North Korea may have Pyongyang, but South Korea's got Seoul

Considering that it’s home to 25 million people, it should come as no surprise that Seoul’s initial impression is, unequivocally, one of size.  Sheer, unabashed size and scale.  This isn’t a metropolis, it’s a megalopolis.  I never thought anything could make Shanghai feel small, but I think I’ve found it (I’ve never been to Tokyo, which people say has the same effect).  New York, Delhi, London, Beijing, LA, and Paris are all amateurs when it comes to size, apparently, and coming straight from comparatively tiny Phnom Penh further exacerbated Seoul’s megalopolisness.

I made the rookie mistake of falling asleep on the shuttle into the city after telling the driver t drop me off at the Ritz, where I was very much not staying but served as the closest stop to the Gangnam Artnouveau City Hotel.  I awoke with a start as we pulled up to some other luxury hotel whose name escapes me, the Buena Vista Social Club still playing on my shuffling iTunes, squinted out the window up at the canyon of gleaming skyscrapers that had materialized in my sleep, and hoped sincerely that we hadn’t already passed the Ritz (we hadn’t).  The overnight flight had not been the most restful, as I had drifted in and out of consciousness, struggling both to wake up and sleep, and felt worryingly warm the whole time—I run cold anyway, and aren’t flights supposed to be freezing?—which made me wonder if I hadn’t managed to get out of Southeast Asia without some sort of tropical illness.  So the plush shuttle, in all of its 90-minute air-conditioned glory, was the perfect place for a nap, but then I found myself and my backpack incongruously on the doorstep of the Ritz-Carlton having no real idea of how I’d gotten there.

Side note: let me tell you, it sounds dumb but there’s a definite embarrassment factor to having an impeccably turned out five-star doorman smile at you, take your filthy rucksack in his white-gloved hand, and ask, “Checking in, miss?” when you are in reality staying someplace else.  As I explained this to the three doormen and concierge who gathered around me, I tried my best to remain dignified in my baggy batik print pants and douchebag backpacker bracelets and give the impression that normally I didn’t dress like this or carry my things in this somewhat disgusting receptacle.  Luckily they took it in stride and packed me off into a taxi for an easy 15-minute ride to my real hotel, which, while not the Ritz, was no slouch either.

After washing my hair, brewing a few cups of barley tea, and fully waking up, I brought up Google maps and tried to get my bearings.  At this point, you may be wondering, Are you some kind of directionally-challenged idiot?  Did you run into doorways before you had a smartphone? but no, I’m not—you see, Seoul has very few actual street names, which complicates things a bit, and the idea of anything being on a grid here is laughable.  Instead of street names you have neighborhood names, and the bulk of the streets simply reflect in which neighborhood they happen to lie.  Gangnam, where I was staying (couldn’t resist), for example, is Gangnam-gu when referring to the neighborhood, while there are several streets called Gangnam-daero.  It can be very conducive to getting lost.

What I quickly realized, however, is that the phenomenal metro makes up for this in a big way.  It is Seoulian in scale of course, but so clearly laid out, with everyone written and announced in Korean, Chinese, and English, that getting pretty much anywhere, even north of the river and all the way across the city, pretty simple.  Throw in being cheap (less than $1.50 a trip), frequent, clean, and free of crazy people and you essentially have the anti-BART.  It was also weirdly uncrowded, even at rush hour, which struck me as pleasantly odd and remarkable in a city of 25 million.  My commute from Clapham Common to Victoria, by contrast, involved me waiting in a queue five deep just to squeeze my way onto a train that packed so tightly that the 25-minute ride was basically soft core porn.  It makes me wonder how Seoul pulls it off.

As part of my attempt to absorb a bit of culture in my flying visit, my destination was Gyeongbokgung, which is the oldest and largest of the dynastic palaces clustered in the city’s north and conveniently has its very own metro stop (the subway system isn’t idiot-proof, but I have to admit that getting from Gangnam to Gyeonbokgung comes pretty close).  Considering that it’s a major sight in the heart of the city, I was bracing myself for throngs of visitors, something on par with the hordes that descend upon Tiananmen Square, and getting ready to shield my face from the spokes of eye-level parasols that are the hallmark of Asian tourist attractions in sunny weather.  I was surprised to find that the walk to the metro’s palace exit was deserted and silent, so much so that I wondered if the whole thing was closed for August or something.  But no, I stepped blinking into the blazing sun and was greeted by all of three other tourists making their way through the gate, so I trekked across the main courtyard—a decent trek—and paid my way in.

