I know I said before that I was excited about living in places that are more different than home—that apparently has its limits.
One of the most interesting things to do while traveling is to observe the similarities and differences between cultures. Seoul is, in many respects, a very modern, Western-feeling city. There’s extensive and easy public transportation, and Itaewon, the expat neighborhood, has all the cuisine I’ve been missing on the road (Tex Mex! Pizza! BBQ!).
But there are differences, of course. Some of them are innocuous: sure, I’ll take off my shoes when I enter my apartment; I wish there were a chair up front to sit on when I have to put them back on, but whatever. Some of them don’t thrill me but don’t really affect me: many Koreans driiiiiink with dinner; just on Tuesday, I saw one girl fall down while trying to exit a restaurant, and another girl in my building had to run to the bathroom to throw up, all before 9 pm. But one difference I just can’t handle: Koreans, you’re nice enough, but please don’t touch me.
It happens on the street frequently. A woman, rather than walking around me, put her arms around me and physically moved me from her path. A man, upset that I didn’t take the flyer he was offering me, resorted to tapping my arm aggressively.
I’m willing to believe that I was doing something wrong in these situations. The woman was older; perhaps I was supposed to leap out of her way. Maybe Koreans take all the street flyers they’re offered. (This would be a problem unto itself, but that’s another matter.) But whatever the problem, the solution is never to touch me.
The strangest incarnation of this issue was actually the best intentioned. We went to a restaurant one night, James Cheese Back Ribs. It’s basically just what it sounds like—baby back ribs with melted cheese wrapped around them. They have illustrative photos at the entrance to lure in curious travelers like ourselves:
I like the concept, to be honest. I love ribs, I love melted cheese, I’m down to combine the two. But the problem is that they didn’t just let you eat your cheesy ribs in peace.
First, they made us don protective gear. Koreans really, really do not like to eat with their hands. So we had to put a glove on our left hands and use chopsticks in our right hands to maneuver the ribs into our mouths.
Second, they wouldn’t let us assemble our own cheesy ribs. A woman wrapped cheese around a rib and deposited it into one of our bowls. Once we ate that rib, she would give us another.
If it had stopped there, I would have been baffled and slightly annoyed, but I would have been okay. But it did not stop there.
When we got fried rice, the woman who had been assembling our ribs mixed it up in the remaining cheese, made a bite (with kimchi, of course, the universal condiment), BLEW ON IT, and then fed my friend like a baby. My friend tried to protest, but it was useless. That spoon was going in her mouth.
At another point, I made the grievous error of touching a rib—lightly, I did not grab, my hand merely grazed the rib—and a woman came racing out of the kitchen with a wet wipe.
Did she hand it to me to use as I saw fit?
No. She did not. She wet wiped my hand.
This is all hilarious, of course, but it also made me extremely uncomfortable. I don’t have a phobia when it comes to touch: I’ll shake someone’s hand upon meeting; I have zero problems when it comes to romantic relationships. But I don’t thrive on touch the way others seem to. I don’t feel the need to hug my friends when I just saw them yesterday. And I really don’t care to be unnecessarily touched, particularly by strangers.
One of the other people (a man, of course) at dinner thought I was being silly: “No, no, this is great; think about it. If you were lying on the beach, and some hot guy was feeding you grapes, wouldn’t that be awesome?”
No. No no no. First of all, I can eat the grapes by my damn self. But second, we’re at a restaurant, we’re eating cheesy ribs, and there’s not a hot dude in sight, just an overly attentive woman trying to wipe my hands and feed us.
And this wasn’t an isolated feeding incident; a woman at a bar offered us French fries and then attempted to deposit them directly in our mouths. I ran away.
It’s been an interesting month here in Seoul—I’ve seen some beautiful sights, learned quite a bit more about history and current events, and eaten some tasty food (the cheesy ribs, to be fair, were very good)—but the lack of personal space boundaries means Seoul will never quite feel like home to me.
I do live in New York, after all. We can scream obscenities at each other on the street corner; just don’t touch me.
