The usual goal is finishing up this newsletter by Sunday evening on the east coast. That wasn’t going to happen this week — well, last week. We were girding ourselves for the least human sort of travel, the one that laughs at your circadian rhythm. Leaving Korea at 7:20 p.m. local time; landing in Seattle 2 p.m. their local time; flying from Seattle to Washington at 10:30 p.m. local time; heading to work bright and early on the east coast.
I pulled it off, barely, but had to put the journal down. Two weeks of marriage hasn’t changed me much, but when we’re together, and certainly when we’re traveling together, I don’t want to say no to something because one of my pet projects called. The best thing about “settling down,” which I keep covering here, is un-learning the selfish, consumerist habits I built up over years. Instead of sitting down to gush into a diary, I said yes to one last swing through the malls near our hotel; instead of ruminating into a CMS I tagged along in the duty-free cosmetics store, where we got a great deal on horrifying skin masks, and in the knock-off emporium, where no fashion logo or T-shirt gibberish was too much to put on sale.
We had fun, then splurged for a luxury ride to the airport, the kind in which the driver hands you a keyboard to play with the 24’’ screen in front of you as you hit the “massage” button on your reclining seat. (I didn’t know this sort of car existed.) Nothing felt undone. Two weeks honeymooning in Japan and South Korea took us everywhere; the second, slower week paired nicely with the hectic first week. We had time to spend a rainy day in the largest spa we’d ever seen, time to see “Barbie” in a luxurious theater where the jokes didn’t translate well, time to get off at the wrong metro stop and realize were at the Zaha Hadid-designed spaceship art complex.
I’ve noticed a backlash to travel-talk, for a couple of reasons. Some I agree with: It can be crashingly dull to hear someone describe a vacation, and it can make the listener feel a little jealous, especially if the speaker is bad at telling stories and doesn’t seem to appreciate what he got on the trip. Some I don’t agree with: Travel is a bourgeois waste of time that could be spent looking inward. There are many ways to “waste time,” and the odds of you having a completely un-insightful day spent thinking about your place in the universe are higher than you having a completely unmemorable day somewhere else.
Some highlights:
The DMZ. My wife booked a daylong tour of the demilitarized zone between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic, and it took 10 minutes for our South Korean host to comment on how ironic the second country’s name was. Let me tell you: I love that stuff. The history of communism museum in Shanghai, that presents all Chinese history as a march, first unknowing then knowing, into the socialist future. Can’t get enough! We got the hard sell on democracy, which we didn’t really need, then, during the video introduction to the third (of four) military access tunnels that tourists can walk down into, an updated propaganda video about how good it was that the north and south were reconciling.
I’ve spent a lot of time in D.C., but don’t think I’ve ever been in a place so surfeited with politics. You can buy smuggled North Korean currency and (for less) North Korean beer. You can buy DMZ rice in Panmunjom, the unification village where a few hundred people live under constant military occupation — worth it, we were told, for the profits on lotus flowers and ginseng. You can pick one of two dozen telescopes and gaze into Kaesŏng, trying to spot a real live North Korean. You can, and are encouraged to, take a picture of the statues paying tribute to comfort women, and the statue of a on oddly adonic Harry S Truman. Recommended.
Spa Land. It rained for about half the time we spent in Busan, which for simplicity I kept describing as Korea’s Miami. (Not an awful comparison — you want to be on the beach, but most people live in the town and let the tourists pay for the $15 chaise lounge rentals.) We expected this, and headed to Centum City, home to the largest mall we’d ever been to and the largest spa, which introduced us to the “bed tub” (curved linoleum you can lie back into as the jets spray) and introduced me, specifically, to the idea of spending 10 minutes in a Finnish sauna (75 C) then running into the cold pool (19 C). “It helps with blood circulation,” they say. Sounds silly until you try it and, sure enough, feel all of your pores open up.
The rest of the week was low key — a couple of great meals, a trip to Gangnam where there’s a massive statue of Psy’s hand gestures (and a speaker constantly playing “Gangnam Style,” which seems like overkill), a trip to the neighborhood we kept hearing referred to as “the Williamsburg of Seoul” and where we kept having to navigate around the engaged couples taking photos outside the Dior store.
Could gush all day, but I’m two days late and back to work and should wrap this up.
The Best Thing I Read: The answer’s “Catch-22,” which I’d owned for maybe 20 years, a paperback from a used book store in Wilmington. The context is that I brought books to give away when I was finished, and that was the best of them; I read it during the long periods when I was next to water and didn’t care if my copy got some splash-back.
I brought more books than I was going to read, but in one of my first married compromises — not even a “compromise,” something I should have been doing for years — I packed just a few hard copies and put the rest on a Kindle. Finished “The Ambassadors” by Henry James, finished “After the Quake” by Haruki Murakami, got about halfway through “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth.
The Best Thing I Heard: My wife, who planned most of the Korean part of the trip, closely follows Korean pop music. It was through her that I learned that Psy’d staged a comeback — actually a while ago — with a new song composed entirely out of hooks. It was the only one I heard first on the trip then played when I was getting ready in the morning. The everything-in-the-blender style of K-pop production either confuses me or works instantly.
The Best Thing I Watched: The best experience was watching “Barbie” in a cine-cafe in Busan, on another rainy day, 36 hours before it was released in America. The vibe was perfect — reclining chairs, phone chargers in the seats (Korea is the only place I’ve been to as phone-addicted as the US), sparkling water and complimentary dark chocolate. The audience never laughed; we, the Americans who got all the 90s references, were for once the loudest people in a theater.
An overall good time, even though the best thing I saw was the Venture Brothers movie, which wrapped up a series that started in George W. Bush’s first term, when Stephen Colbert was affordable enough to do multiple guest voices. It preceded the great Geek IP rush of 2008 to 2022, and it finished just as people seemed to be sick of all that stuff. It ended perfectly, wrapping up the little mysteries that we figured would get answered by the end of the show, confirming that Dr. Venture and the Monarch were siblings, and leaving us with a few great gags, like the 60s actress who we at first think might be the mother of Hank and Dean Venture starring in a “Nutty Professor”-ish bomb called “Follow That Bikini.” I was a snotty college student when the show started, and I finished it as a married man with just the right relationship with nostalgia.
Back next week, and probably less late.