A Seoul Countdown

It has been almost a month since my last blog entry and I must admit that my lack of writing is as much a consequence of my being busy as it is of my not experiencing a lot of “touristy stuff” in Seoul. But truth be told, I have experienced a TON here, and sometimes it’s simply a matter of writing it down that allows me to see just how wonderful some of those experiences have been.

Things as simple as Namdaumun market, an indoor/outdoor night/day bazaar of sorts selling just about EVERYTHING you could possibly ever leave the house to buy; walking streets packed….PACKED…with people pushing past each other to buy their kimchi, ginseng, or swim goggles and knockoff jeans; a woman delivering lunch to a local shop owner, carrying a tray of soups and noodles on her head; a legless man army-crawling along the walkway singing into a microphone attached to a speaker he is wheeling along in front of him. To your right is a dumpling shop and…what’s that smell?....oh, yes, stewed beetles on the street, right next door to the department store whose bottom overflows with what we call the “Costco crate” section. Imagine hundreds of crates that mysteriously fall off of a truck on the way to Costco. They ended up in Korea. A five-pound block of Kirkland cheese sits next to a pile of nuts and some GNC multivitamins. And right next door the smell of fresh fish permeates through the glass walls and into the narrow hallways leading to a vendor selling makeup and Aveda products.

The market sits next to (and is named after) the Namdaemun gate that once stood high in the middle of a road just minutes from our hotel. I say once because one night on the way home from our show we turned a corner to see smoke, flames, and over twenty fire trucks crowding the streets, shooting water at Korea’s #1 National treasure. Unsuccessful in being quenched by hours of firefighters and their hoses, the gate burned down and made it to CNN headlines the next day as thousands of locals gathered around to see their beloved gate. I read about it the next morning in my New York Times affiliate newspaper that gets delivered to my door every day before breakfast.

I’ve spent countless hours walking around the Meyong Dong shopping area, walking in and out of clothing stores with post-season sales and styles you never thought you’d see anyone wear. Days and afternoons have passed as I have gone for lunch at many of the international restaurants scattered throughout Itaewon, the most “western” area of the city. Thai one day, Indian, Greek, Malaysian, Turkish or Italian the next. Every so often we’ll grab a beer and a burger at Smokey’s Saloon….I guess you could call that an “American” restaurant.

Valentines day was spent with Natalie marveling at the metropolitan sprawl of Seoul from atop the Seoul tower. For as far as the eye can see, buildings weave in and out of mountains and valleys, over rivers and into the haze of the far-off expanse of the city. One sliver of it is the size of Manhattan. Here was a city so vast, so expansive, that I could not even comprehend seeing it all, even within my two months here.

Atop the tower I couldn’t help but wonder…in the six years I have been living in New York City, how many times have I visited the Statue of Liberty? The Empire State building? Gone for a carriage ride through Central Park? Seen the cloisters, the Guggenheim, or the Whitney? How many times a day do we walk by some edifice, monument, or ‘place of interest’ simply staring at our iPod of talking on our phone? And if we forced ourselves to find something extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary, how many pages could we write?