Despite the current craze over all things Korean, if you ask the average person what they know about Seoul you probably won't get past discussing Gangnam Style, K-Pop girls, Plastic Surgery and the latest Smartphone from Samsung. What I've compiled here is a list of everyday oddities, sometimes awesome, other times very, highly, extremely, absolutely not awesome (skip #2 if you're Ricky Gervais or love animals).
7. Old People Outnumber The Young
Well strictly speaking, not really, but they’re practically everywhere. The elderly population has actually tripled in size over the last 30 years and it’s not getting any smaller largely thanks to low fertility rates. It’s a massive problem that’s brewing in Korea, not least because the open umbrellas held by hunched over little old ladies are a major hazard to the throats of the younger generation.
There’s even a district in Korea called Jegi-Dong, home to a Fish, Meat, Herb and Traditional Medicine market where you’ll literally find thousands of elderly folk going about their business while you struggle to find a single soul who knows what a Pikachu is.
For the record I think roughly 75% of old people are absolute cunts while the other 25% are gems. There’s just no middle ground. I guess it's not their fault though, living without knees and a functioning back will do that to anyone, but I digress.
6. The Convenience Stores Meet Your Every Need
What do you usually drop by the convenience store for? Snacks or Beers? Groceries if you haven't got time to visit the supermarket? Condoms while trying to avoid the judging eyes of the store attendant?
Well in Seoul not only will the attendant be an octogenarian, but you'll also find things that you never thought would appear in a 7-11. Fancy a piece of Fried Chicken? Check. Misplaced your spectacles? 20 different prescriptions for you to choose from! Had a wet fart from too much kimchi and now need some disposable underwear? We'll throw in some free pantyhose.
There’s a microwave for you to heat up frozen meals, a hot water dispenser for cooking soup or noodles and most of the stores will even have seats so you can lay back and take in the full experience of the student lifestyle while inhaling bowls of MSG filled instant ramen.
They even provide services like printing, selling SIM cards, filing your tax and utility payments and sports betting. You could literally live in a convenience store and have all you ever need.
5. Cafes are Everywhere
It’s literally impossible to walk down a street in Seoul and not see a café. The options for a drink, dessert or snack are far often much more numerous when compared to if you simply want a nice, proper meal. According to a survey conducted by Starbucks Korea, 41.8% of respondents visit cafés 3~4 times per week.
There’s also concept cafés like the Hello Kitty Café, Cat Cafés, Puppy Cafés and get this – Sheep Cafés!
The only one that probably isn’t a complete rip off is the Study Café. To enter you simply need to purchase one overpriced drink (which lets be honest, you’d be paying for in any Café), following which you can then use the all the facilities including comfortable study areas, WiFi and power sockets for as long as you want. There’s pin drop silence besides the furious mashing of keys on laptops and any loud noises or even hushed talking is frowned upon. It’s a great place to sit your lazy ass down and finally get some actual work done.
4. Street Food and Desserts are often the Main Course
If you’re not inside a mall and craving for a proper full hot meal, tough luck. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything other than pushcarts and shops selling all kinds of snacks, desserts and other street food like Ice Cream Waffles, Egg Tarts, Grilled cuttlefish, Spicy Rice Cakes and tons of other stuff. They’re all really delicious, but not exactly what you want when particularly famished.
One snack that’s gaining in popularity fairly quickly, are the Poop Pancakes. Yep, poop as in faeces, excreta, merde. Now you might think that these are probably just a novelty item sold by a single popular stall or a couple of pushcarts in the middle of a touristy area, but there is an actual company with a chain of poop delivering shops all over Seoul that go by the name “Dong Bang”.
Fun fact, the actual spelling of Poop is the English equivalent of Ddong, but the CEO of the chain decided not to go down that slippery slope as he felt awkward having the literal meaning of the word ‘poop’ in the company name, which is certainly strange for a man who has no qualms about his food resembling, you know, poop.
Desserts wise you’ll find ‘Bingsu’, a dessert made of shaved ice with sweet toppings like fruits and their sickly sweet syrups, ‘Mochi’, a Japanese dessert hugely popular in Korea, as well as Bubble/Pearl Tea in dozens of different flavours all designed to give you diabetes. It’s fair to say Koreans have a pretty sweet tooth.
3. The Spas are 24/7 Entertainment Complexes
When you imagine a visit to a Spa, you think of perhaps some time spent in the sauna and a nice soothing massage finished off with a cup of hot green tea. Not in Seoul!
The Spas here are massive buildings, up to 6 stories high, and have so many facilities you literally won’t be able to use them all in a single day visit. Cinemas, PC Gaming Rooms, Swimming Pools, Hot Tubs, Saunas, Arcades, Restaurants, Jacuzzis are just some of the facilities available for your use once you pay the entrance fee of roughly $20.
Sounds good right? But of course, since this is Asia, nothing can be perfectly normal and the Spas here are no different. Once you enter you’re separated and lead to the male or female changing rooms where you strip down to nothing, walk into the showers with a ton of other people unabashedly holding casual conversations on what their day was like and how the local baseball team was faring.
Now that's not be odd for everyone, and I totally understand that. What’s really uncomfortable and some might even say, painful, is what comes next. You line up with the others in all your glorious nakedness, trying to maintain your line of sight above the waist when it finally reaches your turn. You lie face and dong up on a massage table and it begins.
A full body scrub, including the parts that you’re thinking we may have excluded from ‘full body’. It’s done with a course brush and you literally see dead skin piling up in the bristles of the scrub while the scrubber scrubs you with all the finesse and tenderness of The Hulk. Once the abuse is over, you take a quick rinse again and then off you go, 20% lighter with skin as smooth as the day you were born.
2. Dog Meat is a Huge Industry
While technically illegal, the unregulated trade results in nearly 100,000 tons of dog meat being consumed either as soup or in medicine. While many are pleased with the current stance on the illegality of the trade, what it means is that the dogs that are raised for slaughter allegedly go through a harder life compared to other livestock raised for consumption. The fact that there are no laws in place in order to ensure proper hygiene as well as maintain standards of animal welfare for these dogs, has meant that the government is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Credits
There have been pushes for such laws to be enacted in the past for the benefit of the animals but they have been heavily criticised and ultimately shot down because of. ironically, pressure from activists who claim it appears like the government is legitimising the trade.
1. The Boryeong Mud Festival
Quick, what did you first picture when you read ‘Mud Festival’?
A huge area full of people flinging sticky, gloopy, viscous muck at each other? Or maybe you're a more conservative and rational thinking person, who pictured some slides and a pool of mud with the consistency of your poop after a particularly dodgy kebab?
Nope! This is what you’ll rock up after a 3 hour bus ride.
Less mud, more diluted cement. No pools of mud that people would desperately try to throw each other in. No chance to grab some and fling it at unsuspecting people like your favourite chimpanzees at the zoo.
It's a bit of a let down at first, but to be fair, there’s still a crazy amount of fun to be had. There are inflatable slides, obstacle courses, wrestling pits, bouncy castles and a few other play areas full of mud.
There’s also a beach party which is probably worth staying the night for. They play the usual party music but there's foam and water being sprayed at you with beach balls and floats flying everywhere. Can't really go wrong with that combination, but you certainly can improve it with alcohol which is why there are dozens of stalls selling liquor and cocktails around.
Showers are definitely a bummer (no pun intended) though. Picture (actually you probably shouldn’t) 30 naked men cramped into a showering room with no cubicles at all separating each shriveled up flaccid penis from the next, washing themselves while just casually having conversations with each other.
You’re welcome.