Seoul 2006 - Part IV: Attractions in Seoul

(Continued from Seoul 2006 - Part III: Japan and Korea in the past.)

Donhwamun, the main gate of Changdeokgung Palace

The biggest attraction in Seoul is no doubt Korean cuisine - Korean barbecue restaurants are everywhere. But there are other things to do in Seoul as well.

First, Korean palaces. I visited two of them: Changdeokgung Palace (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and Toksugung Palace. It was unfortunate that Biwon or the Secret Garden, the back garden of the Changdeokgung palace, was closed to the public until May.

Buyongji pond, Changdeokgung Palace - the only part of Biwon garden open to the public when I visited the palace. The view that pine trees grow in the middle of a square pond is (perhaps) rather unusual in Far East.

Toksugung Palace, on the other hand, is quite intriguing in the sense that one building (Jeonggwanheon Hall) is half-Korean and half-Western and that another (Sokchon-jeon) is totally Western (of Greek-Roman style).

Jeonggwanheon Hall

Sokchon-jeon (on the left) stands right next to a building of Korean tradition in Deoksugung Palace.

Overall, Korean kings used a lot of green colour to paint palace buildings, which I think is distinctive in the Far East region.


A roof edge of (probably) Injeongjeon, Changdeokgung Palace

A veranda of Daejojeon, Changdeokgung Palace

I found it interesting for Seoul to have both Tokyo-like aspects (skyscrapers, billions of showy signboards, etc.) and Kyoto-ish characteristics (preserved old buildings due to the fact that it has been the capital of Korea since long time ago).

Another attraction in Seoul is Insa-dong Street. It has got a distinctive atmosphere created by a black cobblestone street lined with both traditional buildings as well as contemporary low-rise ones such as the Ssamjikil shopping mall (No, don't imagine an American-style shopping mall. It's much, much more stylish than that. A shame I forgot taking photos...). Some shops sell traditional Korean artcrafts while there are small contemporary art galleries as well. Even Starbucks is forced to match the landscape by having the one-and-only Hanguel-lettered "Starbucks" sign.

Starbucks Insa-dong.

Another interesting part of Seoul is Hondae, an area around Hongik University - South Korea's best art university. So hip places - bars, clubs, and interesting shops at one of which I bought a cute alarm clock - abound here. I only managed to visit this part of Seoul after dark for just a couple of hours by myself... I should have come here with someone else.

"Fashion buildings" in the Dongdaemun area are something unique to Seoul. These high-rise department stores - Migliore, Doota, and Hello apM are the three big names with Doota the most stylish - house 1500 to 2000 shop tenants most of which are casualwear boutiques. What's interesting is that among all the other busy floors devoted to young fashion is one quiet floor for Korean traditional dresses for girls. Sooyoung told me that on New Year's Day she wears such a traditional dress and bows to her parents for showing appreciation - Korea is a Confucian country.

Korean traditional dresses for baby girls(?).

What's also unbelievable is that they are open until 5 AM. Even boutiques or any department stores in Tokyo close before midnight. I visited these buildings after midnight. A large volume of Korean pop music with good sound quality was pumped out at the entrance. Inside the buildings were quite a few young Korean people (some looked teens). I wonder how they go home after the metro and bus services are over around midnight - no night buses in Seoul. But taxi fares are cheap in Seoul - it begins with 1900 won (less than 1 pound or 1.5 dollars) for the fist 2 kilometers.

Finally, Cheong Gye Cheon, a small stream cutting across Central Seoul. It used to be covered by the highway. But the current mayor of Seoul decided to scrap the highway and to restore the stream. The restoration work just completed last year. I saw quite a few Koreans, especially families with children, enjoying themselves by walking along the stream. This is suggestive to Tokyo, where there is a similar plan of getting rid of highways overshadowing Nihonbashi, a historical bridge.

As I stayed at Morishita-san's place on the second night in Seoul, I managed to get a glimpse of what life in Seoul is like. I followed him and his wife when they went to a supermarket. Supermarkets in Seoul are again different from those in Tokyo. There are not many large supermarkets in this city. Lotte Mart and E-Mart - the only (?) two large supermarkets in Central Seoul - are pretty much of Anglo-Saxon type with an exception of quite a few "campaign girls" sent by product companies. They wear short skirts and white boots that remind me of "super loose socks" (fashionable only briefly among Japanese high school girls about a decade ago). It sounds like Japanese-style, but we don't have such girls in supermarkets. (They inhabit streets in Tokyo.) People in Seoul come here once a week to buy everything they need for the coming week, which is different from the Japanese style of household shopping - Japanese housewives like to go to supermarkets almost everyday to buy ingredients for tonight's dinner etc. Finally, products on sale often come with a completely irrelevant extra - cereals coupled with towels, for example. It doesn't seem to be part of sales promotion. It's probably just that supermarkets attach unsold stuff randomly to newly stocked products, or so guessed Morishita-san.

Surprisingly, information on Seoul in English is very limited on the web. True that English speakers find it difficult to explore this city as everything is written in Hanguel letters (and sometimes in Chinese characters, which helps me a lot). But I got a sense that exploring this Far Eastern city further will be intriguing. Two days and a half isn't enough! I want to visit Seoul again.

