road in a city of 20 million people.

I saw a restaurant but I didn’t want to have to spend money on food I didn’t want. And anyway, it looked rather dodgy and like it might close any minute. The area in front of the station wasn’t pitch dark, thanks to streetlights and neon signs and a row of taxis waiting, forlornly, for passengers to appear out of the night. I spent some time idly trying to decipher the bus route information board. A Korean guy, sitting at the bus stop playing on his i-phone, asked in perfect English if I needed help. We chatted briefly before I moved on. I contemplated taking a walk but the streets seemed to disappear into darkness and all the assurances of low crime rates in Korea couldn’t persuade me that moving away from the lights was a good idea. I walked back and forth, back and forth in front of the station. I stood around. I watched the rain. I watched the night-people. I waited. Waiting, watching, staying near to the pleasant-enough taxi-drivers who tried, repeatedly, to convince me to take a taxi back to Daegu (at 5 times the price of a train and for which I most certainly didn’t have the money right then).

At 2am, as promised, the lights of the station came back on and the homeless station-sleepers and I, the one lone, lost foreigner, trickled back into the building. I found a bench free of people trying to sleep and returned to my book, willing the hours to pass quickly now.

At around 2:30 in the morning, the exhaustion was starting to kick in. I decided it was time for coffee. Because I didn’t have much money on me and I was now in the kind of head-space where I wouldn’t take any chances, I didn’t want to spend too much, but strong black coffee sounded heavenly, especially after an hour of walking in the rain. Plus, of course, I’d been awake since 7am. I went into the “24-hour” Lotteria (ha!), which had finally reopened.

The waiter disappeared as soon as he had served me. I sat down at a table with my coffee, glad to be comfortably sitting in a restaurant, away from the fights for bench-space and disputes with station security. I was a little chilly, so I got out my  jacket. The only other customer stared at me, open mouthed. “Is that a springbok jacket?” he asked. Of all the Lotterias in all the Train Stations in all the cities in all the world, what were the chances that the only other person in this one, at 2:30 in the morning, would be a Capetonian named Derek? We had the kind of conversation that happens when you randomly meet another South African in a strange country in the early hours of the morning: where in SA are you from? Where did you study? Do you know so-and-so? He went off, chuckling at the randomness. I think I might have believed I’d hallucinated it had I not caught a glimpse of him getting off the same train as me as we arrived back in Daegu. The last remnants of weirdness about spending the night at Seoul Station trickled away as I relaxed into the inexplicableness of life. If Derek ever reads this, he should he did a great job of brightening my morning.

I bought my ticket home, now that the machines were working again, and whiled away the next few hours reading and writing and occassionally wandering. At about 4:30am, the station began to fill up and slowly returned to its usual, busy, bustling self. At 5, I had another coffee to tide me over until departure time. I managed a couple of hours of broken sleep as the train swept across Korea before finally heading home.

I am absolutely no worse for the experience. It was totally worth it to see an old friend. I even relish a little being able to add to my repertoire of stories ‘The time I spent the night at Seoul Station’. I feel a little bad that I was unable to let my friend know I was okay – my cellphone couldn’t get internet and his wasn’t working in Korea, but other than that, no harm done. It was a little bit of an adventure: a day trip that ended with me sitting on a bench in Seoul Station, writing, at 3:52 in the morning.

Return to Seoul: traditional village

Adventures, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea, ,

After an evening in Itaewon, we woke up slowly on Sunday morning; slow but insensibly cheered by the appearance of the sun. I used to find it strange that people from places like the UK talked so very much about the weather. These days I do it myself. I still think it I a bit odd, but the weather, and particularly the lack of sun, is such a big part of life here in Korea (especially in Daegu). It also mean that a little sunshine is enough to make any day better, even if it’s still fairly chilly.

We set off to do some more exploring. We caught the bus to the city centre area, getting off at the Sejeong Performing Arts Centre. This central area of Seoul is more open than most of the built-up areas because there are open, ‘square’-style areas. There are also magnificent (and sometimes bizarre) statues to the leading figures of the country, alongside luxury hotels and financial centre buildings. It really does feel like a modern city centre capable of competing with any other city centre in the world. From here, we caught a cab to Namsangol Traditional Korean Village.

The concept of a traditional or folk village bothers some people because they feel like it’s all fake and just created to get money out of tourists. Apart from the fact that most of the folk villages in Korea are free and set up to educate Koreans as well as foreigners, I quite like the attempt to represent the everyday lives of people who lived in a very different time. I suppose the attempt to represent social history accurately appeals to me. It’s probably also particularly important in a country that has modernised so quickly it would be very easy for the old ways to be lost forever within a generation or two.

