South Korea

On Sunday, July 25th at 7:40 PM I finished my last English class. It was the end of a two-week stretch of summer classes at the private school where I work. During those two weeks we had students at the school every morning and afternoon during the week. Normally the classes are scheduled for weekday evenings and on weekends during the day and in the evening because the students have their regular school classes during the day Monday through Friday.

With those extra “summer camp” classes, we had lots of extra teaching hours during the week, and because we were short of teachers at the time, I had two weekends in a row of working 9 AM to 8 PM, with morning, afternoon and evening classes on Saturday and Sunday. I was exhausted and wondering what had happened to my summer break. My university classes ended about one month earlier but I had considerably less free time in July than I did in June.


It was a quick induction into the world of work, where your summer break is counted in days, not months. I had 11 days off from my nearly full-time job at the private school (30-35 hours a week) so I canceled my two part time jobs (1-5 hours a week each) to have 11 straight days off.


My short summer holiday started just after 8 PM that Sunday evening when I shared beers with a couple of coworkers in a park across the street from our school. We didn’t stay long because of the mosquitoes, so I was home by 9 to pack.


On Monday morning I woke up at 5:45 AM and was too excited to fall back asleep. I had one last bit of work to take care of. I needed to finish editing a course book for a class starting in August so I worked furiously because I knew that I wouldn’t want to have to trek to internet cafes to get work done while travelling.


At 8 AM I was done and able to leave Nanjing for the first time since going to Guangzhou and Thailand in February (other than a brief overnight trip to Changzhou in May). In late May a new subway line opened and that line has a stop just a few hundred feet from my apartment so now I am able to walk out the door, and within minutes be on a subway. The trip to the train station would take 45 minutes by bus, 25 minutes by taxi, but just 15-20 minutes by subway and costs only $0.40. The subway car was packed with Monday morning commuters, and knowing that I wasn’t going to work like everyone else made me smile.

At 9 AM I boarded a new high-speed train to Shanghai. The previous fast trains, which still run but are now less frequent, take 2.25 hours to cover the 280-kilometer journey. The new high-speed trains cruise at 300-320 km/hour, slowing down slightly when going through train station, and make the trip in 1.25 hours. It was also the first time I had taken a direct train with no stops. I love the trains and public transportation here. I can go door to door from my apartment in Nanjing to anywhere within walking distance of Shanghai’s huge subway system in less than 3 hours for around $22 (144 yuan for the train ticket, 3 yuan for the Nanjing subway, 3 to 7 yuan for the Shanghai subway). The cost of driving a car (gas and tolls) is several times the price of a train ticket and takes three to four hours. Although car and bus traffic between the two cities is still common, trains have almost completely replaced flights between the two cities.


I walked around Shanghai doing errands like changing money, booking a hostel, meeting a friend for lunch, going to a couple bookstores, ordering clothes from a tailor at the clothing market, and checking out the new Apple Store, the second one to open in Mainland China. I had dinner with a big group of Americans at an awesome Vietnamese restaurant where we had some delicious curry dishes, fried rice, spring rolls, three big bowls of this creamy slushy ice – two of peanut butter and one mango – and flan for dessert.


The second day there I went to a fake market in Pudong and had some Shanghai noodles and soup dumplings for lunch. I ran into Dan Barbato and his wife, who was due to have her baby within a week or so. It wasn’t the first time I have run into someone that I know in Shanghai, a city of nearly 20 million people, but every time it happens I’m amazed that chance encounters like that can happen when you least expect it.


I took a ferry from the east side of the river back to the west side and took the more expensive ferry with air conditioning for the first time ($0.30 versus $0.10 for the ferry without a/c). The ferry docks and the boardwalk on the west side of the river were brand new, most likely renovated for the World Expo. I met my friend Ben, who I work with in Nanjing, for dinner and we checked out the Bund at night, then went to the Jing’An temple and found a bar with outdoor seating. Ben and I first met each other in Changzhou and we met up with a British guy who we both knew in Changzhou and now lives in Shanghai.


The next morning Ben and I took a long metro ride to the airport on a new metro line extension that was finished this year, connecting the two airports on opposite sides of the city. This was also completed just in time for the World Expo.

