The Air Affair // Hello, Hongdae!
I finally write to you, dear reader, from the big K itself, happily ensconced in hip-happening Hongdae in Seoul. The past few days have been a blur, but I'll try to un-blurrify it for y'all below!
Another note: Air France was, on the whole, pretty great for long-haul flying! Good food and headrests that bend to make a comfy u-shaped pillow when you want to conk out. Considering they've been wracked by severe, long-running union walkouts for months, I was mostly just happy everything was running and on time!
[PART TWO: HELLO, HONGDAE!]
Despite having taken sleep deprivation to heights to which no man has gone before in the first half of my itinerary, I landed in Incheon airport at around 7am with almost ten hours of sleep under my belt. After freshening up and changing clothes, it really did feel like just another morning. Fun fact: there are shower facilities available at Incheon in a traditional jimjilbang (bath house / spa) on the lowest floor! I didn't use them myself, but a wearier traveler might, especially with an eye to sleeping there for a while (a pretty standard jimjilbang activity).
Armed with an already-charged subway card (thanks, S and C!) I swiped my way onto the airport train and enjoyed a scenic ride to Seoul. A note on the Seoul subway: it is quite possibly the best subway I've ever been on, especially if we're going by sheer usability. Subway stations and cars are sleek, quiet, air conditioned, and impeccably clean. Even as an English speaker, it's almost impossible to get lost due to the sheer density of multilingual signage. Once you know the line you need, you can literally follow colored lines down sets of stairs and around corners to each platform. Every platform I've been on is dual-direction, so you never have to contend with swiping in to the wrong side of the station only to have to exit and re-swipe into the correct one like SOME subways I could mention *coughcoughDCMetrocoughcough*. Every set of station doors (there's a glass partition between the platform and the subway tunnel) has the name of the station you're at and the next station up printed clearly on it in both Hangul and English. Most trains have ceiling-mounted TVs which provide subtitles to the train announcements, which are pre-recorded and repeated in Korean, English, and Chinese. Best of all, each subway station has anywhere from 6 to 12 different entrances and exits, each of which is clearly marked with whatever is closest to it. So, for example, if you're headed to Deoksugung Palace and you roll up at City Hall station on the dark blue line, you probably want to take exit 3, which will let you out of the station closest to the palace, and every sign pointing you towards exit 3 will probably also have "Deoksugung Palace" printed under the arrow. The organization and efficiency of it all are crazy, and I am going to be massively spoiled by them by the time I return to the US.
But I get ahead of myself. Emerging from the depths at Hapjeong and following a short windy route through narrow if empty streets, I finally alighted at my hostel, tucked just far enough into the back streets to be quiet without being too hard to find. After check-in and a quick shower, it was time to start my day!
I'm going to admit, my first impressions of Hongdae were a little dour, if only because this trendy place feels a little empty and shabby during the daytime, like a theme park on a rainy afternoon. Walking past block after block of bars, some little more than a spray-painted sign over a doorway, others elaborate wooden pagoda-like structures complete with fake cherry blossom trees, I got the distinct impression this is the kind of place that comes alive (and gains much of its touted glamour) at night. PCbangs, escape room joints, and noraebang parlors were all to be found in bountiful supply, but were similarly shuttered until afternoon at least. On my way back from escapades later in the evening, between colorful stands selling candy, claw machines filled with stuffed animals lining the sidewalks, and club barkers with headseats competing to entice passerby into each establishment, the same streets had more of the feel of a carnival in its early stages.
After doing a generous loop of the area, I hit up a local convenience store (GS25, branches of which can be found on virtually every street corner in Seoul) for sustenance. There, I tried Chilsung, Korea's de facto soda, some seasoned pork gimbap, and a curious frozen dessert consisting of green tea ice cream wrapped in a brown rice wafer, and utterly failed to take a picture because I was really hungry and bad at remembering to take photos at this point.
Though most of the day was taken up by this more or less directionless wandering (made yet more directionless by Naver Maps, which I quickly discovered is pretty bad at telling where I am), I had one thing on the docket for sure - a performance of the NANTA, Korea's longest-running comedy show, at 5pm. The logic behind this was the best trick I'd ever learned for handling jet lag, picked up from my UK year abroad orientation program - schedule a show on the first night so you have somewhere to be and don't just sleep through the afternoon, but also something to enjoy that doesn't require walking or physical exertion. It worked - though my hostel bed starting calling to me around 3:30 or so, I instead made the trek to the Hongdae theater. When I went to pick up my ticket, I was informed the one I'd reserved had been upgraded to a VIP one for free. Reasons why only occurred to me later.