I signed up to go on a foliage tour yesterday. There were a few options for which park to visit (South Korea has so many!), and based on the photos, the description, and the time of year, I picked Daedunsan. The itinerary said that we would leave Seoul at 6:30 am, arrive at the mountain at 10, take a cable car up, have time to enjoy the views, walk down, eat lunch around 12:30, and depart at 2:30 pm. Sounded like a lovely day trip.
We arrived at Daedunsan, and the guide explained that once you take the cable car up, you have to cross a bridge and then walk up 120 steep steps to arrive at the top. Okay, I thought, no problem; I can do 120 steps.
So we took the cable car up, and it was beautiful; it felt like we were birds swooping over the treetops.
We stopped at the observation deck to take a few photos (I suppose, in hindsight, this is what the description might have been referring to), and then we headed for the top. We started climbing stairs, and one of the two girls who was with me began to count. “Um…” I said, looking up, “I don’t think this is the 120 steps he was talking about. We have to cross a bridge first.”
Indeed, in order to get to the bridge, we had to climb quite a few steps. But the bridge was lovely, and at this point, it felt like a nice walk.
After we passed the bridge, we climbed hundreds more steps, and I started to regret my life choices. Then we reached the point where there were no longer manmade steps, just rocks to climb and scramble over as best you could—on all fours, pulling yourself over on the railing, however you could make it work. I had to stop several times on the way to the top, but after about an hour and a half, I made it to the summit (receipts at left). I was very proud.
Me, feeling proud.
And the views were lovely:
But then I learned that sometimes going down a mountain is even worse than going up. There were supposed to be a few different trails to the cable car, one of which was allegedly easier, more winding and gradual. In fact, there were no easy ways to get on and off this mountain. After a brief respite on a leaf-strewn path in the woods, we headed down in earnest, and the trail looked like this:
Except sometimes there wasn’t a railing at all. At one point, I was hugging a rock as I walked sideways so as not to fall off the mountain.
I wasn’t loving the hike at this point, but I was doing okay. Then one of the girls and I realized that we had somehow missed the trail that went to the cable car, we’d been left by our faster friend, we had no choice but to climb another 800m to the bottom, we had only a vague idea of what the right trail to get there was, and we had an hour to make it back before the bus left.
This was the point when I stopped having any fun at all and seriously considered the ramifications of sitting down on the trail and crying. Then I forced myself to keep going anyway. My legs were shaking, and it took all my mental energy to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I was tired, so my balance was shit, and I have the bruises to show for it today.
Eventually, two hours after we left the top, we made it to the bottom of the mountain. To the side of the highway, to be precise, where we had to backtrack for 15-20 minutes to return to the bus. (I’ve never thought so seriously about hitchhiking, but we can’t even get cabs to pick us up here, so I didn’t have high hopes for strangers.) We made it back 15 minutes before the bus left—no leisurely lunch for the weary. Standing at the bottom, I looked back up at the mountain in wonder.
I suppose I feel some small sense of accomplishment for surviving. Mostly, though, I’m just glad it’s over. But to be fair, the leaves were very pretty:
Briefly. Inside of a building. With military present. On a tour. Nothing to worry about, really.
I hadn’t planned on visiting the DMZ during my time in Seoul, but when a friend asked me if I wanted to join the tour she’d signed on to, with VIP Travel, I said yes. Why not, really?
Well, one reason why not is this sort of tourism makes me a little uncomfortable. I hated Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, with its fake document check and vendors selling gas masks.
And in some respects, this was a similar excursion. The morning portion of the tour felt extremely touristy. Our first stop was a park, which I’m sure has some historical or political significance, but all we saw of it were preparations for the Ginseng Festival. We’d spent the bus ride learning about the seriousness of the conflict, hearing a story from our guide about her uncle, kidnapped as a child by North Korean forces and permanently separated from his family. Then we got off the bus and saw carnival rides.
But it was only a quick restroom break before getting back on the bus, going through a passport check (the first of many that day as we crossed back and forth into and out of the DMZ), and heading to the site of The Third Tunnel.
