GOING SOUTH

My second morning, after another wet and frustrating encounter with the shower from which I emerged rather dirtier than when I had entered, I packed my belongings and then slipped my arms through the heavy shoulder straps of my backpack. I was leaving on a trip to see the other cities of Korea. Walking with my pack on in that small room proved difficult, and I ended up on my knees to crawl through the low doorway.

The Ajimah at the Inn Dae Won seemed sad to see me go. She was a motherly if somewhat shrill woman and took a strong interest in her guests. She asked me in short rifle bursts of broken English about where I was going, and, more to the point, when I might return. I had to disappoint her because frankly I hoped not to return. Seoul hadn’t exactly captured my affections, and I was hoping one of these smaller towns would prove a more pleasant place to live and work. Perhaps I would settle down in Taegu which friends had recommended, or Pusan, the country’s second largest city and principal port town.

Nevertheless, I felt a twinge of sadness and regret upon stepping out of the inn and into the alley. I had become fond of my tiny little hovel. It now offered, if not cleanliness or convenience, at least the comfort of the familiar.

It was still early, yet most of the restaurants immediately around the Inn Dae Won were already doing a brisk business serving salarymen the various dishes considered effective hangover cures. The pharmacy on the corner was also busy, full of people cracking open and swallowing in one gulp the small brown bottles of vitamin tonics. The Koreans had great faith in a vast array of cures and remedies both traditional and modern.

Powerful odours, pumped into the alley from the ventilation fans of the various restaurants, surrounded me as I walked. It took some time for my Western nose to become accustomed to the smells of these strong Korean dishes, especially in the morning. In large part, I never did adapt and certain alleys, known collectively as Death Alleys because of their tendency to trap strong smells, I learned to avoid.

I planned on taking the train and had left what I thought was plenty of daylight hours to cover the roughly 300 kilometres from Seoul to Taegu. I was surprised to learn Taegu was so close. On my map it was located close to the extreme south eastern corner, almost as far from Seoul as you can get in the country. But the entire Korean peninsula is only one thousand kilometres from north to south. And with South Korea consisting of less than half that, no city can be very far away from any other.

I emerged from the alleys at the large and busy Kwanghwamun intersection very close to the giant Sejong Cultural Centre. I was surprised to find many of the Koreans wearing cloth masks over their faces, whether for protection from the cold or pollution I didn’t know. Above the intersection stood a large stone statue of Korean hero Admiral Yi, famous for his armoured turtle boats and the defeat of the Japanese fleet in the sixteenth century. Behind him, the many lanes of Sejong-no came to a T-intersection at the Kyongbok Palace grounds, the seat of the 500-year Choson dynasty. Obscuring any direct view of the palace was a large building currently housing the national museum collection. Originally built as the seat of colonial administration by the occuppying Japanese in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it is still a source of contention amongst the nationalistic Koreans many of whom wish to see it torn down. And towering above and behind all of these buildings was a conical mountain still covered in early morning mist and cloud. I felt a great relief when I saw it. It was beautiful and inspiring and if I didn’t quite feel welcome in Korea yet, I took the mountain as an omen that I would make my way. Ironically, when weeks later I tried to climb it I found it was a fortified position and I was turned back, by armed soldiers, barbed wire and machine gun nests.

I descended into an underpass like those at every Seoul intersection built to ferry pedestrians safely under the relentless and chaotic traffic above. The steps down were arranged in a fan shape, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom where a sloping tunnel began. The tunnel was divided in half by a row of pillars down the middle and between the pillars many people had set up small stalls. The first man had a table filled to overflowing with ties. People crowded around rummaging through them. Farther on, a woman sat on the floor surrounded with plastic wind-up toys. Beside her, an electric train wound endlessly around its figure eight track. All the items were priced with nice round figures of one or two thousand won.

A considerable crowd stood around a man selling very large illustrated books on Chinese medicine. He was the loudest and most energetic of the hawkers, rapidly turning the pages to illustrate all the knowledge found inside and slapping his open palm hard onto each page. He punctuated each sentence by picking up the book and slamming it onto the table top. It had the effect of a small explosion. The worth of the book was somehow related to its great size and weight. Heavy with knowledge, pregnant with the accumulated wisdom of millennia, it was a book, he seemed to be saying, that will sit on a shelf and practically bend it with its authority. The audience stood unmoving and seemingly uninterested, though their ranks swelled with every minute as many a passerby joined the ranks of the curious. Most seemed lost in thought, paying little attention to the sales pitch. Their eyes were for the most part trained on the floor. I felt sorry for the man to put out so much energy and effort and have such little chance of a sale. I pictured him returning to his wife and family that evening, sad, tired and broke. But I had underestimated the cult of consumerism which had descended on Korea. When he finished his presentation with a final resounding slam of the book that sent dust high into the air, the men came to life and charged his table to buy. They were almost desperate to buy and he sold almost half his visible stock.

The streets, markets, subway systems and even buses were filled with individuals like him selling small gadgets such as collapsing coat hangers or hand held fans. I recognized the sales pitch from late night television in Canada, “It slices, it dices, it fits in the palm of your hand. Now how much would you pay? Wait, there’s more! If you buy now you’ll get absolutely free this…”

The subway sellers would jump and run and shout, all the while slapping their products against their hand or thigh to show their durability, whipping them out and collapsing them back into their package like a magician’s practiced illusion. All the while with studied indifference the commuters would keep their attention carefully placed on the floor in front of them. Not by the movement of an eye would they betray that they were listening. But without fail, these master salesmen would make dozens of sales all for that nice round figure of one or two thousand won.

