A wanderer's Seoul

January 10, 2010

Once again, I have observed that the best travel experiences cannot be planned.

I had my heart set on spending the weekend in Seoul. I spent Thursday and Friday leafing through my travel guide, asking colleagues about cheap places to stay, and trying to make plans with friends of friends and other acquaintances who had generously offered to show me around.

And then happenstance intervened.

Long story short, it's 4:00pm, and I'm now riding with two of my colleagues, Jeremy and Ronda, in a car being driven by Stony--one of the admins at the school. Ronda had arranged to have me meet one of her contacts, "Mr. Lee", in Seoul so that I could get a cell phone. Jeremy has plans to meet with a friend of his at 10:00pm, so we're going to hang out for a while, then his friend will help me find a place to sleep.

Stony dropped us off, and we made our rendezvous with Mr. Lee at a coffee shop at Hoegi (way-gee) Station, at which point Ronda left us to make her own engagements. Mr. Lee and I left Jeremy at the coffee shop so that we could complete our transaction. As we stepped into the open air, I took in the scene around me--the sidewalks were pouring over with people, street stalls and delivery people on motorcycles. Although Seoul is not a particularly dirty city by any means, there's a subtle industrial grittiness about the planning and construction that I've since come to find charming... After 30 minutes, two banks, and some crazy back alley dealings between Mr. Lee and the Key Maker from the Matrix, I managed to procure my cell phone.

Jeremy and I found our way to Yongsan Station, and on exiting, found ourselves in the gaping maw of a gargantuan shopping centre. Therein, we enjoyed some lovely sushi at a "Californian-style sushi" restaurant (less than 500 km from Japan). Also available just down the hall was "Californian-style pho".

Maybe next time...

We window shopped for a few hours, then met up with Jeremy's friend Yun Hye (yoon hay). The rest of the night was a blur of eclectic clubs, street-side food vendors (my favorite!!!), and ended at about 4:30 in the morning, when Jeremy and I crashed in a room at a "love motel".

Hey, at $15 a piece for a warm, dry room and a hot shower, they can call it whatever they want! So what if they rent the rooms in 12 hour blocks?! The next day, we rose late, met up with Yun Hye for lunch (bibimbap!), got Jeremy a cell phone, and then went to go see Sherlock Holmes (with Korean subtitles).

And that concluded my first Seoul experience--Jeremy and I giggled like little girls throughout the 2 hour train ride home, as we revelled in our experiences and began to lay plans for future exploration...