Seoul

Well, I caved in and finally decided to go to Seoul during Seollal holiday. 

I met with some relations who I had never had the chance of meeting in the past. They're not exactly direct relations, but distant relations; my great-uncle by marriage to my great-aunt is Korean and his family is from Seoul. We have no idea as to what we were supposed to refer to each other (since there's no title for such relations in either Chinese or Korean!) so I simply referred to my two aunts as "gomo" (generic Korean term for "aunt") while my three "cousins" referred to me by name although I'm older than both. Since we had never seen each other before, I purposely wore a hanbok and a jade amulet on the day I arrived at Gimpo to make myself easily identifiable and incidentally I was the only one at Gimpo that wore a hanbok and a jade amulet! My "cousins'" English are almost perfect and since they lived in England for a while they spoke English with Brittish accents, which was quite fun. Two of my "cousins" were in Shanghai, China while I did my one-year stint in Namhae; one was there to teach English to Chinese high school students while the other studied Mandarin Chinese. I was in contact with one of them for a while and we talked about the challenges of teaching English; she was quite straightforward in her criticism of the mentality of middle school kids. The youngest of my "cousins" is just fresh out of high school; he went to Hanyang Foreign Language High School and is starting college in Daejeon.

Anyways, I spent much of my time in Seoul sightseeing. Being the historical capital for hundreds of years, the armchair historian in me became all giddy at the prospect of looking for all the historic sites and in the very brief time I was there, I just had to see everything, led simply by curiosity. The second I learned of a historical site nearby, I just *had* to visit it. Having my hotel room in Insadong (right in the middle of Seoul) meant that there were historical sites galore. My feet were pretty much sore for a whole week after I returned to Jeju. Since it was Seollal, there weren't many places open, which was a good thing, all things considered (otherwise I would have burned a hole in my wallet!).

Seoul was quite interesting with all sorts of great conveniences, not to mention a real great and simple subway system, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there. It wasn't terribly crowded when I went during Seollal since this is the only time of year that Seoul is actually much quieter, but the sheer scale of Seoul was just too overwhelming for my rustic self to handle.