flickering pictures

It was a long, long haul, but it was so worth it.

It took one short flight from Montreal, one busted airplane hydraulics system, a six-hour wait in Detroit, a looong trans-Pacific flight over Manitoba, Yellowknife and Alaska to Tokyo, and a mad scramble through Japanese security to catch a delayed (for our benefit — though the other passengers didn’t seem pleased) flight to Seoul. But we made it, and man, what a place.

We landed around 11:00 p.m. local time and hopped a taxi to my buddy’s place at Beumgye (unfortunately pronounced “bum-gay”) Station. Every taxi driver in the city has a GPS screen mounted on his dash, and our driver’s system kept giving him frantic flashing warnings to slow down from his average speed of 155 km/h to the legal limit of 100, which he happily ignored.

A word about GPS systems here — they’re everywhere, but their usefulness is limited by the fact that very few streets have names, and very few buildings have addresses. So when you need to get to a location, you give the system (or taxi driver) the name of the nearest major building (which is more than likely named after Korean conglomerates Samsung, LG or Hyundai), and if you don’t know how to get the rest of the way to your destination, you’re in for a good bit of wandering until you find it.

Anyway, we get to Kevin’s, dump the backpack and head out for some late-night kimchi at a 24-hour restaurant not far from his place. On the way, we pass a bar full of tipsy-looking folk — Kevin says drunken Korean men are the nicest people on Earth — and the area seems remarkably safe, even though we’re not in one of Seoul’s best neighbourhoods. Crime, apparently, is mostly unheard of — partially because it’s so rare, and partially because when it does happen, the newspapers don’t report it, so as to keep from shaming the country.

With our bellies full of yummy fish and cabbage, we’re one chess game away from collapsing in an unconscious heap of exhaustion. I don’t win the game — I’ve thrown away a knight in a sleepy moment of thoughtlessness — but I’m more than happy to finally get to sleep.

Two full days later, this place is really starting to grow on me — as much for Koreans’ quirkiness as for their extreme friendliness. Every one of my mangled attempts at a greeting or a thank-you in Korean results in a big grin from the unfortunate recipient, and the few Koreans I meet who speak English are more than happy to give us directions. (As opposed to people in India, who happily give you the wrong directions 80 per cent of the time.)

Kevin tells me that there’s no such thing as a casual interest here — you’re either completely ambivalent or all-out obsessed. This is not a country of half-measures, and there’s a firm belief that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing not only well but so well that it consumes your every waking moment, and precludes sleep, food and socializing until you’ve gained complete mastery of your chosen hobby. Video games are one example — people have died of dehydration because they refused to pause their games. There are two 24-hour television stations that broadcast nothing but Starcraft, an old PC game that came out in Canada a decade ago, and teams of teenagers compete nationally in Starcraft championships. They’re elevated to rockstar status when they win, and suffer soul-crushing humiliation when they don’t.

And of course, work is a national obsession as well. Everyone in Seoul seems utterly exhausted — the product of long days, an unbelievable work ethic and the epitome of dog-eat-dog society. Work is life for scads and scads of people here — we hit rush hour on the subway at 8:00 p.m., and saw a school bus bringing kids home half an hour later. Kevin works until 10:00 helping 13-year-olds cram for the university exams they will take in five years, and if they fail a quiz, they show up to class black and blue the next day. Failure is not an option here, no matter the price of success, but while that can seem awful, it also explains the incredible standard of living that many Koreans have managed — this is a country that 55 years ago was embroiled in civil war, and that since then has risen from one of Asia’s poorest countries to global power status. Today it’s the world’s 12th largest economy.

Alright, that’s more than enough for one day — time to splash some water on my face and get ready for an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ. Watch this space for another update in a day or two.

Take good care,
Mark

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