Seoul Summer

(I have written a bit on our experiences living is Seoul.  Here is one:)

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Demon Summer

Nearly all our Korean experience is limited to Seoul and its immediate surroundings. Of course this area contained 22 million people so there should be SOMETHING of interest here. For example I saw some stores today with interesting names:

* ‘Day Underwear’ – (and at night we wear. . .?)

* ‘Professional Cosmetics’ – Not unusual except that it was the only store in the Amateur Building.

* ‘Need’ – A clothing store not afraid of the direct marketing approach.

* ‘Girls’ – In Seoul this should be obvious, yet their only business seemed to be the sale of yes, you guessed it, balloons. Is it too crass to suggest that ‘Need’ and ‘Girls’ form a joint venture?

Speaking of places of commerce, Seoul would be nothing without its coffee shops. No, I mean that literally: every building in Seoul has at least one coffee shop on the inside. Take away the coffee shops and we would have a structural engineering crisis of biblical proportions with zillions of caffeine-free craters dotting the cityscape, and millions of coffee-refugees wandering aimlessly, knowing full well that it would make no sense to wander aimed.

These shops cater to the young, the young at heart, the quasi-young, near-young and post-young. OK, they cater to just about anybody, but the people that actually GO are twenty-something women. This causes a critical mass of male hormones to gather just outside coffee shops; creating the dreaded Testosterone Vortex.

Another Korea exists outside Seoul — some say the real Korea. Like Japan, where the citizens refer to Tokyo as if it were a different place altogether, so too the Koreans believe that Seoul is a different place from Tokyo.

We had an opportunity to see some of this non-Seoul part of Korea when we took a day trip to a theme park called Everland about 70 kilometers south of the city.

But first the weather report. I mentioned the tenacity with which winter grips this country and how gradually Spring comes on. I coined this Creeping Spring, but the locals refer to it as the far more elegant Winter Envy Spring. On this trip we discovered another ancient saying in Korea that I just made up: Summer Crush Spring. Just two weeks ago it was 8C. Yesterday 28C. It reminded me of that little cartoon a number of years ago called Bambi Vs Godzilla. Only in this version the little fawn of spring takes its first tentative steps only to be flattened into fawn paste by the descending foot of the Godzilla of summer. The End.

Everland is so-named because it is on the Event Horizon of the theme park Universe: it takes forever and ever and ever to get there and once there, in the best spirit of the Hotel California, you can’t ever leave.

Actually it’s a nicely done theme park with an extremely nifty Korean culture and history park next door. Of course the kids see culture as a big open space with statues, fountains and temples, and history as something that’s waiting to happen someday.

“Ride” sounds innocuous enough until you realize that many of the people in line at The Mach 3 Telly Tubby Adventure ride were actually astronauts-in-training hoping to get in one ride without being accompanied by “Ralph”. I might be mistaken but I believe a large percentage of Everland consists of graveyards. I have come to use the words “ride” and “death” interchangeably.

Like many parks this one had a petting Zoo, manifested as a large enclosed space where animals and people intermingled, and where kids could have their limbs pulled off by carnivorous ducks or be trampled by herds of brainless sheep. There were two other cages in the enclosure. The first contained a fairly bad-looking animatronic cow, whose grotesque head and jaw movements reminded me somehow of a mutant Howdy-Doody. I guess it was penned to protect it from living things with good taste. The second large cage read “Welcome to Toni” in letters one foot high. In this cage stalked a thin, dirty and slightly insane chicken. I thought, is THIS Toni, or did it EAT Toni?

#Korea #travel