A note to self: if you don’t feel too much jet lag your first night in a foreign country, it’s very possible that the second night is going to bring a night of blackout sleep for you. At least that’s what it felt like after a long day at the DMZ and a Korean baseball game on May 9, because Elizabeth’s family (and myself) all went to bed instantly when we got back to the hotel room. That’s a good thing, because May 10 was every bit as busy for us. Let’s get into 10 things from the 10th of May.
- Mother’s Day Facetime and breakfast with Charlie
I was up 2nd out of everyone, with Pam beating me out of the chute. She was down at the pool (way down on like the 13th floor), so I went down there to sit in a pool chair and FaceTime my mom for Mother’s Day. What a weird experience it is to FaceTime someone back in the states, knowing fully well that it’s Sunday morning where you are, but for them it’s still only the middle of Saturday evening! It’s like the most useless form of time travel ever.
After the call with my mom (the only time I got to talk to parents on the trip – Nolan doesn’t shell out for international data, and my parents + Alex went on a European cruise of their own shortly thereafter), Pam and I worked on rallying the troops for breakfast. Those troops included a couple of special friends – Michael of course, and also Charlie, the next non-us family member to arrive in Korea. Remember, the wedding was still a week away, and a lot of people were starting off their trips in Japan before coming to Korea.
Both of them were duly impressed by the insane Four Seasons buffet. Charlie took the best advice possible (mine) and had the insane cream puff thing.
I want that cream puff thing again.
- Hanbok time… if we could be on time
A little context is required for the next few bullet points. You see, Seoul is a place of living history. Unlike an American city which has existed for at most a few hundred years, people have been in the Korean capital for about 2,000 years. One of the most tourist-friendly pieces of the city’s past that you can visit is the Gyeongbokgung Palace, only a few blocks from the Four Seasons. Not only is it tourist-friendly, but if you attend the daily changing of the palace guard at 10:00 am wearing a traditional Korean hanbok, you get in for free!
There’s only two issues with that: first of all, none of us (except for Pam – but we’ll get to that in the 10 Things for the wedding day) was in possession of a hanbok. Second of all, have you ever tried to get Elizabeth’s family to a morning event on time? It can be a bit of a seat-of-your-pants escapade, though it always works out in the end. We bid adieu to Michael and Charlie (who said they might end up meeting us at the palace in a little bit anyway), and then went upstairs to meet our Seoul guide, Katie.
Katie was understandably a little horrified at our less-than-strict adherence to the schedule, but she and our driver promised to do their best to get us to Gyeongbokgung on time. We drove a little bit away to a hanbok rental shop (oh, that’s why admission is free) and within minutes were rifling through clothing rack after clothing rack of traditional Korean attire. The portable changing rooms (think Kohl’s changing room meets a port-a-potty) were a bit of an adventure, but hey. It turns out I look pretty cool in a purple hanbok.
- The changing of the guard
We made it just barely in time for the changing of the palace guard. Like I said, things just somehow work out when you’re on Fairchild Time. We didn’t get a spot at the front of the crowd gathered around the gaudily clad palace guard, which kind of stunk for anyone under 6 feet tall – and then someone moved and we had a perfect view. Just how we drew it up!
I don’t have any pictures of the changing of the guard. There is admittedly something that gets my goat about hundreds of tourists all watching something through the lens of their phone’s camera instead of just experiencing it that makes me want to not do that. On the flip side, now here I am and you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that the guards were dressed in the gaudiest of yellows, reds, and blues. There was a band led by some guys playing what looked like a trumpet and sounded like a horrendous single-note bagpipe. And there were flags flying crisp in the late-morning breeze. The whole process probably took somewhere around 15-20 minutes. I found myself wondering: if you were a peasant in Seoul during the 1392-1897 Joeson Dynasty (they had 27 kings, Katie. I was listening to your tour!), how annoying would you have found the changing of the guard if you worked right outside the palace? You had to hear that annoying-ass trumpet for like 10 minutes every single day, and since it was medieval times you were probably starving to death while it happened. If that was me, I’d try to sneak in while the entire guard was marching in right angles to one another and bump off the king for making me put up with that racket.
I wonder if anyone else’s mind goes to something like that while they’re watching the guard change.
