🇰🇷 Seoul - Baseball, Shopping, Clubbing, and ...North Korea

Did it steal my soul?

I’ve heard great things about Seoul, and I was glad to find a lot of these things held up. The city is very modern, the public transport system works great (I’m not going to miss those close calls on Grab bikes), and there’s a rich creative scene. In many ways, the things I like about Seoul are the things I like about London.

I’ve been really glad to come off the Southeast Asia backpacking trail. In the end, meeting 20-something travellers who are mostly trying to stretch their money got exhausting, and seeing locals in tourism’s chokehold has started weighing on me. Instead, in South Korea, you barely meet backpackers - most people are here on holiday. I was also effectively invisible to the locals. Unless they were drunk, then they wanted to attempt a conversation about which English football teams they support and to show me photos of them in Leicester Square.

What people say about the beauty standards here also rings true. While some of it manifests in everyone dressing incredibly well (and mostly monochrome, so I fit right in), it can also go to toxic lengths. There are many billboards around the city advertising plastic surgery, and it feels like everyone and their uncle is constantly shopping. Either way, it was great to admire other people’s outfits and get inspiration for my own style. Even the elderly looked effortlessly cool.

Sightseeing

A lot of the old historical sights in Seoul are concentrated in one area, so we (I, Edon, and Isaac) went to those on one of the first days. They’re really well-maintained and easy to navigate. The main one is Gyeongbokgung Palace, where many visitors were dressed up in hanbok (traditional Korean dress). It’s even encouraged, with people in traditional dress getting free admission into the palace. I thought it would have been funny for us to hire these, but Edon and Isaac weren’t very keen, so we scrapped the idea.

There are really easily accessible hikes in the city, including some smaller national parks. We went up a hill to see the Namsan tower and got an amazing view of Seoul at night.

DMZ

The Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) is a wide strip dividing North and South Korea. When visiting Seoul, it’s a popular tourist destination, giving the opportunity to get a glimpse into North Korea and to learn more about Korean history.

You need to book onto a tour to visit the DMZ, which makes planning the visit really easy. During the visit, we went to a few museums, went into the 3rd tunnel that North Koreans built to attempt to infiltrate South Korea, and got onto an observatory that let us look into North Korea. Some people felt weird about that latter part. I didn’t feel like any harm was getting done by just having a look, and it’s not like by doing that anyone is supporting the regime (happy to have a conversation about this, though). Either way, we didn’t see much - mostly cities that look like they’re stuck in the Soviet era.

There were some slightly tense parts with visiting the DMZ, and it felt pretty exciting to get that close to the border. I usually struggle on tours as the guides tend to talk too much (I’ve never done well during lectures at university), but on this one, they shared some cool nuggets of information. My favourite was the story of the founder of Hyundai. He stole his dad’s cow to buy a train ticket to Seoul, and later sent 1001 cows to his hometown in North Korea from South Korea as repayment for it 1000 times over, softening some tensions between the countries.

Shopping

I never really understood why people shop abroad, especially if they live in a big city already. Having gone to Korea, I think I get it. While there are a few Korean clothing brands that I like, even more basic clothing shops here offer a higher standard and cooler cuts than in Europe.

I made sure to go to the flagship stores of the Korean brands I like. Being able to just go into a shop and try pieces from them on felt surreal. Usually, that first takes having to set Grailed alerts for a few months, only to then pester the seller for a few weeks to get measurements, and then having to pay a small mortgage to have it shipped to me. And then finding that it doesn’t quite fit right. In fact, it’s been years since I’ve gone clothes shopping in person, and not having 7 parcels to return felt good. And to top it off, everything was much cheaper than in Europe.

The main brands I was excited about were XLIM and San San Gear. During my stay, I found a lot more brands that I like - Nomanual, Hyein Seo, Cost Per Kilo, and Ignota. There were also very well-stocked multi-brand retailers - 8DIVISION, ALAND, PEER, and Beaker were my favourites, even just to get inspiration.

The one thing I was a little disappointed by was the lack of good jewellery designers and brands. In fact, an employee at the San San Gear shop complimented my jewellery and asked where I could find good jewellery in Seoul. They said that’d also like to know.

Many of the clothes here also had some funky English translations. I quite liked those.

Food

The food in Korea was an interesting one. While I’m not a picky eater, it was hard to get good food here, as a lot of it was just so sweet or excessively fried. And that’s excluding the fact that it’s also very meat-heavy. Saying this, there were a few highlights, but there wasn’t much that I tried that I hadn’t had a version of before. My favourite dish was probably doenjang jigae, which is fermented soybean stew. As to the food I’ve had before, including Korean BBQ, it tasted just like what I’ve had in London. By all means, not bad, but nothing you have to travel to Korea for.

I think the best food we had was food from a cooking class we did, where we could control how sweet we made things. The one we booked was really fun, being hosted in the teacher’s apartment.