Namsangol Traditional Village is not in fact a recreation of a village that existed or a ‘typical’, hypothetical village that could have existed. Instead, five residences (including houses and outhouses and sometimes servants quarters) were all relocated and restored here so that different social strata are represented and also that the homes represented are those of real historical figures. It is a different approach. I haven’t seen enough of the other approach to be able to compare. For now, it was just great to be able to get a closer look at life during the Joseon period through the lens of these five households.

The first house was that of Sunjeong Hyo Empress Yun’s parents. This is the home where the future Empress lived until she was 13, when she was designated the wife of the crown prince. It’s always a jolt to be reminded of how young marriages happened in the past, and even in the not so distant past : this was in 1906. The house was beautiful. Each room was set up with beautiful old furniture, brightly coloured bedding and polished metal. I particularly loved the wood – the doors, the cupboards, the tables. I’ve always loved old wood but wood is particularly important in Korean homes because it is reasonably plentiful on the peninsula.

The second house was a residence built for the 27th king of Joseon by his father in law so that he could use it when he came to pay respects to his ancestors (as is part of the Korean tradition). The father in law built it when his daughter was designated a second wife of this king. Around the back of the house, as well as what looked like an outdoor oven, what looked like a Teepee made of straw. When we looked closer, there were three of the traditional brown, shiny storage pots (what I tend to refer to as kimchi pots) buried up to their necks inside the hut. Of course, there were no information boards to explain why. We’ll have to keep wondering.

The other three houses were those of the husband of a princess, a military commander and a regents chief carpenter. In each, we saw bedrooms with beautiful wooden dressers with bedrolls stacked on top of them, clothing hanging on bars from the walls and stunning old lamps. The floors of Korean houses are raised so that there is space for the heating fires under the floors. These kitchens, however were deeper, to provide access to the fires of what looked a lot like aga-style stoves (except less fancy). Large black pots and kettles in unfamiliar shapes sat on stove plates. Garlic and dried plants hung on the walls. Piles of wood waited to add to the heat. Unexpectedly (at least for me), what looked like half-calabashes hung on the walls. In a bedroom, we saw rolled up straw mats next to a high table with ‘ancestor chair’ and the small tables used by those sitting on the floor on cushions all hung on the wall for storage. Definitely an original way to store tables you don’t know what to do with.

In several of the houses, there was a real person dressed in traditional clothing working on some aspect of traditional art and willing, for a small fee, to show everyone else their traditional writing, traditional music and traditional clothing. We didn’t stop to try any of these out but we did enjoy the addition of live models to the quiet old houses. In the central area, we walked past families playing traditional games, several of which I’d seen at the Daegu museum and several of which also reminded me forcibly of some of the traditional games back home. There was even a game where children run along with a bent piece of wire (which is a specially made tool) and a metal ring, trying to keep the ring going. Watching them, I couldn’t help but picture African children in tatty clothes with a stick and an old tyre running along dusty roads. I suppose some things really are universal.

We wandered the park area for a while and also saw the Seoul time capsule. The time capsule, containing 600 items representing current life in Seoul, was buried in 1994 to mark the 600th anniversary of Seoul as the capital of Korea. It is rather ambitiously designed to be opened in 400 years time on the 1000th anniversary of the same. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly impressive to look at and the idea that Seoul will still be Seoul and still be capital in another 400 years seems a little optimistic to me, but perhaps that has to do with my South African view of how long things last. The rest of the part was prettier and we particularly enjoyed the combination of pine trees and water features. We also found a little gazebo-type place made of wood that reminded me so, so strongly of church pews in far-flung farm churches in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. I stopped to take some pictures and run my fingers along the smooth wood surface. Strange associations from two Eastern Cape girls 10 000 miles from home.

By this stage, we were a little cold and definitely hunger so we found a Chinese restaurant – my friend  has a very useful knack for finding Chinese restaurants. After a late lunch of shrimp-fried rice, fried meat dumplings and the most delicious pork and vegetable spring rolls, my second trip to Seoul was almost over and after we chatted for a bit more before I headed off to the station.

The final little bit of my trip took an unexpected turn. The economy tickets for the next KTX to Daegu were sold out. I debated waiting for a later train but I was fairly tired and not in the mood for sitting around so I took a chance and checked the price of a first class ticket. It was definitely more expensive but not completely unreasonable and I figured I could chalk it up to experiencing something new, so I bought one. The KTX train is a fairly luxurious train experience. It feels a lot – from the design of the stations to the seats – like a modern plane, except with more leg-room. There are even ‘cabin attendants’ who could very easily work on planes. Given this, I should probably not have been surprised that the first class is very much like a the first class on a plane. The seats are huge, with ridiculous amounts of space to stretch out and relax. There are only three seats in each row – one on the left and two on the right. Next to me was a huge window with blinds and curtains to block out whatever I didn’t wish to see. Of course, it was evening so there wasn’t much to see anyway, especially with the lights within the train reflecting on the windows. The amount of space was excessive and I wouldn’t have paid the extra if it hadn’t been for getting home earlier, but it was nice to enjoy a little luxury for a bit.

