Seoul Train

Firstly, let me apologize for the obviousness of the titular pun. Unsubtle or not however, it is appropriate, given that I paid a visit to Korea's capital city over the weekend.

The city that jumps to mind most quickly, interestingly, is Athens. Seoul is much bigger than Athens, obviously, and has the whole Modern Asian Metropolis (MAM) thing going on, but what the two of them do have in common is the pieces of antiquity scattered in a seemingly random pattern throughout the city. Seoul has five (five!) palaces and various other shrines, pagodas, and other bits of history around every other corner.

There's something almost intoxicating about being let loose in a large and unfamiliar city. Every step teases with the promises of wonders as yet unseen. There's a rush of realizing you're going through what is, for you, uncharted territory. Even the mundane holds a special allure. You're not just riding the subway, you're riding the subway in Seoul. Awesome. I love new places. When that new place happens to be the second-largest city in the world? Double-awesome.

I don't think I'd quite realized it until arriving there, but Seoul has long held a special place in my...not heart, as such, but at least my consciousness. My memory of global events from the 1980s is sketchy at best. The first News item I remember is the Challenger explosion in '85. Sitting in the waiting room table at the dentist's office was a magazine (Time, I'd guess, but I really have no idea) with the astronauts on the cover. So that's the first thing I remember from outside my immediate sphere of reference. I also remember, albeit vaguely, the ascension of G.H. Bush to the U.S. Throne, and the 1988 Olympics. The Winter Games in Calgary were a big deal, obviously, taking as place as they did just to the west of Canada, but it's the Summer Games that stick out. You can attribute this to the fact I was eight months older by then (7 and a half years old), but I think it has more to do with the fact that a sprinter by the name of Ben Johnson happened to be stripped of his gold medal for steroid use. Remember that?

It's not to say that I only remember the Seoul Games because of our man on the track, but I think that what Johnson did do was give me a reference point for a city that would likely not have featured very prominently in my mind at all.

I just hope he got to see some of the sights.