There were a few tour groups, sure, but the sheer size of the palace grounds, along with the green bulk of Mt. Bukhansan rising up behind the north walls, lent it a kind of lazy, quiet peace that would seem impossible to come by in such a massive city.  Rather than the urban din of cars, sirens, music, or even voices, it was the cicadas who hummed away, and with the gracious clusters of tall, leafy trees stretching out awnings of shade over the lily ponds and footpaths, it was easy to imagine what it must have been like to be a Korean royal of yore in the summertime.  The living quarters, banquet hall, library, and temples were all cool and pleasantly dim inside, a respite from the fresh, robust heat, which, coupled with an army of servants, lavish furnishings, and unmatched wealth and power, must have made royal life very good indeed.

Hyangwonjeong, a lovely little island pavilion that exists in the middle of a ginormous city

I spent a solid couple of hours wandering around the complex, which really does just go on and on and on, and eventually, sun-bleached and still underslept, retreated back to the other universe that is Gangnam.  I opted to follow the locals and get myself an iced coffee to fortify myself so I could go shopping and get a manicure, the whole experience of which couldn’t have been more different from the serenity of the palace grounds.  Neon, flashing 50-foot billboards, k-pop blasting from unseen speakers, plastic surgery clinics every 15 feet, everything everywhere packed and buzzing with tens of thousands of fashionably-attired people worshiping at the altar of cool—that is Gangnam at night, and it is pretty great (maybe minus the plastic surgery clinics).  My little jaunt up to Gyeonbokgung had softened the city, humanized it someone, so that by the time I came back to Gangnam, I no longer felt turned around and dizzied amidst a forest of skyscrapers and nearly palpable capitalism.  It's nice knowing that, even in a megalopolis that plays host to more human beings than I can wrap my head around, it’s possible to stretch out on a bit of grass, look up at the sky, and feel like you’re in the same mountain town that Seoul has always been.

Plus, Incheon Airport is probably the best airport I have ever flown in and out of, so I would probably go back just for that.  Free wifi, movie screenings, and massage chairs?  Seoul, consider me officially won over.

A big jolly goedemorgen from Amsterdam

I was having withdrawal symptoms—restlessness, irritability, cold shaky hands, relentless grinding of my teeth. I couldn’t concentrate. I would find myself picking up a book or logging into The Times online only to lose interest in a matter of minutes. My mind would race in such a way that it actually made me anxious, and somehow I was both full of nervous energy and lethargic as a parched houseplant.

If you read the title of this post, automatically assumed this was about drugs, and shook your head at my destructive ways, shame on you! Tainting my good name!

No, I’m talking about a different kind of withdrawal. As I woke up on the 23rd of October, I realised that it was the longest I hadn’t been on a plane in about four years. I had been on the island from June straight through until October, a full four months. No casual city breaks, no fleeing to the tropics to fend off the winter blues, no getting stranded in a tiny heat-blasted Gulf state, no brother’s university graduation that warranted hopping across the Atlantic, no long weekends in Beijing, no high-powered urgent business meetings requiring me to hop on a jumbo jet to the southern hemisphere ASAP! (They tell me that the last one is rather unlikely for a brand-new graduate at the bottom of the professional food chain.)

And so I found myself sat cross-legged on the floor of my aunt’s sitting room in Belgravia, left hand curled around a mug of green tea, right hand gesturing grandly as I tried to explain my painfully bourgeois variety of malaise. Most people would have given me a dry look and asked me to come back with a real problem, but I knew my aunt Louisa would empathise. You see, my dear auntie was a freelance travel writer for years, popping back and forth between the UK and Mauritius and Burma and Sri Lanka and Brazil and Indonesia on a weekly basis, and is still well-known amongst the luxury travel journo/PR set in London. She, too, has set a personal record for staying in one spot in the past few months, and fully understood the all-consuming desire to just get on a plane and fly.

