Smog, Gangnam, and Falling in Like

I meant to have this post written by Friday. But, as you will soon see, I've been rather busy.

In my last post, I mentioned that being Seoul feels rather like a dog flying a helicopter upside-down (in other words, like this dog):

Now I would like to say that my dog-in-helicopter phase has ended. But this is sadly untrue. I would like to say I can navigate Seoul like a native, speak Korean fluently, and inhale the spiciest noodles without weeping in pain. But while I am a long way from doing any of these things, I am a little bit closer to doing them than I was a week ago. Perhaps I am flying my helicopter sideways now.

At first, I was miserable. I spoke no Korean. I had no company. My roommate had yet to appear, and I doubted whether she ever would - whether she even existed at all. I slept, facebooked, and wandered the streets of Seoul for hours on end before retreating to my room to pity myself and sweat profusely. Then, mercifully, my roommate came.

She was Finnish.

She was stylish.

And, thanks be to the Lord and all his angels above, she spoke English.

She had also been in Korea for four months. After I babbled hysterically at her for a while, she kindly showed me the ins and outs of Seoul - how to use the metro, where to buy soap, what to do with the trash that had begun to accumulate in the shadowy corner of our room. Another English-speaking angel - a cousin's friend's brother, if you must know - took me out to get a real Korean dinner, paid for my meal, and gave me a lesson on Korean table manners. I felt bad that such nice people were spending such time and money on me, but both my roommate and my cousin's friend's brother told me not to worry. Their explanations for their graciousness were basically as follows:

"It's okay. I remember my first week here."

For some Westerners, Seoul can initially be confounding. At first, it's hard to say why. The streets are not particularly twisty. The drivers are not particularly crazy. The people are not particularly unfriendly. But there is something unnerving about going from living in a cool, green place where everyone speaks your language to living in a hot, smoggy, endlessly crowded place whose language is unintelligible to you, where you have few acquaintances and no friends, where you cannot, for the love of God, find BREAD.

Now, I have learned to do without the bread. I have acquired a few acquaintances, and maybe even a friend or two. The language is, of course, a barrier - I can't form a sentence in Korean, let alone make small talk - but I can complete simple financial transactions, provided that the cashier doesn't say anything to me. At all. And I have slowly started to like this cloudy, sprawling city.

Seoul is not exactly picturesque. It's not Paris or Venice or Rome. But it has a character of its own. It has vertical street signs, smartphone-addicted citizens, a musical language, questionable odors, countless 7/11's (no joke), a brownish river, crazy old ladies, a haze of smog, uncompleted skyscrapers, and green hills that jut out of the city grid like teeth that grew in crooked. And it's starting to carve out a place in my heart, slowly but surely, with the bored clumsiness of an exhausted, inexpert surgeon.

When I am not wandering around Seoul or blogging about said wanderings, I teach, or try to. Thankfully, my students are wonderful. They are sweet and articulate. They laugh politely at my corny American jokes, and they don't make fun of me when I butcher their names. Although "butcher" is perhaps too light of a word. "Slaughter" is probably more appropriate. Calling attendance is always a linguistic experiment. One student (real name omitted) noticed my plight and offered to go by another name, with considerable sass:

But you don't want to hear any more about me. Get to the good stuff, you say. Tell me about SEOUL. Tell me wonderful exotic things about Korea that I have never heard before in my life.

My friends, I will try.

1. I did visit Gangnam. It looks like this.

As you can see, there are a lot of shops and shiny buildings. But Psy does not gallop around corners or catwalk out of parking garages. It mostly looks like the rest of Seoul, plus a few tourists and minus a few 7/11's. But I am not really a trustworthy source for information on Gangnam. I was deliriously sick when I visited. Seoul is hot, humid, dirty, and home to approximately twenty-five million inhabitants; for me, it is thus a petri dish of disease.

The Friday I visited, I felt like a parasite-riddled zombie. I grabbed lunch, dragged my coughing, oozing body up and down the main street, took pictures, got back on the subway, made it to my room, crawled into bed, and slept for fourteen hours.

So yes, I have been to Gangnam. But I may have hallucinated half of what I saw.

2. Is Korean food spicy? you ask. To answer, I turn to exhibit A: Dok Po Ki.

Hmm. This "Dok Po Ki" looks innocuous enough, you say. Just dumplings bobbing in chicken broth, really. Almost like won ton soup. What's so scary about that?

But what you do not know is that underneath the broth and noodles lies a layer of red chili peppers, so spicy they will make you feel as though your eyeballs are bleeding out of your face.

That, my friend, is my answer to "Is Korean food spicy?"

3. But it can't ALL be spicy, you say.

Okay. Some of it is LESS spicy. For example, this dish will make you only cry water, not blood.

It is rice, chicken, vegetables, and spicy sauce. It is painful to eat, but tasty. I do not know what it is called. A Korean friend ordered it for me in Korean, and to me, Korean sounds mostly like "KoreanKoreanKoreanKoreanKorean," so it could be called "Unicorn Turds" for all I know.

But enough about food. Let's talk about sports.

4. Unbeknownst to me, there is baseball in Korea. And it is kind of a big thing. Although one would think that a country of fifty million could build a bigger stadium than this:

But I digress.

In Korea, teams are mostly named after their sponsoring companies, not their location of origin. I thus saw the LG Twins play the SK Wyverns. But another day, I could have seen the Kia Tigers or the Samsung Lions. I can't decide if this is invasive advertising, brilliant marketing, or both. For what it's worth, the stadium was packed, and the audience was more enthusiastic than anything I've seen on TV or in real life in the US. The crowd chanted, clapped, shouted, and did the wave for nearly four hours straight, with barely a pause for breath. So I now challenge anyone who says that baseball is the "American" pastime.

6. At one park in Korea near where I live, there are playgrounds slash exercise machines for ADULTS.

Okay, so I am no photographer. I was also unwilling to flagrantly take pictures of feeble old men attempting to lift weights in peace. I'm not a douchebag, after all. But I hope this mediocre shot at least proves that this park exists, and that old men use it, sometimes.

Now back to food.

7. I guess Koreans have a thing for French cuisine. If you don't believe me, feast your eyes on this picture of one of the many Paris-themed cafes in Seoul:

And they have food that looks like this:

Was it particularly tasty? No. It was about as good as you might expect of a bunch of Koreans trying to imitate pain-au-chocolat. But my bread-starved body appreciated it, even if it was tasteless and stale. And I'm sure it goes both ways - a Parisian attempt at Dok Po Ki would fail miserably, don't you think?

And with that I end this post. I have not fallen in love with Seoul, but I have certainly fallen in like. I might even fall in love someday, if I survive the smog, parasites, plastic croissants, and Dok Po Ki. Maybe one day, I'll even fly my helicopter right-side up, even if I am still (figuratively) a dog.

Until next time,
-Emily O.