My favourite was a young man I saw several times on the buses selling a new space age cleaner. He wasn’t content to just talk about the merits of the cleaner. He would whip out a rag and demonstrate its power with deft strokes that wiped clean various greasy and dirty metal fixtures. Once he even wrote his name on the ceiling. I kept an eye open on buses for small perfectly white and clean squares knowing that the cleaner salesman had recently been there.

The tunnel eventually ended in a large underground area. There were three tunnels, besides the one I had entered, to choose from. After watching the salesmen, I was disoriented and unsure which tunnel crossed the intersection in the direction I needed to go. I chose one and emerged beside the Kyobo building, which housed one of the best bookstores in the city and the Australian embassy. But I was no nearer the train station. I went back down and chose one of the remaining two tunnels. It too was the wrong one. That left only one, but I was reluctant to go down and up yet again. I stayed aboveground, took my life in my hands and ran across traffic provoking a storm of outraged honking and verbal abuse.

The sidewalks were thick with people, making it impossible for me to walk in a straight line. I was constantly pushed aside even by those coming up behind me. Those coming towards me kept to their course unerringly and I had to give way or risk collision. I found this amusing for the first while, but my patience soon wore thin. When next I spotted someone coming directly towards me, I resolved to hold my ground. It was difficult to do. Every instinct I had urged me to politely give way, but I resisted. The man slammed directly into me. I was prepared this time and had leaned into the collision. He had not and almost fell down. I said “Excuse me!” very loudly and deliberately.

I immediately felt very bad for what I had done. The poor man’s face twisted into an expression of extreme fright. He bowed repeatedly saying in English, “I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry” and then dashed away. I learned later that much of the pushing and shoving behavior that I found rude or at the very least impolite was quite accepted and no cause for anger or impatience. One book I read explained it this way. In Confucian society there are five important relationships: king-minister, father-son, husband-wife, older-younger, and friend-friend. Anyone outside these relationships, such as the stranger on the street is so unimportant as not to be noticed at all. A Korean will walk through a crowd brushing aside people as I would walk through a forest and brush aside tree branches and bushes. The branch does not take offence at being moved aside, and, in Korea, I found neither did people. One day, I even saw a man physically lift a child off her feet and deposit her several feet to the left out of his way. When a stranger such as myself suddenly takes exception to being moved or pushed and shouts, “Excuse me” it is to them as if a bush had suddenly found voice. They would react first with surprise then apologize and then relapse into puzzlement, unsure of what it was they had done wrong.

My path to the train station took me directly to the large City Hall Plaza, site of many a spectacular confrontation between student demonstrators and riot police. On the west side of the plaza sat the entrance gate to Toksu Palace, originally constructed in the mid-1400’s. Any foreigner passing there was sure to provoke choruses of “hello’s” from the gaggles of school girls waiting to meet their friends for an afternoon on the grassy palace grounds. On the south side of the plaza stands the Seoul Plaza Hotel, the stairwell of which is a good vantage point for watching the riots down below. The north side of the plaza is the City Hall itself.

In searching for a way across the plaza, I stumbled on a series of pictures on display outside City Hall showing the city of Seoul, yesterday and today. These were fascinating and showed how rapidly Seoul had grown from a large village with dirt roads and picturesque single-story dwellings into one of the largest cities on the planet. The intent of the display was obviously to show how quickly Korea had modernized. The yesterday pictures were meant to illustrate something bad and the today pictures were good. But I far preferred yesterday. Stone gates and walls where now there was cement and steel. Burros where now there were buses. Old men in flowing clothes and high hats walking on canes where now there were businessmen in suits and school children in uniforms. It looked a very pleasant place to live during the first half of this century.

I descended one of the tunnels at random, passing uncomfortably between the heavily armed columns of riot police flanking each of the entranceways. I found their jet black Darth Vader-style helmets and unmoving vigilance unnerving, though I towered over even the largest of them. Many walked around in pairs checking the identification cards of passing students. Reinforcements lounged in the many buses scattered around the plaza and here and there trying to look inconspicuous were what I called the sneaker cops, those in jean jackets and running shoes whose job it was to run down fleet-footed bad elements. Their attempts to blend in with the crowd were useless as long as the ends of the heavy riot clubs stuck out from under their short jackets.

The riot police began to eye me suspiciously, as, for the next twenty minutes, I continually resurfaced in their ranks to check my bearings and go down once more into the bewildering underground tunnels for another attempt at crossing the plaza. At City Hall, two of Seoul’s four subways lines, the red and the green met underground. The red line was the first built in Seoul. It consisted of only nine underground stops, but it connected with an above ground rail system that stretched west to the coastal town of Inch’on the site of General MacArthur’s famous landing during the Korean war, north to Uijongbu, and south to the walled city Suwon. The green line was the second built, and its nearly fifty stops encircle a large part of the city. Their meeting at City Hall created a vast underground network of subway access tunnels, shopping areas and the basement floors of the many hotels and office buildings. By the time I found the right exit point, my legs were aching from the continual climbing and descending.

Continuing south and realizing with every step that it was much further to the train station than it seemed on my map, I next passed Namdaemun, or south gate, built in 1398, one of the original nine in the wall that once surrounded Seoul. There was a picture of this same gate in the series at City Hall but back when it was used. A dirt track ran through the arched gateway and the huge colorful roof loomed above. A stone wall attached on either side. It is ironic that this gate, which originally channeled and controlled the slow moving traffic of its day, now sat blocking traffic in the middle of the intersection. Cars and buses were forced to go around this “National Treasure #1.”

 

 

 

Tags: City Hall, Inn Dae Won, Korea, Korea - First Days Teaching English, train