For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t), North and South Korea aren’t divided by a border, per se. They never signed a peace treaty after the Korean War, only an armistice agreement. So instead of a border, there’s an MDL, a military demarcation line. And two kilometers on either side of it is the DMZ, the demilitarized zone.
There are four tunnels, constructed by North Korea for infiltration, that South Korea has found, though they believe there are as many as 20 tunnels still undiscovered. The third tunnel is open to tourists to walk inside. We first went to a museum that briefly explained the history of the DMZ. Then we watched a short, yet very odd, film. It summarized the Korean War at blinding speed, touched on South Korea’s hope for unification, and then closed on an odd segment about the beauty of the DMZ with slow-motion footage of flowers blooming and a discussion of migratory birds. I left feeling like I’d just watched propaganda but had no idea of its aim.
Going into the tunnel itself reminded me of nothing so much as the salt mine tour Mom was desperate to take in Salzburg. Only with less to see, really; it was just a five-minute walk through a tunnel, hunched over at times (the tall man in front of me hit his [mercifully hard hat-covered] head repeatedly), and then you turned around and walked back. Walking out involved ascending a very steep 350m hill—not my favorite activity, but at least I felt like I accomplished something. No photos were allowed in the tunnel, sorry for that!
Our second stop was the Dora Observatory, a high point from which you could see North Korea. Not much to look at really, just a hazy mountain view, with a small village and a flagpole. (Apparently the two countries went back and forth erecting bigger and bigger flagpoles because of course they did. The double meaning of erection is not a coincidence, I think.) The most interesting thing I learned there is that South Korea uses massive speakers to blare k pop at North Korea. Really, I have video.
Our third stop was my favorite of the morning, Dorasan Station, the unfinished northernmost rail station in South Korea, which they hope will one day link the country to the north. Our guide put it poignantly: “We’re a peninsula, but since we can’t pass through to the north, it feels like we’re on an island.”
Bush made a speech at the station in 2002, the text of which is displayed, and the evenhandedness and presidential qualities it showed just about broke me in light of T—‘s tweets. For the record, every person I talked to this day said he is making things worse here.
After a very quick lunch break, we boarded a different bus and went on to the second half of our tour to the JSA (Joint Security Area), officially the territory of the UN. This part of the day felt different, more serious—more like crossing the Berlin Wall when it was still up, rather than visiting Checkpoint Charlie today.
After we signed the nuttiest waiver I’ve ever seen (and I used to do legal work for a reality show), we watched a PowerPoint presentation on the history of the JSA, hearing again about the acts of violence that have occurred here since the war, before things were regulated as strictly as they are now.
We then boarded a military bus with our designated US solider—both US and Korean soldiers stay onsite—and drove deeper into the area, past a multi-layered barbed wire reinforced by a strip full of land mines, and on to the Freedom House, which we walked through quickly to stand on the steps and face North Korea. Or a building there, at least, with one soldier outside of it.
Our soldier barked orders at us: Stand in a single file line on the top step. Do not take photos to your left or right or behind you, only straight ahead. Do not make gestures. You can take photos for two minutes, now.
The unzoomed view to the other side…
One woman apparently took a photo of something she wasn’t meant to; a soldier was by her side instantly, telling her to delete it.
We then walked in two single file lines into a building situated exactly halfway between the north and south, with the MDL traversing the center. In the photo at left, the microphones on the table—ostensibly for negotiation—mark the MDL. I felt nervous while I was in there, more from my usual anxiety over following rules than any real sense of danger. But again there was the surreality of the contrast between the very serious situation this building represents and the inanity of tourists piling in and taking photos with soldiers.
And then it was back on the bus. The final place we visited before our tour concluded (besides the gift shop; there is ALWAYS a gift shop) was the recently constructed temple, a beautiful commemorative work, from which one day the bell will be rung, signifying peace.
It took me a few hours after returning home to shake my feelings of unease. For as cheesy as parts of the day were, as much as I’d laughed at them, taking the tour intensified the feeling that we’re edging closer to a precipice, which I very much hope we don’t fall over.