North Korean Restaurant

Having visited the DMZ, I had a look for North Korean restaurants in Seoul. There were a few, with Neungra Bapsang being the most popular. It’s owned by a North Korean defector with an impressive CV. I met her in the restaurant, and she was lovely!

I wasn’t expecting very much from the restaurant, and the food aligned with exactly what I’ve been told about it. Namely, it was pretty bland and lacked any vegetables, described through euphemisms such as that it’s “hearty” and has “subtle flavours”. I can’t even be mad at the restaurant - they plated it well and made the food authentically boring.

The restaurant menus weren’t spared from poor translations either. I’ll need to be back to savour the local specialities.

Galleries and Museums

Seoul is rife with galleries exhibiting great art. I went to a bunch, with the Leeum Museum of Art being my favourite. It had a few permanent collections, mostly exhibiting pottery (I made a lot of notes), and the building itself was really cool architecture-wise. It had an exhibition on environments created by women artists, which I also really liked, recreating old works made by women after the Korean War.

I also went to the kimchi museum, which documents the history of kimchi and its different varieties. I could also try different types of kimchi here, which I thought was a cool aspect of the museum - persimmon kimchi was my favourite.

LoL Park

I traded a lot of my teenage years for playing League of Legends. When we found that we’re near LoL Park, I felt obliged to go. It’s an esports facility that hosts Korea’s LCK games (the highest league of League of Legends games in Korea, and therefore also the world).

My only frame of comparison for something like this was going to Insomnia, a gaming festival in Birmingham, when I was 16. It was exactly like you’d imagine. People stank, nobody slept, and there were barely any women around. It was the opposite here. It was well looked after, everyone was dressed really well, and somehow, there were more women and men around. They had an LCK game on in a viewing area with a few people watching, but I could barely figure out what was going on, having not played the game in about 11 years. If I were a Korean teenager and gaming were regarded like this, my life would have taken a very different turn.

Baseball

Baseball is pretty big in South Korea, and while I know nothing about it (other than I’d be terrible after having tried some batting cages in Seoul), I wanted to experience a baseball game. We tried to see a game on a Saturday night, which was futile - weekend games sell out. I still wanted to see the game, so I tried to make an account and get tickets in advance. This was an arduous process. As a foreigner without a resident number, booking things meant for locals is very hard or impossible. In the end, I managed to get a ticket in the cheering section, which was apparently the most exciting section.

The baseball game was good fun. Each team’s cheering section got super lively when their team was batting, with cheerleaders dancing to K-pop and the crowd reciting various chants. They also had some entertainment during breaks, including American-style kiss cams and the like. Definitely a step up from rounders.

Clubbing - Faust

We had a free night on one of the weekends, so I checked RA. There weren’t too many events that interested us, so I went with Isaac to nacht at Faust, nacht seemingly being a regular series of nights that Faust runs (borrowing the name from Berghain’s Klubnacht?). I heard of Faust before, as they get some decent bookings, so I was hoping for a night of good local selectors.

The club is located in Itaewon, which is one of Seoul’s main nightlife districts. And I mean nightlife in the most general sense - every kind of club is here. Walking around, there are bars blaring music, bright-red, drunk Koreans stumbling around, and people predrinking in 7-Eleven. I was very surprised by this - in Europe, when you turn up to any underground venue, you’re second-guessing if you’re in the right place. This might as well have been Bangkok Khaosan Road or Hanoi’s Beer Street.

Anyway, we went in and got a free drink with our entry, something I’ve not seen since university. The club was split into the main dancefloor, Faust, and a bar called “Tanz bar” (the similarities to Berghain with its Panorama bar persist here). The bar had a tiny dancefloor, to the extent that about 4 people dancing filled it up.

As to the club space itself, it was pretty similar to what I’ve experienced in other Asian clubs. It had a well-tuned sound system that’s a tad too quiet, AC, tasteful lighting, and DJs mixing meticulously. A scrolling “NO TECHNO NO LIFE” LED screen in the corner had me grimace every time I caught sight of it, so I made sure to obscure it in my vision.

The night was fun for a bit, but the music didn’t vary much - it was just repetitive techno. It just wasn’t the flavour of electronic music I like. With a crowd that was just drinking, too, it felt like the energy was lacking. As to the crowd, it was similar to what I experienced in other Asian cities - mostly students, with a few tourists. Nobody seemed too into it. I did like this track that NUSNOOM played, though:

If I were to come back to Seoul, I’d check out Ring. They don’t post their listings on RA, and the line-up is announced a day in advance. I quite like this concept, which almost reminds me of Unfold. Hopefully, it would attract a more dedicated crowd.

Leaving Seoul

Seoul was a fun city. I was a little sad leaving it, honestly, as I got to know someone here and we got along really well. It felt a bit like I’m leaving something unfinished, wishing I had more time, but I can’t exactly mooch around Seoul forever.

I’ll leave things vague as I already feel like I’m saying too much. If you catch me getting random flights to Seoul, don’t ask questions.