So acute was my longing to travel that I tallied the hours I spent on planes in the 2010 calendar year. It came out to 140, or roughly nine days. We’re not talking getting to and from the airport or layovers or going through security, either, this is raw air-time. I had unwittingly trained my body to expect the packing of suitcases and the shedding of boots onto conveyor belts and the scanning of departure boards and that sweet hard rush of being launched into the sky. No wonder I felt weird. The highest I had been in the past four months was Hampstead Heath.

Dear God, I thought, I will do anything to get on a plane and go somewhere.

And just like that, thanks to a tatty old page buried in the middle of my passport, an excuse to travel fell into my lap.

Back in 2007, I was issued a British student visa (my passport arrived from the Los Angeles consulate quite literally the day before I was scheduled to depart for term at St Andrews—nerve-wracking, to say the least). The visa expired not at the end of June 2011, just after graduation, but the end of October, presumably given the bearer time to apply for a post-study work visa. I had meant to do this, but then realised that if I wasn’t working at a place that strictly required an £800 visa, then why buy one? I had until April to make my application, so why not wait a few months to spend that money and have the post-study visa expire in April 2014 rather than October 2013? It made a lot more sense, but it did make me wonder what would happen if I overstayed by 31 October 2011 expiry date. To the internet! After looking through various ‘ZOMGZ MY VISA EXPIRES N LIKE 5 MINS CAN ANY1 TELL ME WUT 2 DO KTHANX!!1!1!!’ forums, I was able to discern that overstaying a visa may not give you any trouble leaving Britain, but when it came time to applying for another visa, you could kiss your chances goodbye. That could only mean one thing.

I had to get out of Britain, and I had eight days to do it.

Had to! Literally! It was a bureaucratic necessity. Unless I wanted to seriously screw up my future, I had no choice. I nearly dropped to my knees and thanked the god I don’t believe in. My zeal renewed and kicked into high gear, I started the search for cheap last-minute flights. I had originally planned to spend the Halloween weekend at some St Andrews medic friends’ party in Manchester, so I figured I might as well fly out of there on the 31st. And as long as I was at it, why not just fly up into Edinburgh and pop up to St Andrews? Before I knew it, a simple weekend in Manchester turned into a ten-day three-legged journey where I zigzagged across Britain and the Netherlands in planes, trains and coaches. I could almost feel my muscles and my mind settle as the relief coursed through my veins. As I prepared to pack up my trusty royal blue suitcase with the feather-light frame, I fished my passport out of its designated nook. It was time for its little navy self to come out of hibernation and to gather some Dutch stamps.

Meanwhile, my aunt had arranged to meet a friend from California in Paris for the weekend, setting out on the Eurostar a few hours before I left for Manchester. When I came over to say goodbye, I found her packing, and she was utterly thrilled about it. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I’m so excited—I get to pack! I can’t believe I ever complained about doing this!’ I told her to have a fabulous time in Paris and she me in Manchester and Amsterdam. ‘And we’ll see you when you’re back. When is that, exactly?’ she called as she plucked a top out of the closet.

‘Well, I’m taking a few days up in Scotland after Amsterdam, so around the 8th or the 9th,’ I told her. ‘It was all a bit…impromptu.’

‘That’s nearly two weeks! You’re going to be properly gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve been plotting to travel, haven’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I admitted, a smile creeping into my face.

And now, on the second of November, I have woken up to a radiant sunny day in Amsterdam, where the leaves are a riot of reds and golds and everyone has just started to wrap themselves in woolly scarves. And in the eyes of Westminster, I am really and truly no longer a student. It’s bittersweet, and I can’t think of a better place to come to terms with it than Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities on the planet. And I figure that if a 55-minute flight across the Channel can make me feel so good, it can hardly be wrong.

An auspicious start, or How I Ended Up In a Frying Pan on the Persian Gulf

'The internship' period has technically gone on for a few days now, so I've been writing things down until I had solid internet access. This is from the 12th:

As to how my internship is shaping up so far, I’ll give you a hint: that first title is the tiniest bit sarcastic. My flight to Doha with Qatar Airways, yes, ‘the world’s five-star airline’, is already two and a half hours behind schedule; considering that I had all of eighty minutes to make my connection once I got to Doha, I can safely assume that I will be in that oh-so-scenic little Gulf state for a little longer than I expected. I should add that there is only one Doha-Shanghai flight per day.

