Korean Diary - Say something nice for a change

Guilt is nagging me to write something nice for a change. After nine months I should be able to come up with at least a short article on all the things great and good about Seoul and Korea. And manage to do it with nasty digressions, sarcastic wandering and tangential anecdotes. Let's see.

Toilets.  
It has to be said, this is certainly where Seoul excels. 
Those who make the decisions about such matters, those in charge of defecation disposal, in most cities of the world, should hang their heads in shame over the state of their bogs. London, in particular, should be singled out.  Places like Mumbai or Kinshasa, you think might be rated in the bottom 10 or 20 out of the top 1000 list of public facilities?  In that scale, London should still be ranked below ground, a negative number in a league table, an embarrassed footnote. Seoul would set the bar in the top 3 behind Zurich and Geneva (the Swiss would have to come out on top in such a list, no?)

How did Seoul achieve such great things with toilets?  Just three small steps to make the grade. The first step - put them everywhere. No matter where you go in Seoul it is possible to find a toilet. Every underground station has a pair. And not on the inside either, i.e. after you've paid your fare. Most office buildings and residential flats keep a ground floor WC's available for the passing public.  Every coffee shop, every restaurant, every bar and every civic facility has toilets available.  Second step to success - clean them (which includes replenished bog rolls). Third step - make them free. Not all that difficult really, no rocket science involved.   

So why can't London have decent public toilets? The hygienic state of the few that are there would scare anyone into a state of constipation. And nothing is more frustrating that searching about for a 20p coin you haven't got to feed a miserly turnstile while desperately squirming with crossed legs to avoid an embarrassing episode. Seoul spends more on signs telling you where the ubiquitous toilets are located - "Toilet-161m ->", "Toilet-143m ->", and so on - than London does on the entire white bowl network. So why has Seoul ended up with a top ranking in toilets to London's miserable failure?

The first reason is the obvious one - Britain doesn't really 'do' infrastructure, not on the Conservative agenda. We wait for it to fall down before we fix it. But I think there is a bigger, and more nefarious reason for Seoul's supremacy: the coffee conspiracy.  You may read in some places that coffee is not actually a diuretic. This is misinformation and conspiracy to conceal the leaky truth. From my own personal research and that of the Formosa Institute of Investigative and Interpreted Statistics, coffee makes you pee. And since the Seoul metropolitan catchment has 1.6 coffee shops for every Seoul resident (another fact from the FIIIS), pipework to handle the resulting flow is mandatory. Without it coffee consumption remains at more less normal levels, e.g. London. After intensive investigation I have discovered the international coffee cartel have recognised this limitation to their product sales and have descended on Seoul as a testbed for their scheme to go worldwide, named 'Potent Intensity Seoul-Shops for Coffee'. When knowledge of this conspiracy does go viral, please remember that you read it here first.

Buses.  
These can be intimidating in any city at any time. Mastery of a city's bus system can be worn like a badge of courage and intellectual prowess. In this, Seoul is no exception. iPhone apps, however, have come to its rescue which have meant open access for all, foreigners without Hangul skills included, not just the long term residents and cognoscenti.  

Fools who drive cars in Seoul are just simply out of touch or don't drink coffee. Taking a bus means whizzing past long queues of immobile traffic, mostly composed of empty taxis (43% of Seoul traffic is empty taxis prowling for a fare, data taken from a study done by FIIIS) and paying an absolute pittance for the pleasure. The city is busy with creating dedicated bus lanes, more crop up every day, to allow buses clear passage. 

Route planning is still a bit of a challenge for a foreigner. Not all the place names use roman characters. And there are so many interconnecting spaghetti-like routes. Without an iPhone it wouldn't really work at all, even with the app in front of you, it isn't easy to say 'I am here, and I want to go there - How do I do that?' Instead it is a bit of trial and error, inputting multiple route numbers and see where they go.