The flight to Incheon was quick and easy, and from there we took a 45-minute bus ride to Seoul. My first impression of the country was that it was very clean and orderly, at least in comparison to China. The people were also extremely polite. On the plane and in the Incheon airport, there were a lot of travelers, the vast majority Korean, and we noticed that everyone was quiet, lines were neat orderly, and people went out of their way to let you pass by them. This was quite different from crowded places in China, which are really noisy and have few rules regarding lines and the flow of traffic. There were similar differences when we first went out and walked around. The city was surrounded by green mountains, the streets were super clean, and the traffic was eerily quiet.


After checking into our hostel, we picked an area that looked cool in a guidebook and took the subway there. We saw an area with art galleries shops lining narrow pedestrian streets. We walked along some commercial streets and ended up in a large public square where the city hall is located. People often gather in that square for public events like viewing World Cup games on large screens (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/halfway_in_-_2010_world_cup.html#photo8). Nearby was the train station, so we went there to buy tickets to and from Busan, a city on the southeast coast of the Korean peninsula.


We went home early that night because we were dead tired after going out in Shanghai the night before. The last thing we did before retiring for the night was walk around a huge outdoor market. There was a web of small streets lined with stalls selling cheap things. We didn’t get anything there that night but would go back there on our last day to get some gifts. That night we had some tasty and very inexpensive Korean food in an alley with lots of small restaurants. We sat at a counter and interacted a lot with the two women cooking, although we couldn’t understand each other very well. The place was nothing more than a tiny kitchen and a counter with stools. We had cold noodles, rice with mixed vegetables and chili paste, and lots of cold dishes like kimchi. When we paid the bill we just handed over a 50,000 won note because we didn’t understand what the cook said to us. When we got a lot of change back and calculated that the meal cost about $3 each, we were relieved to know that we wouldn’t go broke or hungry in Korea. There was plenty of cheap local food.


For our first full day in Korea we decided to get an early start and head to a mountain to hike. We took a good hour-long metro ride to the north side of the city. We bought some drinks and snacks at a convenience store and asked the clerk where to go to find good hiking paths. He spoke to us in Korean, motioned to the buses on the street and wrote down a name in Korean. We were able to match the name that the clerk scribbled down with a bus stop so we took a bus there only to find that it was the next subway stop. Going with what our guidebook said, we got really close to the right place on the subway, but not quite to where we needed to go.


Our guidebook also said that hiking is a popular weekend activity for Seoul’s residents and described them as the world’s best-dressed hikers. Since it was a weekday, the only hikers that day were older people and they all had nice hiking boots, quick-dry clothing, backpacks, hiking poles, hats and sunglasses. We really stood out with our casual clothes, tennis shoes and messenger bags. There were lots of outfitters and restaurants selling take-away food outside of what turned out to be a national park. We hiked up gravel paths and steep steps, past two Buddhist temples, and towards a large, exposed rock face. We had a picnic near the top with the snacks and drinks we bought that morning. Through the trees we could see parts of the city, pockets of high-rise apartments and sprawling suburbs. There was a small stream shaded by trees that was popular with picnicking hikers. In some areas it was deep enough to wade and people were floating in inner tubes or having splash fights


After that hike we took the metro to Itaewon, which is basically a foreign neighborhood populated by US soldiers and families. There were lots of American fast food chains and cheap souvenirs. I wouldn’t be surprised if locals refer to that area as Little America à la the Little Italy’s and Korea towns found in large American cities. We went to the south side of the Han River after that and walked down a hip shopping street before eating dinner at a Japanese noodle restaurant. After that we went to a busy shopping street that was full of fashionable people. There were a lot of beautiful and well dressed people.


On Friday we took a train to Busan. It was a high-speed train that took us through tunnels under a number of mountains and by many farms and small towns. The landscape in the middle of the country was very green and hilly. Within a few hours we had reached the other end of the country. Busan is a port city on the southeast coast of Korea and although it is the second largest city in the country, with a few million people, it has a very different look and feel than Seoul. The buildings are older and smaller, and the smell of the sea lingers in the air. The city is broken into smaller areas because it’s squeezed in between mountains and the rocky coast. In some neighborhoods the buildings seem to be built on top of each other because the land is so steep. The prices were also cheaper than Seoul. We stayed in a decent hotel double room for $25. When we went out searching for food we found a street near the port that was lined with restaurants. It was mid-afternoon and the majority of them were closed, so we had to imagine what the place would be like on a busy evening. There weren’t many choices at that hour, but the place we went to was really good. It was Japanese food, or at least Korean food that looked a lot like Japanese food. Japan is only a short ferry ride away from Busan so there seemed to be a lot of Japanese influence on the Korea’s east coast. I ordered cold noodles that came in two clumps on a bamboo mat, next to a bowl of cold broth. I thought the liquid in the bowl was a drink. Thin hot soup is often served with Chinese meals and it’s common to drink it straight out of the bowl, so I treated this bowl the same way and took a sip of it. The waitress came over and showed me how to eat it: put a pile of noodles in the broth, add chopped veggies and minced garlic from another bowl, stir and eat. It was humbling to be a dumb tourist again and struggle to figure out so many simple tasks like how to eat noodles. Ordering food and paying the bill was always awkward, too.


