Heart and Seoul in Korea

Watching the Korean national soccer team play on front of 60,000 crazy fans at Seoul’s World Cup stadium.

Taking in a spectacular 360-degree view of the Seoul skyline and enjoying a spot of lunch in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Nansam Tower.

Covering myself in mud and enjoying the 30-foot-long mud slide before diving into the warm waters of the Yellow Sea at the Boryeong Mud Festival.

Sitting out in the sun with a group of Korean friends to enjoy dog, which they had freshly killed, prepared, and cooked.

Enjoying swimming, sun-bathing, and beach soccer before relaxing with a cold beer and a huge bowl of super-fresh seafood in Mallipo, a beach resort on the west coast’s Taean Peninsula.

Quick Tips:

Always ask what you are eating! Koreans have a very varied palate and have a penchant for eating almost anything that swims runs or even moves. They are obviously most famous for eating dogs, but since Korea is surrounded by sea they are also very big on fish and seafood with oysters, raw fish and octopus (often eaten live) all highly popular.

Coffee doesn’t always mean coffee. What in the West is merely a hot beverage in Korea is a far wider concept. Coffee shops do sell coffee, but just as in Amsterdam, where they often have a second product on offer, in Korea too there is often also an added element--the coffee girl. These ladies are sexily dressed, heavily made-up, and paid to serve coffee to businessmen, and sometimes do a little more.

Best Way To Get Around:

The eight lines operate throughout the city and as far afield as cities like Incheon and Cheonan. The subway is fast, wide-reaching and convenient, however if you’re a fan of personal space you could well be in for a torrid time. Even though the carriages are larger than their counterparts in London or New York at busier times passengers are packed in like sardines.

Outside the city and the easiest way to travel by far is by bus. The express bus network links almost every town and city in Korea. Buses are insanely cheap, fast and extremely regular. The greatest benefit from taking the bus is that it means you don’t have to brave actually driving yourself. The Koreans all like their big cars and like driving them very fast, so the highways can at times be treacherous places.

Accommodation in Korea generally falls into one of two categories, either your expensive international hotel or yogwans (motels). Korean motels are usually far better equipped and decorated than their western counterparts. They regularly come with giant double beds, almost always with air-conditioning and cable TV, and are often equipped with state-of-the-art bathrooms. The problem is, they often have a far seedier side to them. Most do cater for overnight guests; however, at many establishments, there is often an hourly rate that is just as well used. This is particularly true in Itaewon, the westernised area of central Seoul close to the US army base, where I once spent a rather unpleasant evening being kept awake by the sound of a Korean "lady" entertaining an American GI. Because of their dual identity, some motels can often produce some little surprises. I once stayed in one in a small town named Seosan and found a sex-aid vending machine in the corridor. Vibrating beds and mirrored ceilings are also not uncommon sights. There is a vague rule that helps to avoid some of the seedier establishments. If they are built and decorated in the style of Disney's Magic Kingdom and the car park had barriers to obscure the license plates of cars inside, they are probably used more for the hour than the night.

The major problem with motels comes if you are not travelling as a couple. I often used to go to Seoul with a group of friends, which made motels either awkward if we shared rooms or expensive if we took one each. Kim's proved to be an ideal and cheap solution to that problem. Situated in the Hapjeong area of Seoul, in the city's northeast districts, it is convenient for the city center and has rooms for one person, two people, or even in dormitory style.

The family-run business is split between three large suburban houses, with runs of varying sizes in each. Bathrooms are shared but spotlessly clean. There are communal kitchens, free toast for breakfast, and free Internet access. It quickly became routine for my friends and I to arrive at Nambu bus terminal head to Kim's on the subway, drop our bags, freshen up, and head out for Seoul by night.

Kim's was cheap, clean, and great for a group or friends or an individual wishing not to break the bank. The only downside was the location: it is unfortunately almost a mile from the subway station and is not the easiest to find.

Hongdae is one of Seoul's biggest party areas. There are several streets lined with bars and clubs, which are popular with young Koreans and Westerners alike. Carne station lies just a couple of blocks from the heart of this and is seen by many as the perfect start to an evening out.

The food is nothing spectacular. There is plenty of Western fare on offer including burgers, pasta, fajitas, and salads as well as Korean barbecue-style food such as the baconesque sangyopsal and the rib based kalbi. However, no matter if things aren't the greatest you've ever tasted they are good enough to make you want to head back for more and the beauty of Carne Sation is that you can do that as many times as you so desire.

