Sons of Loki

20:25, Seoul time. Said goodbye to Joo-sung and So-jin, our illustrious RAs. Boarded the bus, the five of us: Dare, Rebecca, Grace, Rosie, and me. Only passengers, only people to watch the banal Korean variety show on the TV at the front of the coach.

Watched skyscrapers float past the window, neon totems of light. Another coach slides by on the highway, a fluorescent island in the night. A brief film reel of windows, friends laughing and playing, vignettes streaming past. I wonder if I’ve caught the eye of my counterpart on the other side of the glass, but they’re sleeping.
“Just Like Honey” on the iPod.

Mere photographs cannot capture this scene. Empty airport buses go by; the drivers must be looking forward to a warm bed.

We got on the plane about 23:30, a shiny new Boeing 777. Walked through first class – such luxury! – to our seats in economy, which weren’t bad either. Widescreen touchscreen LCDs with digital video on-demand in every seat back, a far cry from the tiny, fuzzy TVs I remember from my flight to Japan all those years ago.

“B777 has never had a fatal accident,” I scribble in my notebook. The most dangerous parts of flying are take-off and landing, I tell myself. Planes do not drop out of the sky at cruise altitude. Even so, I watch the lightning blaze in the pitch-black clouds below us with trepidation. Better to be above it than in it, I imagine.
It is 2am Korea time but still the afternoon in the UK. To avoid jet lag, I must feel awake. I watch The Green Mile, a three-hour slog of a movie, and enjoy it, but I am happy to doze off listening to Richard Hawley on my iPod.

I do not sleep for long. Sleeping on an airliner is like eating on one; lots of small portions, not entirely satisfying. Next to me, the middle-aged Korean couple are cuddled up, asleep. It’s alright for some. I crack open one of my emergency cans of Dr Pepper and offer a swig to Grace and Rosie, seated in front and behind me respectively.
I wake up, with comic timing, at the sound of “Breakfast?” Eat. We land in the darkness

and wait in the airport until it is time for Grace, Rosie and Dare to catch their flight to London Heathrow. We say our farewells. It is just me and Rebecca now, with a long four hours to wait for our flight. We wait. I think about buying some duty free, but thankfully for my bank balance, my card is rejected.

The flight back to Stansted is delayed. We take off, something like an hour overdue. This is my fifteenth takeoff, I conclude:
2 to Japan, 1 in Japan, 2 to get back
1 to the US, 4 in the US, 1 to get back
2 to Korea, 2 to get back

Eating lunch – or breakfast, it’s hard to maintain temporal contiguity when it comes to food while travelling – I start thinking about who I’m going to put on the Acknowledgements page if I ever finish a novel. And then I think – who wouldn’t I put on there? In some small way just about everyone I’ve met or spoken to or even seen has contributed, in some small way, to this book I’m writing. I thought about people like Carly Brandt or Mike Fenton from way back in the day, people who were great friends despite the fact I only knew them from the internet. I haven’t thought about them in ages, haven’t spoken to them in even longer. What became of them, I wonder?

The fellow in the seat across from us is stretched out across three seats, sleeping. Has he bought them all? A guy in the seat in front of him, oozing cool, is reading a Bill Hicks biography. Doesn’t Bill Hicks look awfully like Peter Buck from R.E.M.?, I wonder.

We land at about 3pm. I meet my dad and sister and drive home. It doesn’t occur to me that I was in Korea the day before. It doesn’t occur to me that I’ve been in Korea for a month and now everything is strange and unfamiliar. It is the end, regardless.

Sitting in the apartment in the afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that I was spending my penultimate day in Seoul playing bloody SimCity 4. This was ridiculous. I decided to head to Dongdaemun market, about which I had heard a lot.

The titular Dongdaemun, a big old gate destroyed by arson in 2003. Although it doesn’t show. Perhaps I was misinformed.

Maybe I got there too late, as most of the stalls were packing up as I got there, or maybe I was in the wrong place. Either way I spent a leisurely 45 minutes browsing the stalls, picking up a t-shirt in nifty MARPAT camo for 10,000w (shrewdly negotiating from the original 12,000w), a shirt combining gratuitous English with gratuitous Korean for 5,000w (from an Arabian-looking guy in the subway who was selling shirts with a cartoon Jesus on them winking) and a no-name-but-strangely-stylish watch for 15,000w (expertly bartered down from 20,000w).

It started to rain, so I got the train back to Dongjak station, walking through the brand new Line 9 extension corridor which still had that new-station smell on it. The four of us guys left went to a nearby galbi restaurant we’d been to occassionally for delicious meat barbecued outside by us. As we left, the entire staff (it’s clearly a close-knit, family-run place) came out to give us our farewells, the patriarch warmly shaking my hand. I was rather touched. If/when I return to Seoul, hopefully next year, I will be sure to drop in on these guys.

