Daily Times

We spent five wonderful days in Seoul, the soul of Asia, as the Koreans like to call it. Their currency is called the Won and with a name like that, you know they are out to win your hearts.

We saw three of the imperial palaces, two of the indigenous markets, one ultra-modern shopping mall, walked around the downtown area and, of course, did the mandatory tour of the DMZ. Even in those days, tension hung in the area. There had been some incident between the north and the south involving a submarine. A memorial service was being organised near our hotel. I can only imagine what the tensions between the two Koreas must be like in the current standoff between the north and the US.

In late March, it was cold and chilly most of the time but the people were friendly and that took away a good bit of the frost. Crime is rare but I made sure my wallet was in my front pocket.

Sadly, sidewalks are rare as well.

At most major intersections, you have to hunt for an adjacent subway station and go down and up several flights of step to cross the road.

Beware – drivers often don’t give way to pedestrians at the sidewalks that do exist.

The city architecture was very eclectic, as if Seoul was trying to discover its identity. A lot of the high-rise buildings had a generic colourless personality. They resembled the Stalinist structures we had seen in Beijing.

The Lotte department store, a high rise with escalators, was jammed packed with shoppers despite having prices that were three times of what we had seen in San Francisco. At some point, sheer claustrophobia drove me out of the store. As I turned back for a final look, I saw shoppers streaming out of the three stairs at the end, like water spilling off a dam.

The view from the North Seoul tower was stunning. And the ride in the cable car was the steepest that I had encountered. It convinced me that vertigo couldn’t be conquered by simply wishing it away, unlike what I heard on the Dr Oz show. The best views of the Seoul skyline were to be found by cruising the Han River. Don’t confuse this with the Seine and don’t look for the Tour Eiffel.

But after a few minutes, the view of the skyline will grow on you.

The changing of the royal guards at the palaces was very colourful and was accompanied with the beating of a large drum. The guards were totally non-communicative but you could have pictures taken with them. The folk art museum at the largest palace was very nice.

It had a pavilion, which featured a total life cycle display.

The downtown area could have been anywhere. We saw people walking around with cell phones, talking away with their friends far and near.

One walker was also using a second cell phone to text.

The last time I saw this “both hands on phones” phenomenon was in Manhattan. There was an abundance of restaurants. You could find just about anything you wanted in many of the fine eateries but food was not cheap.

Our buffet at the Westin Chosun was truly international and sumptuous to a fault. We would linger there for more than an hour everyday. The Chinese section had a mural of Chairman Mao and the Tiananmen Square behind it. The Japanese section had a mural of Mt. Fuji. We ate Chinese food, Japanese food and Korean food. But one evening we succumbed to the California Pizza Kitchen that was just across the street. And for our last meal, we wandered into a Middle Eastern place called Saffron. It was beautifully decorated but just about every item on the menu could have come from an Indian restaurant. The Indian person at the entrance had aroused my reflexes as to whether it was Middle Eastern or India. Despite the confusion of identity, the food was great.

In late March, it was cold and chilly most of the time but the people were friendly and that took away a good bit of the frost. Crime is rare, we were told but I still made sure my wallet was in my front pocket

Compact Fluorescent Lamps abounded in the shops at Namdaemun market. You wondered if they were saving energy or using even more energy than the incadescents they had replaced because there were so many of them and they seem to be on all the time.

We encountered language problems everywhere we went. But we saw the iPhone being used to effortless translate phrases by cab drivers and their dispatchers and ultimately started doing the same ourselves.

One late afternoon, as the weather was getting cold, we were drawn to a street vendor who was frying meat and selling it to people on skewers. As I got closer to the wok, to see what was being fried, I thought it was a coiled hosepipe. That did not make any sense so I took an even closer look. My goodness! It was a snake that had been skinned. It had the saddest looking expression in its eyes. I had never seen people snacking on snake kabob! The sight caused us to skip dinner that evening.

Tours are great since they give you an overview of the place with an English-speaking guide and you know you are safe and not going to get lost.

But they will make mandatory stops at stores that sell the local fare – in Seoul, this is ginseng and amethyst.

So be prepared for that.

On the tour of the DMZ, two boys from the UK got a hold of the mike from the female guide and sang the Beatles’ song, “I want to hold your hand” for far longer than was necessary. When she asked the boys to give her the mike back, they claimed they were not from the UK but from Liverpool. Last night had been spent clubbing and they were hoping at each stop the tour would pick up more girls. As the tour came to an end, they asked the guide for her Facebook address and she was seen slipping a piece of paper to them.

That was a minor blemish on what was otherwise a really fine tour. Except that we did not get to see any machine guns or artillery batteries or even soldiers with automatic rifles. But we did get to do down a thousand feet at a steep angle to spy on the tunnel that the soldiers from the North had dug in to invade the South. This was discovered in 1974 and the north initially tried to say that it was an old coalmine shaft. The tunnel was big enough we were told to let in an entire infantry division in just an hour.

The five days we spent in Korea were among the most pleasant we have spent abroad. They were culturally and historically enriching. But if our five days, we probably saw only five percent of the greater Seoul area.

There is so much more waiting to be seen on a future journey.

The writer has toured 34 countries on six continents and can be reached at ahmad.faruqui@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, September 26^th 2017.