Return to Seoul: a palace, a museum, sushi and cupcakes

Adventures, Seoul, trains and train stations, travelling in Korea, ,

I have made the most fantastic discovery. On my way to Seoul this weekend, I had a 20 minute wait at the Dong-Daegu Train Station (because the train I’d been aiming for was sold out), so I went in search of something to wake me up and found not only decent coffee but also a cupcake shop. The cupcake craze which has taken a lot of Western cities by storm over the past few years didn’t ever really make it to South Africa, but I have always found cupcakes irresistible. This is the first time I have seen a single cupcake in my almost 9 months in Korea, so there was absolutely no way I was going to walk away. I bought four cupcakes (two black forest and two dark chocolate) and was given an extra one as ‘service’ – something free that the shop-owner gives you because you bought a lot. So breakfast before I got on the high-speed train was strong, dark coffee and a decadent chocolate cupcake. Sometimes living in Korea is not very Korean.

Just over an hour and a half later, I arrived in Seoul. Arriving in Seoul is always a reminder that wherever I have come from is a tiny village compared to this huge urban sprawl. When combined with Incheon – they’re so close they share a subway system – Korea’s capital has a population of over 20 million and is the second largest metropolitan area in the world. It’s a little intimidating to stare out of the train window as you enter the dense mass of skyscrapers and traffic and roads but it’s also a little exhilarating to leave the small city I live in and visit the bright lights for a couple of days.

I met up at the station with the friend I was visiting and, after coffee and a bit of catching up, we headed off to visit Gyeongbokgung (Gyeongbok Palace), the largest of the five grand palaces in Seoul. The construction of Gyeongbokgung was ordered in 1394 and it was the royal headquarters, delightfully called the “Palace of Shining Happiness”, for over 200 years, according to my guide book. It’s subsequent fate tells the story of Korea’s history over the rest of the millennium. The palace grounds once held nearly 400 buildings but most were burnt down when the Japanese invaded in the 1590s. It was finally rebuilt after the coronation of child-king Gojong in 1863. Soon afterwards, the Japanese invaded again. In 1895, one of the wives of this king who was considered an obstacle to the Japanese, was assassinated in the palace grounds, a precursor to the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1910. During the Japanese occupation of Korea, this palace, formerly a symbol of Korean pride and national identity, was used by the Japanese for police interrogation and torture and they moved things around, like palace gates and built additional structures with, seemingly, the express purpose of destroying the symbolic form of the palace. The Japanese Governor-General’s residence was also within the palace complex. After the Japanese finally left with the end of the Second World War, parts of the palace were further destroyed during the Korean War. These days the palace complex has largely been rebuilt, with work still going on to recreate the rest, and is a monument to life in the Joseon dynasty, including various representations of traditional life and a great museum.

The last time I was in Seoul we visited Changdeokgung, which is the only palace to have been granted UNESCO World Heritage status. It was fascinating but the thing about World Heritage sites is that the efforts to preserve sometimes limit the experiences of visitors. At Changdeokgung we were only allowed to walk around with a tour-group and it was all a little sterile. From the moment we arrived, Gyeongbokgung was anything but. We stopped to take a look at a particularly beautiful ancient stone stupa (1085)  within the grounds but outside the actual palace complex. As we came around the corner and walked towards the main gate, a group of palace guards in bright red uniforms with black hats and weapons marched past us to the beat of their military drummers. There is something a little surreal about military guards in uniforms belonging to another millennium marching past you as you look up at the gate of a grand palace. The entrance was also guarded by guards in various uniforms, some with flags and others with shields and long sticks. Their colours, from bright red to purple and sky-blue, and the varied flags fluttering in the chilly wind, complemented the colours of the palace gate and the huge painted drum outside, as we got our tickets (3000 won) and wound our way between them and into the actual complex.

Once inside the palace complex, we found ourselves looking up at a large central hall – the throne room or Geungjeongjeon. You can’t walk into the throne room but looking through the open doors on the sides and in the front, you can see the elaborate, detailed (and shiny) throne with the royal screen behind it. The throne is on a raised dais under an awesome ceiling in amazing colours and designs. Around the dais, in the spacious room, are lamps and jars and wooden pillars. The room is set up as it would have been at the time. In front of the throne are two narrow tables with cushions around them, where the scribes would have sat. These scribes, according to a guide we overheard explaining to another group of foreigners, would have sat there throughout the days, recording everything the king did or said to create the record of the kings life that was sealed until after his death: a memoir captured moment by moment as the days of his reign went by.