On Saturday, our one full day in Busan, we went to the ferry port and admired all the ships and the older homes that filled the steep hills around the harbor. From there we took the metro to a beach north of the city. It reminded both of us of beaches on Spain’s southern coast, such as Málaga, which we detest, so we didn’t stay at the beach very long. It was still cool to visit a beach, though, and it was only my third time going to a beach in Asia after Llama Island in Hong Kong and a few beaches on the island of Phuket.


There was a street near the train station with a traditional Chinese gate that our guidebook labeled as Busan’s Chinatown. We went there looking for Chinese people but didn’t find any. The restaurants and shops were all staffed by Koreans and there were a few businesses run by Russians; no one responded to “ni hao.” We had dinner in a place near the train station where we shared a really hearty, home-style stew with giant pork and vegetable dumplings. I think it’s the kind of things Koreans eat in the winter, not in the summer, but we weren’t very good at ordering things so we had to go with whatever we ended up with.


After dinner we went to a coffee shop. There were so many coffee shops everywhere we went that we went to one once or twice a day.


Before going to bed that night I went to an Internet café, which are also easy to find, to check my email. The internet at that café was a much better experience than using the internet in China as it was super fast and the sites blocked in China, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, were all accessible. And, as I expected, a number of people in the café were playing Starcraft.


On Sunday morning we went out for coffee and a very light breakfast because we had plans for a big lunch later that day. After packing and doing some shopping, we walked around the huge indoor fish market and took our time to check out all the restaurants on the second floor. The restaurants all consisted of an open kitchen in the middle of the huge floor with a few tables on the outside near the windows. All of them had fixed multi-course menus and some of them were very busy so we could get a good idea of what they served based on what dishes were on the tables. We picked one that had open tables near a window. For $16 each we ate five courses: a half dozen cold vegetable dishes, sashimi, a cold smoked fish, a whole grilled fish and fish soup. By the time we finished it was close to 2 PM and we went straight to the train station to catch our train back to Seoul. As we left we saw people using nets to transfer live fish from a truck to buckets on the sidewalk, probably to be prepared and served for dinner that evening.


That night in Seoul we stayed in our original hostel and went out near Hong Ik University, which we had neglected to check out when we were first there. It was a very vibrant area, even in the summer, and all the young people and student-oriented shops and restaurants reminded me of State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. There was even a small bike shop that had lots of fixed-gear bikes, something that I’ve seen only once in China. We ate in that area and walked around before stopping to watch a live music performance. Some of the musicians turned out to be tap dancers, too. The energy and creativity of the young people in that area was palpable and it was cool to see live music and dancing on a warm summer night, another experience that brought me back to Madison and evenings spent hanging out on the terrace. We had some beer in the park while watching the music and tap dancing and then went to a bar for the first time.


On our last day we went to the giant COEX mall, which had a lot of the same international brands that are found in China, but one differences was the bookstores, which had more English books and far more English textbooks than the foreign language bookstores in China. We also went to a big outdoor market near an ancient city gate, Dongdaemun, where we had a cheap lunch and picked up some gifts.


We met up with two of my former classmates near a Yonsei University and had a light dinner at a student restaurant, then fruit slushy drinks at a Krispy Kreme, and then walked through Yonsei Univ. After it got dark and we couldn’t see much any more, we went to a really cool underground bar. We had a few courses of really delicious and high-end appetizers and snacks and shared pitchers of beer and small bottles of soju, the Korean grain alcohol. We played drinking games and shared some great conversation and laughter together. It was really fun to have a small reunion with Nanjing Normal University classmates in another country and to have some locals show us around. We went to several cool places that night, including one of the coolest bars that I’ve ever been to for our last stop, all of which we never would have found on our own.


South Korea was a vibrant and exciting country with an interesting mix of traditional Confucian and Buddhist culture and modern culture, with a lot of Western influences, at least on the surface. The country is definitely worth another trip.