Ave, ZenKimchi!

An interesting ZenKimchi article on how to do Seoul right (turn off your VPN if you hope to see it, though that might depend on your VPN). Headline:

What Kind of Traveler Are You? Here’s How to Do Seoul Right

Seoul is not a one-size-fits-all city. It doesn’t care why you came here. Want temples? It has those. Want to eat until your pants beg for mercy? Done. Want to drink makgeolli in a neon dive bar inside an abandoned print shop? That’s Thursday night in Euljiro.

But the best version of Seoul is the one that matches you—your vibe, your pace, your reason for leaving home in the first place.

I've lived in Seoul for most of my time in Korea, except for an awkward stint in the outskirts of Daegu from 2013 to 2014, during which time I taught at Daegu Catholic University. I still don't know Old Hanyang, and since the city is constantly changing, I'll never know it.

The DCU job, and the satellite town I lived in, and my living conditions, proved not to be charming enough for me to want to stay down south. I never got used to the southern accent—with its weird expressions, its quasi-Japanese cadence, and its bizarre intonation. The people were nice, though, even if my students were often brain-dead zombies. Perhaps the only truly good thing to happen when I was down there was that I began to form a habit of taking long walks. In the town of Hayang, where I was, there weren't too many local mountains, so most of my local walks were flat, and I hadn't yet learned the habit of mind that would impel me to seek out—via maps, online research, and local rumors—more angled terrain, so most of my walks were around the campus and fairly flat.* But that was the era during which I got in touch with my pedometer, and once I moved back to Seoul, I kept up with the step-counting, and I began to build up a habit of route-finding as I continued to walk.

So: I've spent about twenty-three years in Korea, close to one year of which was in the Daegu/Hayang region. Hayang was so small that it didn't even have its own cinema (that may have changed by now; I haven't checked), meaning I'd have to take a bus into Daegu to see any movies on the big screen. These days, I'm rarely motivated to hit the big screen at all; maybe that's a habit that became ingrained during COVID.

Anyway, go read the ZenKimchi article. I may be a longtime Seoul resident, but even today, I know very little about the city, and there's so much to know.

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*These days, after a stroke and a heart attack, I'm pretty much condemned to flat ground... except for the occasional nasty hill along a cross-country path.