Beyond the main hall, we wandered through the many buildings of the complex, each restored and carefully maintained, some, including the residence of the queen, with furnishings set up to show how things would have looked. Unlike the previous palace, here we were able to wander everywhere we wanted on our own. One of the joys of Korean palaces is just being able to spend time wandering around and taking in the incredible detail in the roofs and roof tiles, as well as the symmetry and elegance of the way buildings are spaced out. These palaces are not like Western buildings where everything is clustered under rooves. Here, the courtyards form an important part of the design with passages around the edges and buildings set apart in the centre of courtyards. The courtyards are like white space on a printed page, adding to the drama of each hall or building because they create an open space around them. Sometimes water is used to do the same thing. We looked across a lake at the pavilion where festivities and events would presumably have been held (Gyeonghoeru or Royal Banquet Pavilion). The people who lived banqueted here are long since gone but the water still laps at the small island where the pavilion stands and fish still swim through the water. Behind us, I noticed some of the chimneys that would have carried away the smoke from the fires used to heat the rooms. According to my guidebook, the water in the lake was used not only to add beauty to the banquet hall, but also to put out the fires that inevitably accompanied the use of underfloor wood or charcoal fires (particularly in buildings constructed using rather a lot of wood).

Further on, we looked up the steps to multi-story temple-style building, longing to be able to climb the steps – something that is not allowed in order to preserve the old construction. It is particularly beautiful and strikingly Asian. Alongside this, a few buildings have been set up as models of life in the early 20th century, with the house of a scribe and shop of a traditional healer, a comic book shop, a restaurant and (of course) a beauty salon, among others. There is little explanation but the setting is obvious from things like radios and movie posters (James Dean, among others) scattered around the place. We were intrigued by the information outside a model of a little shop selling shoes and the tradition wide-brimmed, black hats, to read that the hats are called ‘gat’ (which only those who speak Afrikaans will understand).

From there we went into the museum underneath the multi-story temple-y type building. I have mentioned before, I love museums, but am often frustrated by the sterile approach to history some museums employ, presenting artefacts as individual finds rather than part of the narratives of the history of the time. This museum, the National Folk Museum of Korea, took a different approach and instead of simply presenting historical things, tried to recreate and explain the context. The exhibitions range from the ‘Life Cycles of Koreans’ gallery, which attempts to present traditional life experiences from the bridal bed and birth, first birthdays and childhood to weddings, sports, war, the way different classes lived and old age – complete with traditional games – and death. Another area presents different aspects of traditional life. At one point, there is a truly magnificent funeral bier, ornately decorated with figures of birds and animals and people and painted in bright greens and reds, blues and yellows and oranges. The information board said that it was carried by between 12 and 24 pallbearers. It certainly looked large enough and heavy enough to require that many men. There was also a bridal palanquin – a little like a covered sedan chair meant to be carried by four men and used to transport the bride to the home of her husband after the wedding ceremony. There were also displays of traditional farming, fishing and other ordinary living activities, including what looked for all the world like a scarecrow and turned out to be a raincoat made of bundles of straw. It is impossible to detail all the things we saw but it was a great museum, far more modern, of course, than the Gyeongju museum (because this one focuses mainly on the much later Joseon period, rather than the Silla dynasty) but also focussing on social history, rather than royalty or archaeological finds.

This is the second time I have visited a palace on a misty, wintry day but it adds to, rather than detracts from the experience. Before we left, we went to another small lake where a much smaller, but even more beautiful, pavilion stands on a tiny island, connected to the outside world by a narrow wooden bridge. In the background, the mountain peaks were shrouded in mist and the grey day gave an eerie timelessness to the bare trees set around the gardens within the complex walls. At one point, as we walked back towards the main gate, we came through a doorway into a courtyard and we were the only people there. I had a sudden moment, in the dusky light of the misty, overcast day, picturing what it must have been like waking through these same grounds on the same kind of late-winter day hundreds of years ago at the height of the Joseon dynasty.

After leaving the Gyeongbok complex, we found – after a little trial and error – a great little Japanese restaurant. I’ve been craving sushi for ages so it was a great find. Our fairly inexpensive meal included, as is so often the case here, several different courses. We started with sweet pumpkin soup and then a cabbage salad with a yummy sauce, a variety of sushi and sashimi, including prawn (wow) and salmon (yay), miso soup and prawn and sweet potato tempura with a sweetish sauce with a hint of ginger, all accompanied by tea and the usual side dishes (including kimchi because it’s not a meal in Korea unless there is kimchi). We were seated at a table in a private room, with sliding doors pulled shut around us by the woman serving us, opening only as she brought us yet more food. We sat and chatted as we savoured the gorgeous meal and sipped warm tea. It was almost difficult to leave the warm, cosy restaurant and go back out into the chilly afternoon.