- Michael and Charlie, Kings of the palace
Remember earlier when I said that Michael and Charlie told us they might stop by the palace as well? Turns out they found a hanbok rental place of their own (it’s not hard; they’re everywhere around Gyeongbokgung. Probably 40% of the people in attendance were dressed up) and decided to dress as traditional Korean royalty. If you’ve never seen two 6-foot-something white guys dressed as Korean kings swaggering around the grounds of a palace, you’ve missed out. Apparently random people were stopping them to ask for pictures. It’s the sort of absurd thing that can only happen to a Harding.
Katie recovered from the shock of having two random people join her tour with considerable aplomb, and showed all of us around the rest of the Gyeongbokgung complex. I mentally added another reason for Medieval Korean Peasant Nolan to kill the king: this place was huge.
The contrast between old and new was on full display here as well.
- My first “meh” in Korea
After the Gyeongbokgung Palace (I’ve been copy+pasting that name every single time), our next stop was the Bukchon Hanok Village a few blocks northeastward in Seoul. Don’t confused a hanbok and a hanok. One of those is a cool-looking Korean traditional attire. The other is a village of cool-looking Korean traditional dwellings. Bukchon is set into the side of a hill. It’s a fascinating mix of shops, AirBNBs, and permanent residences. Michael told me that he and Irene actually moved into one for a week before deciding to look elsewhere.
And that’s where the meh part comes in. You see, everyone and their mother wants to visit a Korean hanok village. By nature, these villages have narrow, winding streets, and the groups of tourists clotting the alleys rapidly overwhelm all good sense and decorum. There are signs all over Bukchon (and when I say all over, I mean literally every 50 feet) to remind you that this is in fact a residential zone, it’s closed to pedestrians in the morning and evening, and please keep your voice down. It’s a total vibe-killer.
With that said, it wasn’t all a bust from my point of view. Katie took us into a hanok that had been converted into a tea shop. It was peaceful; it turns out that after Pompeii and Seoul, I am officially on board with open-air courtyards in the middle of homes. In fact, it was so peaceful that as everyone talked, my eyes started to drift closed.
Fortunately, a little bit of caffeine from the tea shop fixed me right up.
- Our first – but not the last – experience with Korean beef
One of the most embarrassing revelations of our first 48 hours in Korea was the complete lack of traditional Korean food we’d eaten. KFC one night, fried chicken at the baseball game the next day – come on now! We needed to get going on some authentic cuisine!
Fortunately, our hanok village trip ended with us around Insadong. There’s plenty of trendy options around there. English words aren’t allowed on the alley we wandered to look for food, but one restaurant had a cartoon beef on it. That and Katie’s endorsement of the restaurant name were all we needed to go in and request a table for 6.
I won’t go into too much detail on the food experience itself, since I promise there were other meals on this trip where I can better explain how Korean beef/BBQ restaurants work. As a top-level “what to know”, we ordered some ribeye and bulgogi. The ribeye was grilled at the table while the bulgogi came in stew form. Both were excellent especially with the ever-present kimchi. Katie was an invaluable resource for us as well. She handled the sometimes-thorny work of translating our desires into an order that the restaurant could understand. She explained how various components of a Korean meal work. And most importantly of all, she introduced us to somaek – the extremely popular Korean cocktail made by mixing soju and beer. The two of them alone are already great methods to consume alcohol, but combined they actually come out even betetr. I had many glasses of somaek over the next week thanks to her.
Katie, you are a real hero.
- Friendship bracelets? Why not?
Not far from our restaurant in Insadong is an open-air shopping mall called Ssamzgil. It’s a pretty neat little spiral staircase-type thing.
Did I have a clue why we were there? No! Sometimes it’s just better to go with the flow and see what happens next, and this felt very much like one of those cases. Katie led us up the stairs and into a shop… where it turned out that yes, we were being set up at a station to make friendship bracelets. Admittedly this felt like kind of a weird thing to do, but after a couple of minutes of reflection it actually seemed like a fun way to celebrate modern Korean culture. Plus, it was a fun way to ply my creative skills to make Elizabeth a cute gift. For Elizabeth’s bracelet, I put clouds, rainbows, and hearts on it. For mine, she put gummy bears. We each understand each other so well. Both of us put our bracelets on and kept them there for the rest of the week in Korea.
Also, a brief shoutout to the rest of the mall area, which featured a wishing terrace:
And a spot down on the ground where there were multiple Korean lawn games. I enjoyed watching people attempt “trying to throw sticks into a narrow wooden vase”, but the really fun one was “throw a beanbag really hard at another beanbag to try to flip it over. Winston and I went down and gave it our best. Alas, the second beanbag never flipped.