You know it's going to be a good show when the first thing they play is a safety briefing concerning how to use the many, MANY fire extinguishers in the theater. This was quickly followed by a plug from the Korean Agricultural Association assuring us that the show used only the freshest and most ethically sourced local ingredients - a shame, really, since most of them ended up chopped into tiny pieces on the floor. To explain: NANTA follows three chefs (plus a few other bizarre characters, depending on the day) as they rush to prepare a number of traditional Korean dishes in the impossibly short time before a fast-approaching wedding reception. They achieve this lofty goal by turning their kitchen over to the power of Stomp. There's traditional Korean drumming on big tubs of kimchi; insanely fast vegetable chopping; knife twirling; martial arts; synchronized dancing; fire breathing (hence the extinguishers), etc etc. There were also subplots about the restaurant owner's nephew being allowed to work in the kitchen despite having no chef skills, the others having to massage his ego even as they raced to get things done despite his witless interference, and two of the chefs trying to steal kisses without the head chef noticing.
Oh, and did I mention the show is basically entirely nonverbal? This is part of what makes it so popular with foreigners and families - you really don't have to understand Korean to enjoy the show because it's done almost entirely in pantomime. Neat, huh?
Top two moments: first, when head chef was trying to get we in the audience to help him lay down a tasty beat by stomping and clapping to a certain rhythm, but a lot of people in the audience didn't get the "repeat after me" part of the nonverbal directions and kept starting early, leaving head chef hilariously exasperated and calling out ahjummas and ahjussis who weren't playing along. Second, when I was picked to go up onstage and participate in a dumpling making relay race! In hindsight, I suspect they moved my seat to put me at the end of a row so I'd have a higher chance of standing out and getting picked. Though at first I tried to beg off, I eventually relented and took the stage. My job, as communicated to me nonverbally by cheerful fourth chef, was to pound a mochi pestle and a meat tenderizer in a very particular rhythm in between running back and forth between the work counters and the end of a conveyor belt on which steamer baskets of completed dumpling would be placed - I had to stack the steamer baskets at the front of the stage, first team to ten would win! Between my complete lack of understanding these directions and the general absurdity of the situation, I led my team to defeat.
As a consolation prize, they gave each volunteer a complimentary commemorative photo. In mine, I am dazed and confused, have absolutely no idea what's going on (not even that a picture is being taken), but I'm having a great time and happy to be up there anyway. And incidentally, that perfectly summarizes what my first day in Korea felt like.
* * *
That's all for now, folks! Stay tuned for more Seoul shenanigans, of which I promise more pictures will be taken and showcased.
[PART 1: THE AIR AFFAIR]
So far the best part of being in Seoul is also being thankfully on the other side of 24 door-to-door hours of air travel. Needless to say - and perhaps unsurprisingly given the sheer volume of transportation transfers and small decisions involved - there were a few hiccups. Now, taking into account the fact that listening to someone else's travel stories is right up there with watching someone else hit a punching bag to blow off steam - you may feel for them, and you too may one day be in their shoes, but that doesn't make merely spectating it anywhere near as satisfying and cathartic as doing it yourself - I'll keep my account of the smattering of snafus snappy by using this space to thank the two people who helped me get where I was going in one piece, even when things went a little pear-shaped.
By way of introduction, this is Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Never go there.
I had heard the stories about CDG - that it was old and sprawling and not really built to work like a modern airport needs to, so everything takes twice as long as it needs to. For some reason, I assumed knowing about this tendency going in would help or avert it somehow. It didn't. Moral of the story? Never fly through CDG.
Now, without further adieu, some gratitudes...
1. R, the random American GI
By the time my feet hit tarmac at Charles de Gaulle after the first leg of my flight, it had been almost 24 hours since I'd last slept. Desperate, I did something that only seems like a good idea when you're that simultaneously tired and wired: once I'd navigated the weird mess of security and not-customs required of international connections, I found my next departure gate and promptly fell asleep at it.
I woke to a disembodied, conspicuously Midwestern drawl explaining to some ahjumma that he was pretty sure our departure gate had been switched with less than twenty minutes to go until boarding started. One glance at my phone showed a couple silent notifications confirming this. While the ahjummas seemed weirdly unperturbed by this set of events (to the point that we briefly wondered if it was a temporary glitch or an error and the aunties knew best to stay put), R, myself, and a French girl (who shall remain nameless because she never introduced herself, instead spending her entire time with us talking frantically on her phone to her mom in French about the fiasco) began what I assumed to be a record-breaking sprint between Terminal L and Terminal K of CDG. R, old hat at both CDG and Incheon after several years stationed in Korea, carefully retraced our steps back through security to the inter-terminal train, back through security the other way, and to our gate all while cheerfully telling stories about Korea. We rolled up at our new gate only to see that many of the ahjummas R had just been talking to had somehow beaten us there. Guess we weren't setting records after all!
