Chans in Seoul

Our first family trip of 2024 was to Seoul, the megacapital of South Korea. The country and the broader Korean pop culture scene have been having a moment these last few years, with the latest wave of musical acts, dramas, films, and Netflix reality shows raising the profile of the city to unprecedented heights. Seoul’s neighbourhoods have taken on increased resonance with global audiences, with districts like Gangnam, Itaewon, Myeongdong, Insadong, Hongdae, and Dongdaemun becoming nearly as recognisable as Tokyo’s Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Akihabara.

Ashley and I were last in Seoul back in 2012, when we rented the upper floor of a house near Gangnam with a bunch of friends for a few days and packed our itinerary with shopping, eating, jjimjilbangs, and then more of the above. It was a fun trip, but I didn’t come away with much of an impression of the city itself, and in the intervening years Seoul was an afterthought as we holidayed in other Asian cities and locales. In truth, I had the impression that everything Seoul had, other cities did it better, whether it was food, sites of interest, history, shopping, and just the sheer city-ness of a place. Then some cheap flights showed up one night as we were contemplating our next family holiday, and, despite our soft ambivalence towards the place, we booked a quick three-day trip to the Korean capital.

Our first day in Seoul happened to be a national holiday due to the legislative election, so we met up with our friend Byeong, formerly based in Hong Kong but a resident of Korea for the last few years. This was more of a classic touristy day, so our first stop was Gyeongbokgung Palace, the seat of the ruling Joseon dynasty from the 14th Century to the late 19th Century (minus a nearly three-century period when it was an abandoned ruin). The wide open spaces inside the palace grounds don’t reflect the actual layout of the complex as it was for much of its history, with the imperial Japanese occupiers laying waste to 90% of the royal buildings in the early 20th Century. It is only since the 1990s that the South Korean government have been slowly restoring Gyeongbokgung Palace to its former glory.

After grabbing lunch nearby, we headed over to the narrow laneways of Bukchon Hanok, a neighbourhood to the north of the palace that formerly housed the Joseon dynasty’s nobility and government officials. We have a photo on our travel wall back home of us and our Seoul travel companions, including Byeong, from 12 years ago posing together on the Bukchon Hanok’s main thoroughfare, so it was a little bit sentimental to revisit that same exact location. Of the seven of us there that day, only Ashley and I are still in Hong Kong, the rest having scattered in the intervening years to Japan, Singapore, Seattle, New York, and, in Byeong’s case, Seoul. That’s growing up, then. On the flip side, we got to take that same photo with our two favourite people in the world, Miles and Olive (strapped to my back, but she’s there).

Seoul Children’s Grand Park

After dragging the kids around some of the more touristy sites in the city on day one, we dedicated the second day to activities that were more in line with the kids’ interests. On our agenda was the Seoul Children’s Grand Park, a massive urban park built in the 1970s with a free zoo, multiple playgrounds, a children’s museum, an amusement park, and several other dedicated kids facilities.

We asked Miles what he wanted to do first, and he headed straight for the children’s museum. The three-storey building was a hit with the kids, full of colourful and well-designed activities that encouraged them to explore design, the interaction of light and physical activity, the impact of human activity on the natural world around us, physics, tent-making, and how to make fuel with poop. That basically took up our whole morning.

Next up was the zoo, and we truly had no expectations, especially for a free one. But the very first animals we saw was a pair of elephants, and Olive went wild. She’s got a particular love of animals and this part of the park was right up her alley. Every exhibit we walked up to she found something to delight in, whether it was foxes, lions, monkeys, a kangaroo, or a family of meerkats.

We ended the day at one of the park’s many playgrounds, and though not quite as impressive as the ones we saw in Okinawa last December, it was enough for the kids to let loose whatever extra energy they had left over. One nice bonus was the amount of cherry trees spread throughout the park and lining the paths connecting the different areas. Miles has brought up on more than one occasion how he loved seeing the cherry blossoms in Tokyo last March, so it was nice to show him Seoul’s cherry blossoms too.

Jamsil Railway Bridge

One of Miles’ enduring loves is trains, especially metro systems and their colourful maps. He’s drawn the Hong Kong MTR map from memory before and I’m pretty sure he knows what each station’s colour scheme is too. Tokyo’s dizzingly complicated city train system is another huge favourite, and he even remembers a few of the stations we passed by last summer when we were in Toronto. With that in mind, I figured Seoul’s beautifully chaotic subway lines would be right up his alley.

There’s a bridge crossing the Han River not far from our hotel called the Jamsil Railway Bridge that connects two stations on Line 2, Jamsillaru and Gangbyeon. The cool thing about this bridge is that there’s a pedestrian path right beside the train tracks, a perfect vantage point for a train-loving five-year-old. So on the morning of our third day, we took the train a couple stops over to Gangbyeon and then walked back across the bridge towards Jamsillaru.

