Let’s look around Seoul a bit.
Insadong
We selected a hotel around the corner from the Insadong neighborhood. The main street through this district is perfect for visitors like us. And there were plenty of fellow visitors. Restaurants, cafés and shops line this walking street. We bought quite a few of our omiyage gifts and souvenirs here, as well as a couple nice Korean BBQ meals.
We followed a few narrow side streets off the main walking street. They’re lined with restaurants and little green antidotes to the big city outside.
Big Clean Place
Seoul is a very big city, spread out. The subway system makes it very easy to get where you want to go. It’s immaculate and very well signed. And — very civilized — each station has free clean modern toilet facilities. In fact, in the parts of central Seoul where we explored, public toilets are easy to find, and clean. Ironically, though, it’s very hard to find a trash can in Seoul. Like going camping, you just have to take your trash back home with you.
We were impressed to find No Smoking signs on the sidewalks. No Smoking even outside. But if you have to smoke, there are prominently placed pavilions for you; like the smoking rooms in airports, but outside on street corners.
As you can imagine, Seoul city center is full of a lot of both car and pedestrian traffic. Some intersections give the pedestrian more than just the green or red person in a sign box across the street. The street edge itself glows green or red to let you know if you can walk or not.
Coffee and Milk
On one of our first days, we took a Hop-on Hop-off bus ride around the city. These bus tours are often a great way to get your bearings in a new city.
Seoul is a vast place, so destinations on the bus route are a bit spread out. Right at the start of the route, we noticed a Starbucks, and then another, and then another. We starting keeping track, and by the end of the 2-hour ride, we were in the 20s. There are quite a lot of other brands of coffee shops as well. Really, you can get a coffee on almost every block.
We checked online. Seems that Seoul has more Starbucks outlets than any other city in the world. According to a recent piece in Quartz, the coffeehouse chain has 284 outlets in the South Korean capital, seven more than in New York City. On a national scale, South Korea ranks sixth in the number of Starbucks locations, with 642.※
We wondered about that, so we asked our makgeolli-tasting host, Sam. His perspective reached back to post-war South Korea. Ever since liberation from the Japanese occupation during World War II, through both dictatorial and democratic rule, the official mantra has been, “Work, work and work some more to modernize Korea.” The modernization story has been dramatic and impressive. Think just of the impact of Korean technology companies around the world: Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia. But that success has a price. Starting in school: the days are very long, and pressure to succeed is intense. The typical high-school day ends at 10 pm. That’s just getting you ready for the working world. A current law limits working hours per week to 52. Purportedly, the current President just proposed to increase that max to 69 hrs per week!
Now all these coffee shops make sense (sadly).
We also noticed that most people out on the streets of central Seoul dress in black and white; not much color at all.
We saw a lot of late-model high-end cars on the streets. And there are billboards and grand commercial screens all over the city full of ads for luxury international brands.
We happened upon a street in the Choengdam area that looked like the Rodeo Drive of Seoul. Flagship luxury brand store buildings one after the other. From a design perspective, really impressive.
We also stopped at a famous shopping center called Starfield COEX Mall. Almost every YouTube video about Seoul that we watched before our trip included a stop in this mall’s photogenic “library.” Well, it is undeniably photogenic, and to our surprise, it’s really a lending library. But the rest of the large mall is low-ceilinged and full of the same-old same-old international brands.
From Sam’s perspective, black-and-white attire and lots of luxury brands are all related.
We’d never fault anyone from wearing black and white: you pretty much always look good in the basics! But Sam says that most every Korean, at least in a big city like Seoul, works hard to balance not standing out from their peers, with standing out. Even a hint of flamboyance in one’s attire can be too much, but you want to dress as well as you can within the conservative restrictions. Wearing brand-name black and white clothes says, “I’m a solid member of our group,” and “I’m doing it well, since I can afford these clothes.” Driving a new expensive conservative car performs the same juggle. However, luxury clothes and cars are expensive — which leads us back to working all your waking hours and drinking liters of coffee to afford it all. And perhaps a bit of alcohol between work and sleep. Sam said, “Korea is a country of functional alcoholics.” And coffeeholics too.
Sam offered a coda to all this consumerism and conservatism. There’s a pattern for women who reach retirement and grandmother age: They look around and say, “I’m tired of being judged about my appearance! I’ve earned the right to express myself.” If you catch sight of a bright-color jacket or even strawberry-red hair, it’s likely to be a woman of a certain age who celebrates her true vibrant self.
Or maybe a tourist like us.