Seoul Searching

With a 3 day holiday this month, I thought I’d visit another country in Asia to get another angle on the country I love, before I up and leave Japan later this year. I’d heard good things about Seoul, and seeing as I love Korean food (the first time I ate it was here in Japan), thought I’d go and check out the world’s 6th largest city, after Moscow, Shanghai and Nottingham.

Seoul was totally different to what I was expecting. I thought it’d be like Hong Kong, not that I’d been there either, but as I imagine it would be - very modern and clean with towering sky scrapers all around and men with long flowing beards doing flying kicks everywhere. Infact, some of it reminded me a lot of Bangkok, with street stalls selling all kinds of unidentifiable foodstuffs and fake designer goods galore.

Then in the more trendy shopping areas, it was a bit like Europe with small individual boutiques in a quiet suburb, and in the centre it was like a mini New York, with huge department stores, trees and high rise buildings.

Infact, I didn’t know what to make of it since there is hardly any sightseeing in Seoul, so I guess the only thing that defines it are the gleaming towers of nuclear warheads up north.

Alike Thailand, taxis are cheap, so we got them everywhere rather than using trains, and everyday drove past a long painted wall celebrating the Seoul Olympics. I didn’t manage to get a very good shot, but there’s something about the way that they paint them rather than using graphics or photos, that looks so communist!

The food was awesome. The Koreans love their meat, and every meal at a restaurant comes with a load of free plates of condiments, mostly drenched in the spicy fire-red sauce they use in every dish, and always including Kim-chi, the spicy national dish of Korean cabbage, often confused with Kim-Jong, the spicy north-korean president.

The most famous dish is bibinba, which is basically rice, vegetables, an egg yolk and the spicy sauce in a hot stone bowl, which cooks everything and chars the rice slightly. The national drink is Makkoli, a rice liquor which comes in plastic bottles and tastes like alcoholic Milk of Magnesia.

The restaurant gives you a massive pair of scissors to cut up the meat, which is cooked on a kind of griddle which lets all the grease run off. I didn’t see one fat Korean person, and everyone has really clear skin, apparently due to the nutrients in the spicy red sauce which covers everything.

Speaking of skin, I decided to try out the traditional Korean body scrub, which involves being laid out face up on a foam mattress, wearing nothing but the Emperor’s (Kim-Jong’s) Clothes, and having the skin scratched off you with a brillo pad until you can almost see your bones. Apart from that one time Rich and I had run out of Vaseline, this has got to be the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced naked. The masseur expects you to look surprised when he shows you the pile of grey dead skin he’s amassed after feverishly scraping your body like he’s lathing a piece of wood, but I was expecting there to be far more blood. This is seriously painful - I can imagine it being used for torture further north, for American tourists with sun burn.

It was a very unnerving experience lying butt naked on a bed with a bloke sanding you down, putting all his weight into it, arching forward with his face passing about 10cms from your groin at every swoop, and due to his aggressive movement, your tackle swaying from left to right...praying the brillo pad doesn’t get any closer. It almost spelt the end of my semi-naked modeling career.