Part 4

At the word that we were to meet back here in one hour, I turned on my heel and set away through the packed streets, dodging shoulders, stuffed animals, and variegated arrays of “JonSport” backpacks, drawn toward the red and white spire that punched through the background of the neon signs that extended stories and stories above the pavement.  Three hours by bus had landed us at Gyeongbokgung Palace for the mid-week break, an ancient site but continually restored to its imperial grandeur since the 1990s, brilliant lotus flowers set on fields of blue and green punctuating the free end of every ceiling beam, and the fat, gold Hanja script bowing slightly over the thresholds of each temple.  The day had long since been hot and sticky, the masses of tourists and school groups resigned to the remaining cool that clung tightly under gateways and only braved venturing across the bare, open stone courtyard to reach the next shaded island, or to strike a pose amongst the explosion of pastels on the gabling.  We had no formal tour, but were instructed by our self-appointed handler to maintain a rapid clip, determined to pass every structure and every wall and every moat if but for the few seconds required to depress a shutter and to listen for a word of what it was we were pointed at.

The ascent began once past Soong Eui Women’s College, a cluster of stately buildings etched into the hillside, where the winding road shook off its dashed centerline for slim, parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths and tucked itself into the thickening green canopy, and I banked left, glancing at the plaque map and up the first granite stair.  Lunch awaited us outside the palace walls across boulevards lined with cute, anthropomorphized blue buses, around a statue of an enormous calligraphy brush sweeping a glossy circle onto its concrete pedestal, and into a pedestrian shopping district where I joined three others at a table adjacent to a restaurant’s peaceful interior garden.  Positive reinforcement, gamsa hamnidas to bus drivers or annyeoung haseos from baristas, had encouraged my Korean, so I courageously asked the waiter for mul while the others searched through the menu.  Complete apathy, no acknowledgement whatsoever, unblinking eyes and relaxed, open mouth responded, and again I said mul, and again the response was zombie-like, lifeless, no wheels turning behind the vacant stare.  I could stand there and repeat myself all afternoon, but I resigned and said, in English, water, and something finally snapped, the waiter quickened and excitedly replied, “Oh mul!”  When four full glasses arrived, we simply pointed to a few meals to share and raised all the fingers on one hand on the page with the pints of OB.

Thousands of steps lay before me, unrelenting and weaving up the hillside, passing synthetic cascades spilling into calm, shallow pools, kissing the decaying fortification then retreating back into the trees, and occasionally peaking through to the open sky at the vertex of a zigzag, progress tracked by the roofs of buildings now visible and those yet to be.  The heart of the country lay bare, ripped from its chest and rent apart with the pieces, thousands on thousands of yellow ribbons tied to the hundreds of vertical metal poles, sandwich boards with prayers and drawings of a great lotus flower bearing the souls from the sea to heaven, and simple paper boats arranged in a grand flotilla floating on the grass, each with a toothpick mast but no sail.  From its core, the tendrils of grief extended to the ideal point of boulevards, fluttering in the breeze on ropes hung from railings and on makeshift installations of bicycle wheels lashed together into a giant cracked eggshell.  Only a month after 306 died in the sinking of the MV Sewol, outrage was directed all the way to the top, claims of incompetence and negligence, censorship and manipulation, and the golden blaze of city hall’s courtyard reflected back from the glass building and the hopes of 50 million rest in the assurance that it was transmitted through, too.

What a sight Seoul was from the summit of Namsan: the sounds of shoppers and buses and the stroboscopic lighting from advertisements on advertisements had already been filtered out through monochromatic high-rise sieve hundreds of feet below, replaced by the uncountable undulations of buildings that either disappeared into the haze miles away or abutted the verdant hills to the north, and an eery, lonesome breeze under which the conversations of 20 million were hidden.  The Han river wriggled its way through the grey that itself had sloshed like a tsunami through the wide valley, low and quiet far away, rising then cresting as it approached Namsan, set far above as a refuge, and then crashing on its way toward the sea.  N Seoul Tower reached another 230 meters to the sky behind me, with a single-file tail of tourists that weaved around the mountain’s summit waiting for their ride to the viewing platform, and as the spike near the heart of the city’s compass rose it was visible from anywhere, a waypoint for pedestrian dead-reckoning navigation.  Some quick pictures was all the time I had, then a rushed descent retracing my path to the square where our group lazily waited, wandering in small circles, seated on benches, or chatting about the view from the top, easily accessible by a couple block walk from here and then hopping on the cable car.

The final two days of the conference ended much the same as it started, with lunches at locations strewn throughout Daejeon, including the local college’s canteen, and loud conversations over too many Dry Finish lagers after the sun had set.  As I had no talk of my own to prepare for anymore, my attention to the remaining talks drifted as the weekend approached as I had arranged for an extra day of hiking in the nearby Gyeryongsan National Park, for which its kinked, rocky backbone ridges soaring 2,000 feet above the valleys resembled some unholy union of its eponym of a chicken and a dragon and bore the most qi of any mountain on the peninsula.  I pored over trail maps, estimating potential elevation gains and optimal routes, reading reviews for the best viewpoints, and pieced together a three-transfer bus route from my hotel to the main gate, writing down the number of stops between transfers, on my laptop while at the front of the room there was pointing at the screen and some droning on about some other technique that could separate signal from noise.  After the final talks, and after inadvertently lightening my burden by one badge, I thanked the host and casually mentioned the convoluted hiking plan for the following day.  He was excited by this idea, for while he and the younger generation in general, apparently, rarely hiked, his parents found a trail every weekend, but vehemently refused to permit my bus plan to materialize.  He took his notebook from his backpack and tore out a leaf of paper, writing directions to Gyeryongsan in Hangul for me to pass to a cab driver.

The brilliant red and embossed gold print menus were passed around to the eight of us that remained on the final evening, though rich in flowing Chinese script and lacking photos most of us could do nothing until a native speaker translated.  Apparently, we had decided as a group that we had grown tired of Korean cuisine during the week, and so sought out a Chinese restaurant near the hotel that indulged our weary palettes.  In hindsight this seemed rather unreasonable, but as the size of this group increased, so our collective ambition decreased and choices were limited to something on this side of the river, away from the hustle and bustle and breadth of options downtown.  The dining room was quiet, empty, though dinner time on a Friday, but decorated extravagantly, exposed, knotty beams in the ceiling, marble and jade carvings in every niche along the walls, and an octet of high-backed leather seats arranged about each circular table.  Before sitting down, before the waitress returned to inquire about our orders, the menu had been summarized into English and, as the ambiance suggested and the prices confirmed, this was an extremely nice restaurant where nothing was inexpensive.  With harried shaking of heads and hurried pushing of chairs, we handed back the menus and searched for dinner elsewhere, somewhere where the house specialty wasn’t shark fin soup.