What we did not take into account was how loud the trains were going to be. Near the ends of the bridge where the trains were either just pulling out of a station or slowing down to pull into one, the noise levels were okay, but in the long stretch in the between the noise levels were nearly unbearable. Judging by how often Miles was covering his ears during our walk, I thought he was having a miserable time, but he later told us it was the highlight of his day. Getting to see the trains up close was pretty cool, even for me. And the views along the river were quite nice as well. Just bring earplugs.

Starfield COEX Mall

After watching the trains go back and forth on the bridge, we made our way over to Starfield COEX Mall to grab some lunch. The mall is perhaps best known for the Starfield Library, a popular Instagram photo spot due to its giant curved walls of books that stretch from floor to ceiling. We took a walk around inside and grabbed some photos of our own, along with all the other people in the library there to do the exact same thing. I’m not a hater or a snob when it comes to cool photo locations, and all the better for it being a celebration of reading (or at last the aesthetic appeal of appearing to do so).

The rest of our afternoon was spent at the COEX Aquarium, a decent-sized aquarium located inside the mall. It’s a little bit funny in terms of design and aesthetic, but you can tell they put some thought into it. Aside from the usual big tanks full of marine life, they had one section that featured unconventional fish habitats, like a mailbox or a headboard space in front of a bed. It also had a hall kitted out like an art gallery, with the various displays decorated to look like paintings in a museum. There was also a prairie dog exhibit for some reason. Anyway, the kids loved it.

The Jamsil Derby

The last thing we did in Seoul, and the thing I was most looking forward to, was attend a baseball game at the Jamsil Baseball Stadium between the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears. Both teams play their home games at this stadium, so any time they play each other the games are referred to as the Jamsil Derby. I’d grown up attending Blue Jays games back in Toronto on a regular basis with my dad or with friends, but I knew the atmosphere and the whole vibe of baseball crowds in Asia was a whole other ballgame. As we walked up to the stadium and lined up on the concourse to get in, it felt both very familiar to me and also completely different from what I was used to back home. That feeling when you finally walk out of the tunnel and you hear the crowd noise hit you all of a sudden, and the field just fills up your vision, and even the sun hits you at just the right angle – those are the moments that make you a sports fan and become core memories, and doing the same in Seoul brought back a rush of old feelings.

And that’s where things start to diverge from the North American game. Korean baseball fans know how to get hype and motivate their teams – each side has a stage on the lower bowl with cheerleaders and an MC that is constantly leading songs, chants, cheers, and dances custom-made for each of their own players, and everybody in the crowd seems to have these memorised. We sat in the LG fan section and at first I was waiting for the cheering to stop so that the game could continue, but it never did. I can’t imagine how amped up you would get as a player to hear thousands of fans singing their hearts out in unison just for you, but as a neutral spectator I got chills. The other team’s supporters would answer back with their own deafening retorts and tailor-made songs, and it just struck at something primal within me, hearing masses of humanity coming together in support of something, even if it was just a baseball game.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous too, the perfect end-of-day setting for a baseball game – clear skies, beautiful sunset, and a cool breeze that took the edge off of any residual springtime heat. Miles was happy to just draw while we watched the game, but Olive was entranced by the cheerleaders. Every time they took a break, she’d frantically ask, “Where dancing? Where dancing?” She spent half the time standing on Ashley’s lap, bouncing to the beat of the cheers with a huge grin on her face. Unfortunately due to the kids’ bedtimes we left the game after the sixth inning, and of course that’s when LG scored the tying and go-ahead runs (which would turn out to be the difference). But what an experience! In recent years I’ve paid less and less attention to baseball, for whatever reason I find it harder to follow from Hong Kong compared to basketball and hockey, but it’s still the first sport I fell for, and I have a deep nostalgia around the game. That night in Jamsil allowed me to share a bit of that with the kids, but also to experience baseball in a whole new and amazing way.

Final Thoughts

We flew back to Hong Kong the next afternoon, and pretty soon afterwards Miles began drawing up subway maps with some of the Seoul stations mixed in. I’m never sure how much the kids get out of whatever holiday or new city we take them to, but I have to trust that they’re getting some understanding of the wider world around them. Hong Kong, for all of its faults, is still an incredible city, but it can also feel small after a while. My dream is for the two of them to be just as familiar and comfortable with Asia’s other incredible centres of culture and history and food as they are in Hong Kong, to be able to take their experiences in Seoul and Tokyo and Taipei and whatever cities we come to next and fit them into their own understanding of where they are, and who they are.

For myself, being back in Seoul after over a decade did move the needle a bit in terms of how I feel about visiting the city. There are tons of neighbourhoods we just didn’t have the time or the capacity to spend time in, and the fact that South Korea is trying to encourage more family-building means there is an increasing number of child-friendly activities and venues. I’m not sure when the next time we’ll be back is, though – there’s still so much around Asia that I want to show the kids! In fact, before we even got on the plane to Seoul, we had our next trip planned already, this time to another one of the region’s megacities, and one with a little bit of family history for both Ashley and I.