The launch of my internship, so to speak, has so far proceeded as such:

-I had a lovely sleep on a plush white downy bed and then had a long soak in the bath, emerging relaxed, well-rested and eager to arrive in Shanghai.
-I arrived at the Qatar Airways desk, where they actually weighed my hand luggage and told me there was no way they would allow it onto the flight. What kind of airline weighs hand luggage?? (nb: I am fully aware that this whole thing was my fault; I plead young and stupid.) Anyway, the excess baggage charges were going to be about 300 pounds.
-I cried (kind of). I can do this on command and though I’m not terribly proud of it, it has indeed allowed me to weasel my way out of about 150 quid worth of overweight charges before.
-The guy behind the desk relented about halfway and told me to get rid of five kilos (instead of eight), which I promptly did, much to the amusement of the massive Indian family surrounding me. I’m not very good at throwing things out, even clothes that I’ve had for the past seven years, so maybe it was good for me. At any rate, my wardrobe has been streamlined.
-I pelted through security and duty free with the briefest of stops to squirt some Chanel Chance on my wrists (I really can’t help it), screeched to a halt at the gate and filed onto the plane with everyone else. I’m pretty sure that most everyone is connecting to somewhere that is NOT Qatar—it’s hard to imagine why there would be enough people that wanted to go to Doha to fill an entire plane. Perhaps that a bit harsh, but most everyone says it’s an armpit.
-The pilot told us that the plane was being towed back because of a ‘fuel tank malfunction’. As fuel tanks are the things that seem to explode a lot, I figured this was for the best.
-The pilot told us with a few nervous laughs that we would have to disembark, because they actually had to replace the faulty fuel tank with a working one. The last time we heard from him, he said it would be ‘at least an hour’. This means it will probably be about four hours.
-I went back to duty free to try on some lip gloss and then got myself some juice at WH Smith. Absentmindedly I stuck my Boots card into the machine; the girl behind the counter told me, ‘That’s a Boots card. This is W-Haytche Smif’. Feeling stupid, I took my card back; as I looked down to take a five pound note from my wallet, I gestured towards the total on the till and asked, ‘What’s that, again?’ Referring to the cost of the juice, of course. The girl looked at the fiver in my hand and informed me, ‘That’s five pound’. Thank you for that.

I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting an actual resident of Qatar—not a Qatari but rather a native Mancunian. This inexplicably cowboy hat-wearing guy was kind enough to confirm that the Qatari sand thing was true—that is, Qatar is so unsuitable for living that even the sand is useless, as in you can’t make concrete out of it, so the country actually has to import sand from Saudi Arabia. It’s apparently not even sand, just baked dirt. My new chum also confirmed that it’s a ****hole crawling with fast food restaurants and people with more money than sense…kind of like Dubai, but with less in the way of entertainment. Indeed, when I read through the QA Oryx magazine, it included a friendly welcome from the Emir of Qatar in which His Highness claimed that his state was ‘fairly liberal’ because it permits Westerners to drink alcohol…in hotels only (by the way, don’t even think about bringing your own booze into the country). The Emir did abolish child slavery and the Orwellian Ministry of Information, though, so he sounds like a decent fellow. Relatively.

Some other fun facts about Qatar:

-It’s only three hours ahead of Britain and two in the summer! It seems like the difference should be greater, considering that Doha is far away from pretty much everything apart from Yemen.
-Its national animal is the gazelle-like oryx, which is probably the only thing that’s actually suited to living in Qatar. Homo sapiens, not so much.
-I’m sure there are other things.

Qatari musings aside, I am SO excited to (eventually) get to Shanghai! The Chinese government has poured ten times the money into the city for the 2010 World Expo as it did for the Olympics in Beijing, and apparently the whole place looks gorgeous and is packed with people from all over the world. Hopefully I’ll get to take a look at some of the podiums during my time off—as great as it would be to see the Chinese or Saudi Arabian ones, the queues are about six hours long, so I’m keen to see the smaller, more obscure countries’. I’m sure Belarus has put together something spectacular, or at least funny. And of course I can’t wait to meet my colleagues and flatmates, stuff myself with the famous local dumplings, explore the old neighbourhoods and soak up some of that lovely humidity.