A similar situation exists with drinks. The beer may not be the best. The draughts are the perennially poor Red rock and Cass, the lesser of Korea's three major domestic beers. To compensate for this, the supply is inexhaustible - believe me I tried to drink them dry - and the glasses are iced so each beer goes down nice and cold.

The only drawback I can find for Carne Station is that it closes its doors at the frighteningly early hour of ten at night, meaning you need to get there early, and on weekends reservations may not be the worst of ideas. BUT, if you can eat and drink all the decent food and beer you want in a pleasant environment, that is not the greatest of drawbacks. There is even the school of thought that reads that by ten you should be leaving anyway and heading into the pumping nightlife of Hongdae.

Even before I got anywhere near an actual game, I began to get a glimpse of what an impact the World Cup had on Korea. During the competition, Korea had surprised everyone and under the leadership of Dutch coach Gus Hiddink reached the semi-final stages. Hiddink and his players, who had earned themselves the nickname "The Red Devils" (which was despite the fact that their uniforms are actually far closer to pink than red), became national heroes. At the school where I taught English, children in almost every one of my classes wore white T-shirts with a picture Hiddink printed on the front and red ones with the slogan "Be the Reds" inscribed on them.

The first game I actually got to go see was held at the World Cup stadium in Seoul. During the World Cup, the opening ceremony and one of the semifinals were staged there. That semifinal had seen Korea eventually beaten by Germany. Unfortunately, the day friends and I passed through the turnstiles the opposition was only Kuwait, a somewhat less-enticing prospect.

Despite the lowly status of the opposition and the fact that temperatures at pitch-side were around 9 degrees below 0, the Korean supporters had turned out in force, with 55, 000 of them braving the cold weather to cheer their team on. The atmosphere they produced was indeed intense but nothing like I had ever experienced back in Europe. Whilst everyone made plenty of noise and carried massive banners and flags, there was none of the aggression and hostility you often see in English stadiums. Rather than trying to intimidate the visiting players or curse the referee, the Korean fans were content to simply sing for their team or cheer wildly whenever anyone hit a powerful shot. whether it was anywhere close to being a goal or not.

Truth be told, the actual match failed to compare to the quality of the fans watching it. Despite having several players who plied their trades in the top European leagues, Korea laboured past a very ordinary Kuwait side. Nevertheless, The Red Devils, and the friendliness and enthusiasm of their supporters, had me hooked. From then on I made every effort to watch The Red Devils whenever I could, be it at the World Cup Stadium or just on TV at my local bar.

Up and down the neighbouring stretches of coastline are a series of mud flats, which locals insist are chock full of therapeutic minerals. Because of this, every July tons and tons of the thin almost watery mud, which is not dissimilar in both texture and appearance to chocolate syrup, are transported into the centre of Boryeong for the annual mud festival.

The actual therapeutic value of the mud remains a grey area for most festival goers; everyone there tends to see it as a rather good excuse to wallow around and enjoy a week-long party. In truth, there are some awesomely fun mud attractions on offer. These include mud statues, where actors cake themselves head to toe and pose for photographs, and the mud pit, where people go to play school yard-type games, which all invariably finish with everyone either falling down into the mud or simply hurling large handfuls at each other. The top attraction though is the mud slide, a giant inflatable mud-covered contraption, along which it is possible to slide for over 30m before skidding into a giant pool of mud.

Whilst much of the festival could well be considered pretty infantile, I have to confess that I found it great fun covering myself in mud, and then taking a dip in the sea was a wonderful feeling. The only drawback was a not uncommon one in Korea. The festival draws people from all over Korea, which can make getting a bus or a hotel room a less than simple process. This year the problem was so big that for a few hours on the Sunday afternoon, the festival even managed to run clean out of mud.

Despite the fact that the DMZ slices the nation half, the Koreans have realized the potential it boasts as a tourist attraction. As a result, tour buses head out from all the major hotels in Seoul. However, it is just as easy and far cheaper to make your own way there. A regular commuter train leaves Seoul Station at around 10 minutes before the hour, every hour. It costs W2, 000 (just under $2) and takes around 2.5 hours.

The train runs from Seoul to the town of Imjingang, barely a mile from the thick barbed wire fence. From Imjingang the only option is to climb aboard a state-sanctioned tour bus to take a standard DMZ tour, which costs W 8, 000 (just under $4). The bus passes through several road blocks and checkpoints before winding up a small hill to the Dora Observatory.