In the darkest timeline, I'm still there in Charles de Gaulle, idly napping with full confidence in the alarm I'd set for when boarding would start at the wrong gate. Instead, the universe sent me R, to whom I am now forever indebted.
Note to self: next time I've got a five hour layover at CDG, I'm booking a room at the trendy Yotelair capsule hotel (located conveniently between international terminals) and spending the pre-flight time sleeping off jetlag in peace and comfort until the real gate assignments get released.
2. Anonymous, the Chinese mom
By the time I boarded my second leg (Paris to Seoul), I was not a happy camper. Dehydrated and hungry but too nauseous to drink or eat and torturously overtired but with too much of a pounding headache to sleep, it was just about all I could do get myself parked in the right seat on the plane after many minutes pawing over my travel documents paranoid of having made a mistake and muttering to myself in a weird mix of English, French, and broken Korean.
Either because I looked like death warmed over or out of basic human kindness, a kindly Chinese mother sitting next to me quickly took me under her wing. Though I slept through almost the entire flight, she would gently wake me when meals or drinks came or just accept them on my behalf and leave them on my tray table for whenever I next surfaced. During my brief bouts of consciousness and lucidity, she'd show me how to use the seat amenities and cheerfully gush to me about her children, asleep in the row behind us. She quickly got it in her head I was some sort of professional travel blogger (bless her) and suggested new places to visit on my next trip. As we landed, she lent me a pen and helped me fill out my entry paperwork. 감사합니다, random Chinese mom. You were the best seat neighbor a jet-lagged American could ask for.
Another note: Air France was, on the whole, pretty great for long-haul flying! Good food and headrests that bend to make a comfy u-shaped pillow when you want to conk out. Considering they've been wracked by severe, long-running union walkouts for months, I was mostly just happy everything was running and on time!
[PART TWO: HELLO, HONGDAE!]
Despite having taken sleep deprivation to heights to which no man has gone before in the first half of my itinerary, I landed in Incheon airport at around 7am with almost ten hours of sleep under my belt. After freshening up and changing clothes, it really did feel like just another morning. Fun fact: there are shower facilities available at Incheon in a traditional jimjilbang (bath house / spa) on the lowest floor! I didn't use them myself, but a wearier traveler might, especially with an eye to sleeping there for a while (a pretty standard jimjilbang activity).
Armed with an already-charged subway card (thanks, S and C!) I swiped my way onto the airport train and enjoyed a scenic ride to Seoul. A note on the Seoul subway: it is quite possibly the best subway I've ever been on, especially if we're going by sheer usability. Subway stations and cars are sleek, quiet, air conditioned, and impeccably clean. Even as an English speaker, it's almost impossible to get lost due to the sheer density of multilingual signage. Once you know the line you need, you can literally follow colored lines down sets of stairs and around corners to each platform. Every platform I've been on is dual-direction, so you never have to contend with swiping in to the wrong side of the station only to have to exit and re-swipe into the correct one like SOME subways I could mention *coughcoughDCMetrocoughcough*. Every set of station doors (there's a glass partition between the platform and the subway tunnel) has the name of the station you're at and the next station up printed clearly on it in both Hangul and English. Most trains have ceiling-mounted TVs which provide subtitles to the train announcements, which are pre-recorded and repeated in Korean, English, and Chinese. Best of all, each subway station has anywhere from 6 to 12 different entrances and exits, each of which is clearly marked with whatever is closest to it. So, for example, if you're headed to Deoksugung Palace and you roll up at City Hall station on the dark blue line, you probably want to take exit 3, which will let you out of the station closest to the palace, and every sign pointing you towards exit 3 will probably also have "Deoksugung Palace" printed under the arrow. The organization and efficiency of it all are crazy, and I am going to be massively spoiled by them by the time I return to the US.
 |
| One big, connected station with ten convenient and well-marked exits. |
But I get ahead of myself. Emerging from the depths at Hapjeong and following a short windy route through narrow if empty streets, I finally alighted at my hostel, tucked just far enough into the back streets to be quiet without being too hard to find. After check-in and a quick shower, it was time to start my day!
