BY the time you read this, I should be on my way home from my first overseas holiday since February 2020. Where am I coming back from? Seoul, South Korea.
As singer Psy (of super-duper megahit Gangnam Style fame) says in his comeback song That That, this ahjumma (Korean for aunty) is coming back.
I am writing this column in advance because I won’t have time to do so during my short stay with my son, Nick, because we have planned a very full itinerary.
I have visited Seoul several times – the last was in April 2019 – but it’s Nick’s first. That means we will do some of the usual touristy stuff that will include the Gyeongbokgung, the main royal palace of the Joseon dynasty, which is also the location of many K-dramas. Nick won’t appreciate that but he will enjoy getting an insight of how the royals lived within the huge palace grounds.
We will also do the "hanbok” experience, which is to dress up in rented traditional garments. Again, thanks to the Korean costume dramas, the hanbok is almost as famous as the Japanese kimono. It’s become a must-do for tourists to walk around dressed in both national costumes. (Apparently, there are kebaya rental services in Melaka but I don’t know how well it works in our sweat-inducing weather.)
I have dressed up in both hanbok and kimono (in Kyoto, Japan) and I must say the Japanese experience is much better because it really offers a much more authentic and complete experience of wearing the very elegant and multilayered garment.
I may not get into hanbok this time but Nick is keen and visitors in hanbok get free entrance to the palace.
Why Seoul again? Well, in my column titled “A love letter to South Korea” on Nov 18, 2020 (online at bit.ly/star_korea), I confessed I became enamoured of the country through its TV dramas.
I shared this as a panelist at a talk at the National Art Gallery on May 2 this year in conjunction with the Hallyu-Korean Wave Exhibition that marks the 40th anniversary of Malaysia’s Look East Policy.
While that government policy was aimed at getting the best practices from the east Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the focus was mainly on Japan. Malaysians, especially the Chinese, were already familiar with Taiwan so South Korea was rather overlooked until the tidal change brought on by the Hallyu Wave.
Even so, it was rather sweet of the Koreans to want to mark the 40th anniversary of the policy and the country's Foreign Minister Park Jin was in town to co-launch the exhibition with the Tourism and Arts Ministry’s secretary-general Datuk Saraya Arbi. The exhibition will run till Sept 16, 2023.
The installation art pieces are by the Batu Belah Art Community, one of the Young Contemporary Awards 2021 winners who gave their interpretations of some of the influences of Korean soft power that have become familiar to Malaysians.
For all the modern takes on Korean culture, a painting by the late portrait artist Mohamed Hoessein Enas caught my eye for its timelessness. Painted in 1963, the art piece is titled Korean Girl, but apparently the girl was a young Malay woman dressed in a white and red hanbok.
Other works on display are by notable South Korean artists, including professor emeritus Jin Youngsun who trained as a fresco mural artist and is the recipient of Korea’s Cultural Order of Merit. Her exhibits focus on the globally popular group BTS and their links to Korean culture. She is unashamedly a big fan of the group, like me.
You can imagine my delight in meeting her and how easy and comfortable it was for us two senior ladies to share our appreciation and affection for our seven boys.
I have a date with Prof Jin in Seoul where she wants to show me "The Room of Quiet Contemplation” at the National Museum of Korea. I must say I am delighted she chose this venue as I haven’t visited any museum in Korea on previous trips, an oversight on my part.
On our itinerary is the historic Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the buffer zone between the two Koreas. I have been there and trotted down one of the tunnels the North Koreans dug as a means to invade its southern neighbour, but I look forward to seeing Nick experiencing it. I hope we can cover more places I missed like the Unification Bridge and the Yanggu War Memorial Museum.
A highlight of our trip is meeting up with my good friend whom I got to know when he was attached to the South Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur. We have kept in touch after he returned home in February 2021.
He will be our guide for the DMZ tour and a hike up Bukhansan, a national park with three main peaks just outside the city. Even though it is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "Most Visited National Park per Unit Area” with five million visitors a year, I had been unaware of its existence until my friend told me about it.
So I am taking hiking shoes and have been exercising the last couple of months to make sure I can keep up on the five-hour hike.
There are still a few items on our wish list like catching a stage performance called The Painters and, of course, we have several eating places in mind, including a one-Michelin star noodle shop in touristy Myeongdong district.
From my previous visits, I found Seoul to be quite easy on the pocket. Transportation by bus and the Metro is really convenient and affordable.
But post-pandemic, prices have gone up, especially for food, much to the dismay of returning tourists. According to the Korea Consumer Agency, quoted by The Korean Times, most restaurants in Seoul have raised their prices sharply over the past year due to the soaring prices of food ingredients and higher wages.
That may put a dampener on our eating plan and we may have to resort to a meal or two at a convenience store to eat ramyeon, the Korean version of instant noodles, which K-dramas have turned into a popular trope.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the column, my holiday will be over by the time you read this. No matter how it turns out, it will be a much welcome getaway from our current searingly hot weather. Temperatures in Seoul are supposed to be a pleasant 12ºC to a slightly high 26ºC.
I hope the forecast is accurate as I have packed light. But with climate change, friends who recently travelled to Europe expecting mild weather found themselves freezing in unseasonable low temperatures and snow, so I have thrown in a puffer jacket as well. That and lots of KF94 masks, not so much against Covid-19 but because the dust and dander count is quite high.
As with many things, we can plan as much as possible for a vacation but we can still get tripped up by factors beyond our control like falling sick, flight delays, and inclement weather. But I will remain upbeat and positive that it will go splendidly well and I will return with happy memories of yet another Seoul-good holiday.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
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