Back at the flat, Joo-sung said we could head up on the roof, and who was I to disagree?

Creepy!

Bizarre!

Coming to the end of my time in Korea, with a scant two days left. I’m not entirely sure what I’ve been up to since my last update, but here’s a rough outline:

Finished up our Korean language education, which has been educational and entertaining! We only just touched upon grammar, but it appears quite interesting, remarkably similar to Japanese.

On Wednesday Oscar, Tommi and I visited Lotte World, pretty much the main theme park actually in Seoul (Everland is bigger but outside the city) and it definitely has nothing to do with Disneyland, okay?

Blue-roofed fantasy castle? A monorail? I have no idea what you’re talking about

After the 70m, 60mph Gyro Drop, Oscar wasn’t quite the same. But I love these things.

Biggest indoor theme park in Asia, or something.

Oscar wasn’t feeling too great after the drop tower, so we went on some more sedate rides and tried some of the side attractions (I crashed a commercial airliner in Osaka and won a weird blue stuffed monkey by shooting it). It was pretty much standard theme park fare, although with peanut-butter-fried octopus on sale everywhere and a hot air balloon ride hanging from the cavernous ceiling, which was novel. Also the cute cartoon mascots have nothing to do with Disney, you understand.
Rode the indoor coaster, The French Revolution, which by 8pm had a very short queue (always a bonus). A good solid ride to begin with up to the stunningly tight indoor loop, but a bit extreme and painful towards the end, banging your skull between the headrests. We were going to try the outdoor water coaster, Atlantis Adventure, but a long queue and general tiredness put us off that.

Lotte World was full of couples, as evidenced by the graffiti scrawled everywhere on the walls by the queue areas with K.M.J <3 P.J.A and little heartfelt messages. It feels like couples are everywhere in Seoul, from teenagers to wrinkly husbands-and-wives, but particularly young adults. It’s my theory that with young people living in cramped apartments with their families, it’s more the norm for couples to escape the house for some time alone.

Yesterday, having had a final meal with everybody (again – we’re probably going to have another final meal on Sunday and Monday) six of us Leeds types went to the big, lovely, shiny gold 63 Building. Some concern at the price – even with the discount from 27,000 to 20,000 for a ticket to the aquarium and the observation deck – but eventually I plumped for it and we headed to the smallish aquarium.

These are fish that nibble dead skin off your fingers. A most curious experience.

In one of the tanks, this diver performed a rather incredible display of underwater gymnastics with fish and basking sharks swimming around her.

All in all, not quite as comprehensive as the one in Osaka, but then nothing is.

After that we headed up to the observation deck on the 60th floor, which also boasted a small but well-chosen art gallery with the likes of Mark Quinn, he of the frozen blood head.

After that, I caught a bus to the sauna where I met up with the other half of our group, Anya and Nabbie and Soo-jung. The sauna remains awesome. Slept reasonably well on hard marble floor (anything’s preferable to the heat and mosquitos buzzing around in my room at the apartment – you won’t believe how many bites I have on me now, but I count six on my right wrist alone).

Well, everyone’s still left.

Yesterday we had our first language class – good stuff which is already coming in useful – then a quick lunch with my RA before heading back to the flat to pack. Tomasz is staying at his friend’s, but Paul and I headed across to Joo-sung’s flat where I would join Dare, Oscar, and Tommi.

I know, it’s totally different right?

Today after the lesson Oscar, Dare and I wound up at Seoul Grand Park, a sizable place quite far from the city (and, consequently, refreshingly quiet).

I bought some “carbonated rice wine” (which turned out to be a lot like dongdongshu) and together we wandered. After politely declining a wandering salesman who tried to sell us a pair of socks for 3,000w (£1.50 – but just 10,000w for three pairs!) we headed down to a place by the lake and watched the cable cars go by. And got covered in gigantic ants, but it was pleasant regardless.

We wound up at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, which had an extensive free exhibition (which is to be commended).

The central space was a three-story high spiral walkway with thousands of tiny little individually-decorated squares on the walls around a central Nam June Paik installation, The More, The Better, with of hundreds of television screens displaying bizarre imagery, ranging from eyes to Mandlebrot sets to David Bowie.

Elton John, eat your heart out.

We could have stared at that all day, but we had a cursory wander around before getting the cable car back. Memories of childhood visits to Pleasurewood Hills flooded back.

Back in Seoul proper, we headed to a nice local restaurant for Korean BBQ, galbi. We sat outside under a clear sky (for once) at dusk. Everyone looked so happy to be there with their friends and families and colleagues.

whoops