Many, many thanks go to Sooyoung and Morishita-san.

Seoul 2006 - Part III: Japan and Korea in the past

(Continued from Seoul 2006 - Part II: Korean cuisine.)




(From above, Seoul Railway Station (now disused), the Bank of Korea Museum, and Seoul City Hall)

The third thing that I learned during this trip was what Japan did to Korea in the past. As you might know, history education in Japan is terrible in the sense that we do not learn properly about what our ancestors did to Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. It was a weird experience to see some old modern buildings in Seoul were built by the Japanese during colonial time (see photos above).

There are a few former palaces in Seoul, but most buildings inside these palaces date back to, at most, the 17th century because the Japanese army burned them all down in the late 16th century... We do learn Japan invaded Korea at that time but I didn't know the Japanese samurai soldiers reached as far as Seoul... Koreans all know these things. I think I need to learn this kind of stuff properly, but I'm not sure if Japanese historians have properly studied it. (Unlike the EU, where historians across countries cooperate and produce the common history textbook, there has been no communication between Japanese and Korean/Chinese scholars in history, if I understand correctly.)

(Continued to Seoul 2006 - Part IV: Attractions in Seoul)

Seoul 2006 - Part II: Korean cuisine

(Continued from Seoul 2006 - Part I: Cityscape of Seoul)

Secondly, Korean cuisine. Its ingredients are more or less similar to those of Japanese cuisine, but they cook them quite differently. On the first evening in Seoul, Sooyoung, my Korean friend in Seoul, took me to a restaurant in the Gangnam area. It was full of surprises. Doenjang-jjigae, soybean paste stew, looks like Japanese miso soup, but smells of natto, fermented soybeans unique to Japanese cuisine. This confused me a lot. These two - miso soup and natto - are different things to me, but they are part of the same dish for Koreans. Sooyoung was surprised to know that I didn't know this national stew for Koreans. How little I knew about Korea. I also had mackerel-kimchi stew. Again an impossible combination in Japanese cuisine (Kimchi, Korean spicy pickled salad, is popular in Japan as well, but Japanese people eat it only with barbecued meat, never with fish.

The list still goes on. Koreans love beef and pork grilled on an indoor barbecue. Japanese love it as well though we usually broil raw beef (not so often pork) while Koreans more often than not barbecue marinated beef and pork. But the crucial difference is that Koreans dip grilled beef or pork into kinako powder (ground soybean). Kinako in Japan is used for eating mochi - sticky rice cake - especially on New Year's holidays or for sweets. Its combination with grilled meat is again an impossible one in Japanese cuisine. On the other hand, it's an impossible mix for Koreans to eat boiled rice with barbecued meat, which Japanese love to do. Koreans wait for rice (or naengmyeon - cold noodles in soup) until they finish eating meat. They also use pears extensively for cooking - to make marinating sauce for barbecue or to add slices to naengmyeon and yukhoe (raw beef strips). Japanese only eat them as dessert.

The similarity-cum-difference is not limited to ingredients. Koreans use a large pair of scissors to cut grilled meat on a barbecue, which initially made me feel uncomfortable - the pair of scissors they use looks like the one we Japanese use for cutting cloth or gardening. When we do an indoor barbecue, beef is already sliced to a mouthful size. Koreans put a large chunk of meat on a barbecue and then cut it into pieces after grilled.

Korean cuisine is quite diverse, by the way. I only knew the tip of iceberg. My favorite turned out to be dwaeji kalbi (marinated pork ribs on a barbecue) and jumullok (marinated loin beef that is unstiffened by hands). Plus, lo and behold, it's value for money. Dwaeji kalbi costs around 8000 Korean wons (4 pounds or 6.5 dollars) while jumullok at Seogyangchip, a rather expensive (by Korean standards) restaurant in the Mapo district, costs 30000 Korean wons (15 pounds or 25 dollars). These prices include a wide range of side dishes - different kinds of kimchis, garlic cloves for grilling, lettuce leaves for rolling barbecued meat, and, in the case of Seogyangchip, naengmyeon noodle soup. This is a Korean way of serving dishes. If you order one main dish (or two), you'll get a wide range of side dishes as well - what side dishes come along differ restaurant by restaurant. (Continued to Seoul 2006 - Part III: Japan and Korea in the past.)

Seoul 2006 - Part I: Cityscape of Seoul

I visited Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, for the first time from the evening of 24th through the morning of 28th March 2006. It was in many senses educational. Which means how little I knew about this neighbouring country to Japan.

The first thing that struck me was how similar the cityscape of Seoul is to that of Tokyo. But people there, of course, speak Korean, not Japanese, and use Hangeul - Korean alphabets, which are totally different from Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana) - for all signboards. So all I saw looked what I'd seen before in Tokyo, which was not the case. This dazzled me a lot. To be fair, it's probably partly because I came directly from London, not from Tokyo. My images of Tokyo were not quite accurate as it was one year and three months ago when I last visited Japan's capital city. Still, the fact that this was my first time experience of visiting a rich country that doesn't use European or Japanese language probably enhanced my confusion. (Continued to Seoul 2006 Part II: Korean cuisine.)