Seoul Part 4: Signs of Life, and Going Home

In the end, like everywhere else, Seoul is just another place to live.  People go to work, eat, sleep, and hang out with friends and family.  If you go to a destination thinking of it as a theme park or museum of some sort, you miss out on the things that truly make it different from home.  For that matter, you also miss out on the things that never change no matter where you are in the world.

I mean, unless that's not your kind of thing.  In which case, by all means have whatever kind of fun you like to have.  This is just why I love to travel.

We left a wintry New York City just as things started to warm up there, and arrived in Seoul just in time for a cold snap.  It stayed in the teens and twenties almost the whole time we were there.

Luckily, a lot of Korean food is designed to be eaten while it's dangerously hot -- often being served still boiling in a heavy stone bowl, or still sizzling on a hot metal plate.  We ate a lot of soups and stews while we were there -- my favorite being sujebi, a seafood and dough dumpling soup, heavily flavored with clams and seaweed.  Also worth looking for are kalguksu (kind of like sujebi, but with thick udon-looking noodles instead of the dumplings), samgaetang (stuffed chicken and ginseng soup), and juk (rice porridge -- yeah, it's called the same thing in Cantonese, but it tends to be thicker and comes with different seasonings).

 

 Oh, and don't forget the aforementioned cafes:

           
Or you can just stay in your hotel room and try to get something delivered.

There's a ton of delivery in Seoul.  Most of it happens via moped and motorcycle.  They go up and down the narrow alleys, through red lights, up onto sidewalks, and sometimes down staircases.  My new camera was delivered to the shop on moped on ten minutes' notice.  Hell, even Burger King in Seoul delivers.  Pizza seems to be a sit-down affair, though.  I've always wanted the chance to order jajangmyun noodle delivery.  The delivery guy shows up with the meal in a heated box on back of his bike.  It comes in a non-disposable bowl that you leave on your doorstep when you're done, and they come pick it up the next day.

We were in Seoul for 9 days and enjoyed all of it in spite of the bitterly cold weather.  It never really felt uncomfortably foreign, and you could pretty much get anything done with a smile and basic English one word at a time.  It kind of reminded me of a gentler, slightly easier-going version of Tokyo.  Everything moved along steadily, but you weren't rushed along or crowded.  I guess it could be because it was winter when we went and like us, most Koreans like to stay inside when it's cold, leaving things relatively uncrowded.  If that's the case, then maybe winter isn't such a bad time to visit.

And that concludes the Seoul series.  I hope you guys got at least a little feel for the enjoyment we had there.  Oh, and I still haven't told you too much about the new camera.  I'd love to go over it in a later post, because it's really cool.  Also, here's the album with the rest of the photos from the Bessa, including some that weren't posted.