I’ll see your week and raise you another week

In our experience, capital cities rarely warrant more than a few days of any travel schedule so we were surprised when LP recommended a visit of 5-7 days in Seoul.  Well, after our original 3-night stay turned into 6, we’ll even go one step further and say that Seoul is a city you could easily get lost in for a couple of weeks.

We climbed old fortress walls to the top of Mt Bugaksan where we were rewarded with stunning views of the city and made a new Korean friend who acted as our tour guide for the rest of the day (pointing out the nearby presidential palace, the bullet holes in a nearby tree and more).  In return, I promised to give his daughter advice on going to U.S. law school.  Little does he know that I’ll likely persuade her that law school is a waste of time and his dreams of a comfortable retirement will be crushed.

We stared in awe at the timbered roofs painted with brightly-colored, delicate patterns in the 15^th century Changdeokgung Palace.  The side trip to the “Secret Garden” was a lot less rewarding and with an additional entrance fee of 5000 won ($5) a piece mere highway robbery  (okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration but it certainly wasn’t worth the hype in negative 2 degree weather without an English-speaking guide).

We went to a performance of JUMP, a non-verbal show with Marx Brothers-like slapstick interwoven with unbelievably impressive martial arts, wandered through the Ssamzie-gil art gallery where I only bought one pair of earrings despite wanting 50 and admired the tokens of love that teenage Koreans leave at Seoul Tower in the form of wall tiles and locks with love notes attached.

We’ve also fallen in love with heated floors, hand sanitizers in the subway, dumplings made by Korean grandmothers and getting lost in small alleyways full of hidden treasures.

Polite people + PETA pleasures = paradise

Holy crap, we didn't think it was possible to be blown away by any place anymore, but Seoul knocked our socks off. From the first moment we arrived in the city by airport bus, freezing cold and lost, a kindly businessman out on a date stopped and asked, in perfect English, whether we needed help finding our way. Call me cynical but the last time a friendly couple offered to "help" it was to charge me to fix a 3-inch spike they themselves put in the tire of my sister's car. Evidently, this guy had nothing up his sleeve because his directions got us to our guesthouse in no time. And this continued to happen every time we paused to gain our bearings, with one gentleman looking so genuinely concerned for us that we started to walk decisively just to alleviate the guilt we felt for worrying him so much. At one point all of Starbucks stopped working to look up directions to Changuimun for us on their mobile devices and a girl volunteered to walk us five minutes down the street (in her apron) to the actual bus station! Unbelievable.

Another old man approached us idling in a park and, upon finding out we were from the States, told us how thankful (pronounced tank-ful) he was for the Americans who came to help South Korea in the 1950s when they were starving. I didn't think anyone liked America anymore!*

Wandering through Insadong back alleys, we came across a number of appealing restaurants and found ourselves trying to match Korean characters on Lonely Planet with the signs in front of us (with little success). Choosing Yetchatjip, a traditional tea house, we ascended rickety wooden steps and slipped off our shoes before seating ourselves on floor mats. The chrysanthemum tea was divine, the double harmony tea more like sweetened motor oil. But the ambience couldn't be beaten: songbirds chirped above our heads and flitted freely from perch to perch in the tea house. We don't know how they kept them from crapping in the teacups but somehow it worked.

Our next stop brought us to Sanchon, a restaurant whose menu is based on food Buddhist monks would eat: a vegetarian's paradise, like much of Seoul. Twenty courses of mostly unidentifiable greens, including traditional kimchi (pickled cabbage), radishes, porridge, soybean stew, wild roots, fried kelp, and something I like to call mushroom twizzlers. All of it may have turned me on to vegetarianism (and simultaneously turned Tia off).

Also, everyone here speaks basic English and many speak well. Those who can only manage a few words, apologize (in English) and make us feel like real asses for not doing a better job of learning their language. It's surprising that few other Americans have discovered this place.

* - to be fair, he said the older generation was thankful but that the younger generation didn't feel the same way.