I just returned from my first trip to Korea. I was only there a single full day and two nights but it was sort of a reconnaissance mission for me. I plan on studying Korean there next summer and the summer after, and hopefully will return thereafter for an extended period of research, but I wanted to get a quick feel for the place before I return to the US and begin my Phd program in the fall. Tickets were cheap and my friend Suhee happened to have her birthday this Friday, so the timing worked out great.
Obviously, being in a country less than 48 hours doesn’t allow for either much sightseeing or immersion into the local culture, but my short time there left me with a rich collection of memories, and the usual assortment of FOB (fresh off the boat) observations.
I won’t post a single long entry here covering my trip in all its gloriously mundane details but instead make a few short spastic entries mentioning things that caught my eye. Basically I spent all my time in downtown Seoul, staying in a cheap “motel” (can you have a motel that isn’t on a drivable street and doesn’t have a parking lot?) called Chung Jin Motel (청진모텔) in the middle of the Jongno district (종로). It was very clean and the owner was very friendly. Suhee’s sister introduced it to me since the owner could speak Japanese and some English. Unfortunately, even his Japanese was actually worse than my Korean, if that is possible, so it took us a while to accomplish even simple communication. My biggest problem is that even when I can say what I want to say in Korean, I can’t make heads or tails of the reply to any question I ask. Apparently, the hotel owner’s Japanese had a similar problem. We discovered this on my second and last evening and got through to each other when I spoke to him in Korean and he spoke to me in Japanese.
I spent most of my time hanging with Suhee, and for some time with her older sister, who I had first met in Beijing when Suhee and I both studying at Qinghua university. The three of us had lunch together yesterday, when they introduced me to a delicious summer dish consisting of a soup with a chicken in it, stuffed with rice and ginseng roots.
Meeting them both for a meal brought back some memories. I first got a really strong urge to learn Korean when the three of us met in China some four years ago. You see, Suhee and I communicate in Chinese, in which she is pretty fluent. Her sister, on the other hand, is fluent in Japanese, which she uses in her work at a Japanese company. Thus, any one of us can understand another fine in exactly one language, but we can never have a conversation in a language we all speak well. Experiencing this frustration again yesterday, I was happy to learn that Suhee’s older sister is now learning Chinese. Since I’m learning Korean we look forward to seeing what language triumphs when the dust settles at our next meeting in a year or two.
Overall, I ate lots of great food, got plenty of chances to embarrass myself by attempting to speak Korean, and walked around several districts of downtown Seoul. Anytime I unfolded a Seoul city map, only a minute or two would pass before someone offered to help me find my way, sometimes in fantastic English. I suffered from a number of linguistic brain farts, especially since I was speaking in Chinese with Suhee. After buying an ice cream (may I recommend the delicious strawberry frozen yoghurt 요맘때, made by 빙그레 which was so good I had four in one afternoon) I accidently said 谢谢 in Chinese to an old street vendor. He replied in English, with an American accent, “What, are you from China or something?”
Signs and maps were very helpful and frequently had information in English. Also, I have never been to a city in my life in which it was this easy to find a bus to the airport – there were stops all around downtown clearly labeled as such. In fact, overall, I was really impressed with the public transportation system, both buses and subways. All I knew about Seoul came from what my friends told me, or from what I had read through blogs like the fantastic site by Antti Leppänen.
My remaining thoughts, observations, and unresolved puzzles I’ll post as short separate entries…