Dora is the perfect place to stare into the introverted and controversial half of Korea. If you were standing on the main viewing platform and looking to your right, you would see two pieces of giant propaganda in the shape of two dramatically oversized flagpoles. The one in the south is tall and would ordinarily make a dramatic statement if it weren’t for the giant steel construction a few miles to the north, where the North Korean flag flies from a pole so large it almost convinces people to defect toward Kin Jong Il.

Looking straight allows you to peer towards Caeson, one of the biggest cities in North Korea. On a misty day, the factories and apartment blocks can be picked out through the clouds. On a clear day, though, it is possible to stand and watch people going about their daily business. With all the furore about the North, its nuclear potential and its reclusive leader being able to see kids in their playground provides a slightly different angle from which to view world events.

As well as Dora, the tour offers the chance to walk beneath the DMZ in a tunnel originally built by the North Koreans to infiltrate the South. Obviously they were caught before it was finished, but it nevertheless it is an interesting little trip. Be wary, though, the average North Korean tunnel digger must have been far shorter than your average Western visitor, as the roof is barely 4 feet high--I took several bangs to the top of my head along the way.

Areas like Dongdaemun, Gangnam, and Sinchon often leave you with little space to even breathe, and that is why I always appreciate a trip into the serenity offered at the top of the Nansam Tower. We sat on the top of a major hill and wooded park in the Yongsan-Gu area of the city, as the tower offers a superb panoramic view of the city that can be appreciated without the hustle and bustle of fighting your way through the packed streets.

The structure of the tower in itself is nothing to write home about. Much of its height comes from the mountain upon which it sits, making it far less impressive than competitors, such as Toronto's CN Tower or Shanghai's Oriental Pearl, both of which are considerably taller and considerably closer to sea level. In terms of towers, it also quite antiquated, dating all the way back to the 1960s.

The beauty of Nansam is almost completely monopolised by the view it provides. Seoul sprawls around it like a giant lake of buildings, through which the occasional mountain or hill sticks its green-topped head. I have found few more relaxing afternoons than those I have spent sat in the rotating restaurant at the top enjoying a (to be fair, rather expensive) bottle of beer and quite literally watching the world go by.

The only drawback I ever found at Nansam was the combination of haze and smog that sits over Seoul, which on particularly bad days could obscure almost half the city.

Fast forward a few weeks and my buddy Ossie and I are at a loose end. It's a little too early in the year for a barbecue or the beach, and another night's drinking out in Seoul is sounding a little stale. So, we decide to go for a Saturday afternoon at the footy. Since the national team was not playing, we decided to head for a Korean K-League game, the most convenient being SK Bucheon against Incheon United.

Back in England I am used to large stadiums, big vocal crowds and intense atmospheres. My experience with the national team, where over 50,00 people were willing them on, had me hoping for something similar. Alas, I was to be bitterly disappointed.

We arrived in Bucheon in the rain. It was 2 miles to the stadium, but quite traumatically we were unable to get a cab to take us there. Because of this we walked and arrived both wet and weary. Unfortunately, our first glimpse of the stadium did not serve to brighten the outlook. It looked as though it would hold in excess of 20,000 people, but as we purchased out tickets I could see only three other spectators.

Thankfully admission was ridiculously cheap. Ordinary tickets cost just around 4,000 Won whilst VIP passes were only 8,000. So with our VIP tickets in hand, we headed in to catch the game. It appeared though, that we were the only ones. We took our seats in a nearly deserted stadium. The crowd number considerable less than 1,000 people. There were a cluster of Bucheon fans at one end and a slightly smaller group of Incheon supporters at the other. In the centre were the two of us and a handful of other 'VIPs'. Chief amongst those was Jo Bonfrere, then coach of the national team (he was sacked a few months later after a poor showing in a competition against local rivals China, Japan, and North Korea). I have to say that paying just a few bucks and then being seated about ten feet from the national coach was quite impressive.

Whilst the seating arrangements were of a high standard, the football was not. Mr. Bonfrere would have been unlikely to select any of the players for the next national game. Bucheon managed to win a dour game 1-0, but at no point did the football get remotely close to lifting the gloom.

She was not amused at my little enquiry, and mumbled something in a mixture of English and Korean, which sort of sounded like she was saying something along the lines of wanting to look nice regardless of where she was, or who she was with. I wandered away chuckling, but soon began musing on how much time Korean women devoted to their appearance, or dare I say it her vanity, was almost a microcosm of the country itself.

