Escape from the neon nights

At first glance, Seoul is the world of the hyper-modern. If I had described this city yesterday, I might have said "excessive." It's enormous. Twenty million plus in the metro area. That makes it the second largest metropolitan city in the world, in case you were wondering. When you go out to eat, you don't go out with a restaurant in mind. You pick an area, say two or three blocks, and then you choose from not one restaurant, but 50. You follow the trail of neon lights and the broken English, and finally, exhausted from choice, you sit down.

In Seoul, your vision may start at street level, but it quickly goes up. Up one, two, seven stories, because their is a restaurant/bar/store on every floor. And they're all busy. You at first try to take the stairs, and then realize your legs won't make it if you do this over and over again. In the end, you resign yourself to that simplest of luxuries, the elevator, and you let it take you wherever you want to go. The same applies to the sidewalk. Why stroll when the subway is clean and, dare I say cozy?

The lights are blinding, the options overwhelming, yet somehow this city presses on, buzzes with pride to the extra everything. People do smile in Seoul. And they laugh. And they pray.

Where you would expect to find a humble sanctuary, you find a neon cross. A man waits patiently on the escalator of the metro to give you a copy of "The Daily Bread" (in Hanguel and in English). There is a revival underneath a tent, right outside of Seoul Station. But there's more to Seoul than neon and Jesus, right where you'd expect to find it. Up, up, up.

Today Sam and I took a stroll. First to the Filipino flea market, which happens every Sunday. The Filipinos line the street chatting and jibing, and every bad bootleg DVD you could ever want waits for you next to scrumptious rice cakes and tropical rice. But that was just a stroll, a precursor to our big adventure, the hike to Inwangsan.

Inwangsan is a peak, 338 meters to be exact, and it towers over Seoul just like the 60 other peaks that make the city sort of resemble a cereal bowl. To get to the trail to Inwangsan, you go where you always go in Seoul, right onto the subway. You find yourself dropped off in a neighborhood, which is nearly every neighborhood in Seoul, busy and crammed with high-rises. You walk down a most discrete path, the first alley you see on your left (That is what the directions told us, and they worked just fine) right past corner stores and apartments, and you finally end up at a staircase that steeply climbs to an ugly dirt road that looks strangely out of place for a city as paved as Seoul. The dirt road shoots up the side of a hill, and voíla, you are now at the temple gates to a Buddhist village.

My last description could be wrong, it may be a Shamanist village. I know that many Koreans practice a blended form of the two, and perhaps any other number of religions/traditions. I do know that the entrance, and what's to follow is stunning. Absolutely stunning. Carved into the hillside is the antithesis to what lies below. You turn around, and the city lies before you, pricking at the smoggy sky. Turn around again, and you suddenly are afraid to utter anything for fear of disrupting the energy.

The homes of this village are small, and if I remember correctly, wooden. I could also be making up the following, but I swear there were wind chimes. And birds. And streams running. You crawl through the village unsure if this land is artificial or just so deeply removed from the land below. I walked with Sam, and we didn't have to say anything to choose our direction. We just went.

At the top of the village, you see stone trails that begin to ascend the mountain. Suddenly there are carvings of Buddha, statuettes, and burning incense everywhere. There is ritual, of course, and then there is the spiritual. A woman rocks on her knees in front of bowls of water and burning votives chanting to the breathtaking misshapen rock face in front of her. A man next to her rocks silently, following her command. At this point you are afraid to progress until you see that others dare to walk past. The others walk past and the woman continues chanting.

This scene is played out in a nook and cranny every 50 feet as you walk. Each time you feel like you should cry and begin rocking on your own knees. Every time you reach an opening, you look below to the city and lament the modern world. You climb and climb, not even nodding at those you pass, because perhaps that would be too much, too cruel to remove someone from their own private state. We continued up and up until the path narrowed from stone to grass and dirt, and we tucked our heads lower and lower under the trees. And then we found an exit, a different path. This one was paved with white lines and filled with hiking Koreans. And that was fine. We hiked to the top, saw all of Seoul, and eventually meandered down, following the white lines all the way to the bottom so as to leave the spiritual parts of the hill alone.

We came down and eventually found Insadong, a neighborhood that preserves a little more of the old Seoul and a little less of the skyscrapers. And just as I was feeling bad about not finding any vegetarian food, we wandered through a charming alley and in bright neon lights I saw "Vegetarian Restaurant." I'm feeling refreshed and excited, having learned a little more about the "heart" of "Seoul."