I'm going to admit, my first impressions of Hongdae were a little dour, if only because this trendy place feels a little empty and shabby during the daytime, like a theme park on a rainy afternoon. Walking past block after block of bars, some little more than a spray-painted sign over a doorway, others elaborate wooden pagoda-like structures complete with fake cherry blossom trees, I got the distinct impression this is the kind of place that comes alive (and gains much of its touted glamour) at night. PCbangs, escape room joints, and noraebang parlors were all to be found in bountiful supply, but were similarly shuttered until afternoon at least. On my way back from escapades later in the evening, between colorful stands selling candy, claw machines filled with stuffed animals lining the sidewalks, and club barkers with headseats competing to entice passerby into each establishment, the same streets had more of the feel of a carnival in its early stages.
After doing a generous loop of the area, I hit up a local convenience store (GS25, branches of which can be found on virtually every street corner in Seoul) for sustenance. There, I tried Chilsung, Korea's de facto soda, some seasoned pork gimbap, and a curious frozen dessert consisting of green tea ice cream wrapped in a brown rice wafer, and utterly failed to take a picture because I was really hungry and bad at remembering to take photos at this point.
Though most of the day was taken up by this more or less directionless wandering (made yet more directionless by Naver Maps, which I quickly discovered is pretty bad at telling where I am), I had one thing on the docket for sure - a performance of the NANTA, Korea's longest-running comedy show, at 5pm. The logic behind this was the best trick I'd ever learned for handling jet lag, picked up from my UK year abroad orientation program - schedule a show on the first night so you have somewhere to be and don't just sleep through the afternoon, but also something to enjoy that doesn't require walking or physical exertion. It worked - though my hostel bed starting calling to me around 3:30 or so, I instead made the trek to the Hongdae theater. When I went to pick up my ticket, I was informed the one I'd reserved had been upgraded to a VIP one for free. Reasons why only occurred to me later.
You know it's going to be a good show when the first thing they play is a safety briefing concerning how to use the many, MANY fire extinguishers in the theater. This was quickly followed by a plug from the Korean Agricultural Association assuring us that the show used only the freshest and most ethically sourced local ingredients - a shame, really, since most of them ended up chopped into tiny pieces on the floor. To explain: NANTA follows three chefs (plus a few other bizarre characters, depending on the day) as they rush to prepare a number of traditional Korean dishes in the impossibly short time before a fast-approaching wedding reception. They achieve this lofty goal by turning their kitchen over to the power of Stomp. There's traditional Korean drumming on big tubs of kimchi; insanely fast vegetable chopping; knife twirling; martial arts; synchronized dancing; fire breathing (hence the extinguishers), etc etc. There were also subplots about the restaurant owner's nephew being allowed to work in the kitchen despite having no chef skills, the others having to massage his ego even as they raced to get things done despite his witless interference, and two of the chefs trying to steal kisses without the head chef noticing.
Oh, and did I mention the show is basically entirely nonverbal? This is part of what makes it so popular with foreigners and families - you really don't have to understand Korean to enjoy the show because it's done almost entirely in pantomime. Neat, huh?
Top two moments: first, when head chef was trying to get we in the audience to help him lay down a tasty beat by stomping and clapping to a certain rhythm, but a lot of people in the audience didn't get the "repeat after me" part of the nonverbal directions and kept starting early, leaving head chef hilariously exasperated and calling out ahjummas and ahjussis who weren't playing along. Second, when I was picked to go up onstage and participate in a dumpling making relay race! In hindsight, I suspect they moved my seat to put me at the end of a row so I'd have a higher chance of standing out and getting picked. Though at first I tried to beg off, I eventually relented and took the stage. My job, as communicated to me nonverbally by cheerful fourth chef, was to pound a mochi pestle and a meat tenderizer in a very particular rhythm in between running back and forth between the work counters and the end of a conveyor belt on which steamer baskets of completed dumpling would be placed - I had to stack the steamer baskets at the front of the stage, first team to ten would win! Between my complete lack of understanding these directions and the general absurdity of the situation, I led my team to defeat.
As a consolation prize, they gave each volunteer a complimentary commemorative photo. In mine, I am dazed and confused, have absolutely no idea what's going on (not even that a picture is being taken), but I'm having a great time and happy to be up there anyway. And incidentally, that perfectly summarizes what my first day in Korea felt like.
* * *
That's all for now, folks! Stay tuned for more Seoul shenanigans, of which I promise more pictures will be taken and showcased.
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