SEOUL
POPULATION: 10,000,000
LOCATION: Seoul is 50 km form the border with North Korea
NEARBY CITIES: Incheon, Suwon
SEOUL -- It all seemed so laid-back, back then. It was only 1984 and I stopped over in Seoul for three days on a round-the-world jaunt to check out the hot food and the hot chicks I'd been told were all over the city (and all over you).
Having just passed through Bangkok and Taipei, Seoul didn't seem so special. It wasn't so much different from Taipei really. It was big, it was gray, it was a little bit smoggy.
And the people seemed OK. Again, compared with Taipei, they weren't so crazy. Getting around town was easy enough by taxi and the streets were OK for walking around.
The food was hot, and so were the women.
As I sat in the Windsor Bar at the massive Lotte Hotel in downtown Seoul, I made eye contact with a woman. Not just any woman. She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She spoke English, she dressed with style, she seemed intelligent.
"I'll come back to your hotel room for $100," she purred.
Man, I thought, she IS intelligent.
The flip side of this particular coin was "Hooker Hill" in Itaewon. Business was bad. During the course of my investigations as a journalist, and needing some alcohol, I stepped into a watering hole where two young women were keen to make my acquaintance and entertain me with their broken English.
Leaving was tough. It was 3 o'clock in the morning, business wasn't exactly booming, hands grabbed my arms.
"Don't go," they pleaded. I ran away before they started offering ME money.
I didn't go there again for 11 years -- and what a difference a decade can make.
Seoul boomed in the intervening years, partly due to the hosting of the Olympic Games in the summer of 1988 and partly due to the astounding economic growth of South Korea. The population of the capital more than doubled to around 10 million in those 11 years, and if the surrounding areas are taken into account, the figure is even higher.
The city itself suffered as a consequence. Pollution is horrific, the number of cars is way over what the city can handle and the streets now teem with people.
I'm walking up a street in the center of town with my Korean girlfriend (now my wife) on my first trip to South Korea for 11 years. A woman pokes her head out of a doorway.
"Prostitute! Prostitute!" she screams in Korean.
Ironically, no, I wanted to say, but I let it pass. The comment demonstrated, in one way, just how quickly the city -- and the country -- had grown up.
The young Seoul women of today are happy to date foreign guys, while the older generation still can't forget the not-so-distant past when virtually any Korean woman with a foreign guy was on the game.
I have two more encounters on the same trip: Once when a middle-aged guy told me I wasn't allowed to hold hands (with my girlfriend, not him), and once on a bus when I told my girlfriend to sit on my knee. A guy younger than myself came up and said in excellent English: "This is against Korean culture. This is wrong."
Well, is it OK if I pay her $100, I felt like saying. Instead, I told him to tell her what correct Korean culture was.
"She's Korean," I barked at him. "It's her culture as well. Tell her she can't do it." He slunk back to the back of the bus without saying another word.
Seoul today is not a comfortable place -- and in many ways. The people are not comfortable with themselves, they are not always comfortable with their city and they are not terribly comfortable with the modern world.
Seoul is a modern capital in a country that is struggling to break out of its conservative past. Much of the city is just plain ugly -- row after row of horrible tower blocks shooting 30 stories into the sky. Many of these concrete monstrosities are company housing, designed to be cheap and practical. Innovation, aesthetics and livability are factored out, not in.
And many of the more modern buildings in Seoul look as if they were put up overnight. Basically because they were. My wife used to live in a terrifying edifice that had crooked walls, external wiring and a plug near the shower. Soon after my return to Seoul, a nine-story department store in Seoul just fell down. This was followed by a section of one of the main bridges over the Han river in the center of Seoul (not to mention a gas explosion that killed scores of people in Taegu).
The pace of development outstripped capacity. Speed is Seoul's maxim. A South Korean will always prefer a shoddy job done quickly to a thorough job that takes time. Taxi drivers, bus drivers, any drivers belt around the city with no thought to how fast they are going and certainly no thought to anyone else on the road.
And the roads just can't keep up. New subway lines have been opened recently, but the roads are still jammed. The Koreans have discovered a type of freedom in their automobiles and they are disinclined to give it up. So, while the subways have improved access around town, taking a taxi is not always the most convenient way to travel.
Getting across the river can often be a headache. The Han river splits the city. The south side has been developed over the last couple of decades, while the north side represents the older part of town. They are quite different.
The Olympic Games sports complex is situated on the southeastern side of the city, just south of the river, near another Lotte Hotel and the Lotte World amusement park. While some of the streets are huge, there's still too much traffic and the buildings range from not terribly interesting to downright horrible.
North of the river, the terrain is quite hilly with Namsan mountain and the Seoul Tower dominating the landscape. The northern part of the city wraps itself around the mountain and spreads out from there. While the downtown area has its fair share of high-rise buildings, there are still plenty of low-rise dwellings all around the mountain. As you cross the river from the Kangnam area on the south bank, the skyline is dominated by the shining Hyatt Hotel and an abnormal amount of churches.
Tunnels run through the mountain, easing access to areas on the other side, but these can be chock full of smoke-belching vehicles at peak times (5 a.m. to 3 a.m.). Because of the significant elevation of certain areas, the subway does not reach all areas, so you have little choice but to grab a cab -- if you can.
As you near the city from the airport, you will notice a cluster of modern buildings on an area known as Youido Island. This houses the National Assembly building, TV stations and the Korea Stock Exchange, but the most noticeable building of them all is Seoul's (and Korea's) tallest -- the KLI 63 Building, a 60-story golden edifice that glistens impressively in the sunlight and offers a commanding view over the river, smog permitting.
While Seoul took an unhappy pounding at the hands of the Japanese, the North Koreans and the Chinese in the 20th century, older areas remain, including a couple of palaces that are well-worth visiting. Of course, older may still mean postwar, but there are still pockets of Seoul that have character, although you can't help but think their lifespan is limited.
Perhaps the best place to feel the intensity of Seoul is in its markets. They are open virtually all day and night and are never less than fascinating, whether you're looking for pig's heads, clothes or imitation brand-name goods. At times, it's like being in an Arab souk and haggling for a decent price makes the experience all the more enjoyable (until you find out that you've been ripped off).
Seoul is not an easy city to like. It may have plenty to offer, but the intensity of it all can grind you down pretty quickly. It's not an easy place for foreigners to deal with and requires a lot of patience if you're going to enjoy yourself and have a good time.