In the 21st century, Korea is in many areas heavily developed and looks impressively modern. Seoul is the classic example of this: bright and new, almost in both appearance and outlook. However once away from the capital and the other major cities, things change. While even in small towns and villages there are still plenty of big, slinky new cars and enough neon to drown out half of Nevada, the covering is not as thick and the country's blemishes and imperfections are plain to see.

My adopted hometown of Taean was little more than a fishing and farming village in the country's northwest. Despite being out on the coast, nearly 2 hours from any city, there were plenty of signs from modern Korea: my office was air-conditioned, there were several western-styled bars, and the facilities in my school were exponentially better than at the school I had attended back in England some 10 years earlier. However, as comfortable as the modernity made my life, it was what poked up from beneath the painted visage of the community that fascinated me.

The side of Taean that gripped me was neither sanitised nor developed, rather it was the side where I could walk through the market and find fish being sold from a bucket in the gutter and pigs heads from plates on the floor. It was the side where just a mile from town I could find old women hunched over, tending to their rice fields, just as they had done for generations. It never failed to coax a smile across face when a brand new SUV skipped around an antiquated, three-wheeled tractor carrying a bundle of cabbages driven by an old man with a face so wrinkled his features would disappear into the creases of skin.

The way I saw it, it is as always the blemishes, the realities of a place that make it interesting. In Korea I found them particularly interesting when they were in such obvious contrast with the new coverings that are being created.

For the record when I eventually saw Mi-Ran without make-up in something of her natural state, I was shocked how pretty she was. I don't know if there is a metaphor there, maybe she stands as a symbol of Korea's deeper beauty, or maybe she is just an example of the modernity being a mask that covers a truer reality, make of it, and of Korea, what you will.

It was a baking hot Sunday afternoon. I had just finished playing soccer with my local team. To everyone's disappointment we had lost the game on a penalty shoot-out and were at a loose end for the rest of the afternoon. I was packing up my kit and making plans for a few hours leisurely sunbathing on my balcony when one of my teammates motioned for me to go over and talk with him. I say 'talk', but that wouldn't be an accurate description. None of the team spoke much English and my Korean was fragmented at best, so communication was generally minimal and disjointed.

This time though, we seemed to manage pretty well. All he said was 'eat', and then gestured for me to get into his car. Since I had no pressing engagements on my schedule I agreed with most of the team following us as we drove off. As we sped off at breakneck speed he began making barking noises. At first I was worried he had gone a touch crazy from the heat, until it slowly dawned on me that dog was on the menu. He then moved onto making banging noises. Now, that had me perplexed; it was only when he took his hands off the wheel and used them to mime shooting a gun that I fully understood what he was trying to say.

At first I was a little wary about eating something that in my own country would be considered a pet. On the other hand though, if someone shoots something especially for you, it would be rude to refuse. While my mind was still chewing it over we drew up at a hut by the side of the road.

A bunch of mats were placed in a circle on the ground. We all sat around drinking beer and waiting for Mr. Cho to bring the hound. When he rolled up around 20 minutes later the other guys set about filling a rusty looking oil drum with water and then starting a fire beneath it. Mr. Cho then delved into the boot of his car and pulled out the hacked up carcass of what was once quite a large dog. He then simply dumped it into the bubbling water.

After I had drained my third beer I went over to see how it was cooking. It was not an entirely pretty sight. The large chunks of meat were floating in the greasy looking water. I managed to pick out the hind legs and the rib cage, which still had the animal's nipples on the skin. I have to say I was not feeling 100% hungry as Mr. Cho pulled it out ready to serve.

Actually, eating the dog turned out to be a strange experience. We began by eating the ribs, which were hideous. All Mr. Cho did was dump the rib cage onto the mat in front of us. We then pulled a rib of each, held the bone and tore away at the meat as though eating something like a chicken leg or a corn-dog. What meat there was proved to be awfully stringy, but was overshadowed by large chunks of fat. As I sat trying to pick strands of the meat from between my teeth I was definitely not enjoying my canine meal.

Things then began to take a strange twist. Once Mr. Cho decided the rest of the animal was cooked he pulled out the animal's rump, which proved to be quite good, almost delicious in fact. By that point I had enjoyed a few beers, so I was tucking in with glee. I have to confess I even went back for seconds.

As it had been the first time I ate dog I was a touch shell-shocked, not because my teammates had prepared for the game by going out and blasting the animal into the next world. However, aside from the ribs I have to say the dog was good and I enjoyed several more meals of that kind with teammates.