There are images I always carry with me into a new country, a new city, a new place. Italy exists in my mind as Siena, Florence, Rome, San Cataldo. Siena is walls, cobblestones, workers etching lines into fresh-laid road tiles by hand, the black and white striped columns inside the duomo. Florence is the river Arno, and Ponte Vecchio at sunset. Rome is a sunset, too, seen from the top of the Spanish Steps the day before Easter, then mass in Piazza San Pietro, John Paul II slumping and the Spaniards singing: “Juan Pablo, Segundo, te aman todo el mundo.” All the world loves you. Sicily is somewhere else. Dry hills, history, mine and someone else’s. My great-grandparents left; I came back, then left again.

The China I had in my mind before I moved there was drawn in pieces, from the New York and Los Angeles Times, in Peter Hessler’s River Town, in my martial arts classes. Xi’an came the closest to that picture, something old but redone as new, crowded and dirty, outward wealth overlaying stubborn poverty, a history to be proud of, not Beijing, where history is made, forgotten, remade. Maybe Beijing is what China really is: a place that reinvents itself, and its past, when it must.

But I didn’t have an image of Seoul. The last description of the Korean Peninsula I read came from Ha Jin, and that was a different Korea. That was 50 years ago, during the war, sitting in a prison camp. No use. Seoul is something new and hard to place. I caught myself thinking on the boat over here: “Well, I can look forward to a month of…what?” Nothing came immediately to mind. Usually I spend weeks researching a destination before setting out, but I left in such a rush, and without proper Web access, that I came in almost blind.

Getting here hasn’t made it easier. Incheon passed in gray blocks seen from the subway, a port town like so many other port towns, except immediately not Chinese. The cars stopped neatly behind a red light gave me the first clue of a place different from where I left. I don’t suppose I should expect much similarity between China and South Korea, and in truth I haven’t found much.

Seoul defies easy descriptions. It feels foreign and familiar. Wide streets and fast cars remind me of Los Angeles, houses and apartment buildings stacked up in the hills remind me vaguely of Seattle. All the writing is in Korean, though, and I can’t speak or read a word of it. I’m still very much a foreigner here.

I feel displaced here. Not pushed out, just unattached. I still reflexively see the world as divided between East and West, but Seoul at first glance doesn’t fit such a simple dichotomy. This is the most integrated city I’ve yet seen, far more than Dalian. Granted, I’ve never seen Shanghai or Hong Kong or Tokyo, but I get this inkling that Seoul is different. I like it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under roadside blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.