“So, tell me — why are you going to Seoul?” asked the uncle, trying hard not to slide down the cream-coloured couch.
Silence permeates the room. We look uneasily at each other. The same question runs through our heads: why exactly are we going to Seoul? I can’t speak for the other boys, but since we settled on this location way back in October I’ve been asked this same question, over and over again; each time I stutter for what seems like an eternity before deciding to change the subject. A lot of my fellow citizens are obsessed with the South Korean capital, but I’ve never been one of them: their enthusiasm for K-pop and K-dramas is something I’ve never been able to understand. Finally I shrug and, as my churchmates sputter out some vague general stuff about wanting to broaden their horizons, I walk out the door to catch my bus.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t expecting to go to Seoul, nor was I expecting to go now: when I first proposed this trip to my churchmates last summer, I had pictured a nice little jaunt around the South Seas in February, in a place where I knew both the language as well as what I wanted to see. Sure, Singapore was a bit expensive and predictable, but I liked expensive and predictable (if this is your first time on my blog, hi, my name is Chamois and I’m just another bloody tourist). Why not settle for that?
My friends, however, had other ideas, and so it was that we four found ourselves booking tickets in the wrong direction five weeks after I suggested we go on holiday together. I must admit that I struggled to come to terms with this twist for quite a while: not that I had anything against the Koreans, but it wasn’t the sort of place where four boys would have a good time. As you’ll see in upcoming posts, none of us were fans of K-pop, or watched K-dramas, or had any interest in any aspect of Korean culture; what business had we twenty-something males in this place? But during those five days in Seoul, I found myself begrudgingly enjoying the place: being pleasantly surprised by its vastness, by its energy, and by the sheer abundance of things it had to offer.
It is this slow transformation, this gradual persuasion towards a healthy respect that you will see in the blogposts to come: as always these posts will be light on meaningful observations and heavy on unnecessary detail, but said details were such a constant delight that it would be unforgivable not to tell you all about them. Like the previous two journals, this series will run weekly on Friday evenings (although since this holiday was much shorter than my last one, readers will only have to slog through five weeks of ramblings, and I’ve decided to dispense with an epilogue this time round for the sake of all our sanities). I hope our travels/travails will provide you with a teensy bit of entertainment during these long autumnal nights… and if not, it’s still an excellent sedative. 🙂
One point of note for this particular journal: placenames in South Korea are humongously confusing, and to make matters worse the official English names as translated by the tourism board are both inconsistent and inconvenient. After about five seconds of serious thought I’ve decided that the best way to deal with this problem is to explain it once, and then leave you all to figure the rest out: so for instance the place known as 경복궁 in Korean will be “Gyeongbukgung palace” on its first rendering, and simply “Gyeongbukgung” for subsequent mentions. It’s all very messy, but then again cultural bewilderment is an integral part of the Korean experience.
See you all next Friday!
