Seoul

We’re sitting across the aisle from each other on our way to Amsterdam from Beijing, leaving Asia behind as we enter the final two months of our sabbatical. There’s a couple hours left before we land, and Alice has gone back to bed. I think these twelve-ish hour flights might be my favorite; they’re a perfect length for having a meal, getting a good amount of sleep, and working a bit on whatever it is I need to do without distractions (admittedly, a good business class redemption helps with this).

We had originally debated whether to split our time in Korea between Seoul and another place, maybe Busan or Jeju Island. In the end, we settled for an extended stay in Seoul and I’m glad we took a slower pace. We got a little bit of everything: an interesting trip to the DMZ, plenty of good food and drink, cherry blossoms, and time for Alice to see the dermatologist and for me to log back into work for the first time in months. It feels nice to be at the point where we no longer feel like we need to see attractions for the sake of seeing attractions, and to be able to take the time to get a bit more in tune with the rhythms of daily life.

National stories

One unexpected belief I’ve picked up during this sabbatical is that a well-taught history class, one where one learns to critically synthesize conflicting information into a reasonable guess at the truth, might be the single most important part of someone’s education. I emailed my high school history teacher a few weeks ago to tell him that and to thank him. This thought came from hearing countries and people tell their stories, some familiar—in Hiroshima, at a prison for POWs of the “American War” in Hanoi—and some new, like in the Bolivian town razed by Chile in a long-ago war. Nowhere on our trip did this seem clearer than at the DMZ, a place where the story is still being written, furiously, in real-time, by both sides.

Comfort food

Between more stews and broths than we could keep track of and the hot coals of tabletop barbecue, there aren’t many cuisines that feel cozier than Korean. We had grilled pork belly and kimchi stew on a day that felt just perfect for it: the sort of day that comes just before winter turns to early spring, chilly but not cold; damp and heavily overcast; the outside world never getting beyond a muted gray tone, even by the mid-afternoon.

Geonbae

We haven’t done much drinking on this sabbatical. But Alice thought if there was anywhere to drink, it would be in Korea. We had a cocktail served in one of those plasma containers you find at science centers that make your hair stand up when you touch them; a gimbap drink that tasted more gimbap-y than the actual gimbaps we had the next night; and one of my favorite cocktails of all time, one that lived in the far corner of the light/complex quadrant of the graph printed on the bar’s menu: whiskey, duck fat, balsamic vinegar, fizz, and beer foam on top.

Afterparty

Instead of dinner one day, we spent a couple of hours at Bar Cham making our way through their cocktail menu. Afterwards, we walked through a neighborhood east of the palace and Alice pulled us into a 24h photo booth store. I’m not sure there’s all that much more to say.

Starfield Mall

Early in our stay, Alice showed me an Instagram reel of a five-day itinerary for Seoul which was roughly entirely based around shopping, and I initially thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t, and even though we didn’t spend much time at all in malls, Alice still ended up bringing two Longchamp bags filled with skincare products and cute trinkets back to her mom as we passed through Beijing on our way to Amsterdam.

Shot on a new SD card

The peak of the cherry blossom season was forecast for our last day in Seoul, but a cold snap during our stay pushed that timeline back a little. Even still, we found some pretty amazing blooms that almost looked like waterfalls of flowers pouring into a quiet stream in the Seoul National Cemetery. I had originally planned for us to visit two or three sites across the city (“I” being the key word here; Alice is unfathomably unmoved by cherry blossoms), but we only ended up making it here, just in time for golden hour, after a detour to an electronics store because I’d forgotten my SD card at home. For somewhat different reasons, neither of us had any regrets about skipping the usual cherry blossom hotspots like Yeouido and Seokchon.

Liberation Day

Trump’s so-called Liberation Day was our third day in Seoul, and with it came some of the most exciting markets since 2020. I spent a couple of early mornings and late evenings logged in to work for the first time since September, and it was genuinely exciting to be back in the game. The feeling was a far cry from what I felt checking Bloomberg in Hakodate on Election Day in November, when I think I wasn’t quite ready to go back to that world. I did get starkly reminded of how much time and focus a job can take up and the effort it takes to balance life and work; between our travelers’ activities while New York was asleep and being logged in once they woke up, I quickly found myself hopelessly behind on my usual sabbatical errands and scrambling to catch up.

Taking our time

We were struck by how much of a difference staying in one place for an extended period of time makes. With ten days in a place like Seoul, we could visit less-traveled corners of the city even if we took a relaxed pace through the city. We found ourselves in the basement of a local market, getting directions from a fishmonger under fluorescent lights; at a park where Alice was aghast at the fact that only couples were picnicking on the lawn (“where are the friend groups?!”) and we were both surprised by unexpected cherry blossoms and live violin music; and among riot police snacking on choco-pies as they awaited the verdict from the Supreme Court on the former president’s attempted coup (the last time we were in Seoul, the coup had just hit the newswires as our plane took off, and was over by the time we landed in Dubai). For the first time since Japan, we felt like we understood something new about the culture of a place and its people from, even if just a little, from simple osmosis and time.