- Simulator Golf!
One of the biggest reasons that Pam and Elizabeth chose the Four Seasons for our first stay in Seoul (we’d be staying at the Westin Josun in our second stint for the wedding) was the superior facilities. There’s the insane breakfast buffet, the pool/spa that Pam and I visited that morning, and also a high-rise golf simulator room. Winston and I were both more than a little nervous about our golf round coming up in 4 days on Jeju Island; what better way to work the nerves out than hitting a golf ball into a TV screen and having it tell you where it would have gone?
The simulator setup itself was neat. The hotel let you rent out the bay + clubs for half hour stints, which I figured would be enough for a simple range session. The feel definitely was off, though: certain chips that I felt like should go 25 feet were going 40 feet or more. And I was getting what felt like a really, really generous set of results from irons.
After about 10 minutes, Winston set up a simulated round at TPC Something or Other. It didn’t take long to realize that you could play most of an 18-hole round in 20-30 minutes on a simulator. Turns out, most of the 3.5 hours spent on a golf round is actually spent walking up to your golf ball, figuring out yardage, and picking out a club. All of that is already taken care of once the simulator spits out the next ball onto the mat and tells the you the yardage to go. Plus, there’s no putting: put it close enough and the simulator gives you the next shot, and put it too far away on the green and you’ll get a 3-putt. “3-putt” and the ever-present “OB” were haunting Winston and myself through our run-through.
I’m sure that drive ended up OB.
At least we could finish off the round, such as it was, with a trip down to the pool and spa for a quick swim, hot tub soak, and trip into the sauna. The pool was kind of shallow and the hot tub was really weird – it wasn’t that hot, but it did have a faucet that would dump 1,000 gallons per second of water on you – but my first hot steam in Korea at least was pleasant.
- Inter-continental travel coordination
Over the last 24 or so hours, while we had been enjoying our baseball + palace visit + friendship bracelets, the next American visitors to Korea had been making their way closer. When James learned that Elizabeth and I were heading to Seoul for a wedding, he asked if he could visit the area at the same time and just do his own thing during the wedding. That didn’t bother us; and when Elizabeth mentioned it to Michael, he said James should just come to the welcome dinner and afterparty anyway. Thus encouraged, Moriah asked if she could come to. The two of them formed a “KPop Core” of friends who would arrive in Seoul just in time to join us in traveling to Busan the next day.
I’m so glad that the two of them did so. You don’t get too many chances to explore a whole new country with your best friends. Take them! The kinds of memories we would make over the next week are the kind I’m going to carry for the rest of my life.
With that said… coordinating multiple groups of people in a foreign country is not an easy thing to do, especially when you have different travel itineraries and different hotels. May 10 was my first taste of it; they had wrapped up the Fort Worth to Taipei flight earlier and were now finishing up Taipei to Seoul in the afternoon. I texted the two of them to meet us for a late evening dinner at the Myeongdong street market Elizabeth and I had walked through with Michael and Irene yesterday. But when there’s literally thousands of people squeezed into a few blocks of the city, and everyone is trying to use a different navigation app (Naver) to try to get to the right spot, and Nolan isn’t on cell data…
I felt a big sense of relief when I spotted them further down the alley.
- Myeongdong Street Food
It was a festive mood on a Sunday night at Myeongdong. At some point every evening, hundreds of street vendors show up in the alleyways and start selling delicious Korean street food cheaply. It was basically a shooting gallery of whatever you could want fried. None of us were brave enough to have the live octopus that the area is known for, though Winston and Moira had something fried from deep under the sea.
As for myself, I had a kimchi pancake (Elizabeth and I had visited a restaurant in OKC that sold Korean street food the week before, and that was the real highlight for it). Elizabeth got some candied grapes that just weren’t all that good. She also made a third attempt at tteokbokki (rice cakes and fish cakes in spicy sauce), and discovered she didn’t like tteokbokki for a third time. It was her last time.
There is also a dessert you can get in Myeongdong where ice cream on a stick is wrapped in a marshmallow into a delicious ice cream sandwich, then run under a blowtorch to crystallize. Yes, I had to get it.
Given how cheap everything is in South Korea, you can have a lot of fun cheaply by eating street food dinner. Just know that you’re going to get annoyed pretty quickly by the crowds.