Unfortunately, it has a dark side... The Bus Driver.  These men (yes, only men) are recruited from the rejects of suicide bomber training camps. They simply know no fear. They are probably given a mega-dose of methamphetamines before beginning their work shift. On top of that, the City of Seoul Transportation equips them with a 15 meter monster with a powerful turbo engine and no working clutch. Imagine your feeling as the bus pulls up to the stop where you are waiting, the squeal of brakes on hot iron, the door opens amid a cloud of steam and mist, and it is MIchael Schumaker at the wheel. But in this incarnation, he has luminescent beady eyes, fangs, wild swept-back hair and a look of crazed desperation to get through the next set of lights while they are still red. Welcome aboard.

Personal Safety. 
Unless you are a protester facing a line of riot police or North Korean sympathiser, Seoul seems to be an overwhelmingly safe place to be.  Safety is relative, I realise - it is mostly a feeling rather than solely a statistic provided by an organisation like FIIIS. I've been to a lot of places, ranging from New Orleans to Johannesburg, Marseilles to Naples, Bangkok to Beijing, and always managed to convince myself that I'm safe. Foolish? Certainly, but it seems to work. Seoul is in a league of its own (erm... together with most Japanese cities).  

Recently I was working in a semi-crowded cafe, and a young lady came in, dumped her laptop and expensive handbag, containing everything she owned, on an empty table near me and then went off to one of the city's 12 million public toilets for 8 minutes (women... why do they take so long, what ARE they doing??).  In just about any city in Europe or North America, both items, most likely, would not be waiting for her on her return. This circumstances of this anecdote are not at all unusual - you see this type of thing all the time.

I've read in more than a few blogs of how young foreign women feel so safe here, for example, returning home alone late at night.  To some extent, especially for foreigners, this may be true. In a quick Internet pass, government statistics suggest a very low rate of attacks on women and rape.  However, digging deeper, there is heaps of evidence that low rates of rape are simply due to low rates of reporting (as happens in many cultures that have a deep seated, misogynistic attitude to women).  A rapist here is highly unlikely to be brought to trial, in the few cases that do, he is likely to be found not guilty, in the even fewer cases of conviction, the rapist will get a very light sentence. Add that to the fact (a real fact this time) that most rapists are known to their victims, and how likely do you think it is that government statistics are true and accurate? Even the small amount of reading I've done on this points to some troubling situations - I'll return to this topic some time soon.

Jazz music.  
Very curiously, just about all forms of jazz are popular here. And not just hobbyist popular but actually popular. This is the nation responsible for unleashing K-pop on the world so I can't say I completely understand this dichotomy. 

Some months back I went to a Pat Metheny concert. It took place in sort of a national theatre (i.e. completely over-sized in a sort of Totalitarian government, Realism kind of way) but shockingly, every seat was filled - about 4,000 people. And even the cheap seats aren't cheap. The FIIIS did a survey on the concert and noted that well over 65% of the audience was single females. In Europe or North America this is just unheard of.  Jazz is overwhelmingly a male occupation. So much so that for any single woman over the age of 30, all she has to do to catch an interesting, sensitive and probably well-off guy, is start attending jazz gigs. Being knowledgable would help the ensnarement a little, so being able to say, with apparent conviction and sincerity, '... of course my favourite is Miles Davis, especially when he was with Coltrane' is all she would need for a successful pull.

Mountains. 
Not too many cities can claim a mountain in their midst. And not just one but many. Although you shouldn't think Himalayan majesty, Seoul has some serious mountains. 

In the middle of the summer heat and humidity, as an August evening descended, a friend rang me, she and her sister, who owns a car, and her sister's young child were going to 'make mountain visit' (her lack of English and my lack of Korean hasn't been a big problem so far) and did I want to come along?  I was down at the street waiting quicker than I could say Kamsamneda. In a 15 minute drive through traffic and then a couple of km around winding roads and hairpin curves, we're suddenly out of the heat and gazing at the twinkling city lights just past twilight. Koreans seem to have a Buddhist monastery or temple at the top of every mountain in the country and this was no exception. My friend pointed out the landmarks in the city below us and we watched the traffic flowing red and white. It was peaceful, it was beautiful, the air was clean and cool - Seoul has its good points I decided.