IN SITU

Here we are, in room 309, International House 1 of Sookmyung Women’s University—a room that is actually two rooms, far more generous a space than we expected. We have a bedroom (with a desk as well as a king-size bed) and an everything-else-room that includes another desk. The television is snowy and the phone doesn’t work, but the air conditioner does. The weather generally is hot and humid, the air hazy with pollution. I realize we’re almost exactly halfway round the world from Toronto. We’ve traded night for day—it’s 3:30 a.m. there when it’s 4:30 p.m. here. Perhaps this explains the oddly dreamlike quality of our lives.

As it happens we could be cooking meals—there’s a 2-gas burner, a toaster oven, and a little fridge. But we haven’t worked out how to light the gas, and there are no pots or dishes in the cupboard except the two plates and two glasses we bought when we discovered the Lotte Market at Seoul Station—and besides there are at least a hundred and one restaurants/cafes/coffee houses/take-out places within a few minutes walk. Even if we can’t figure out what most of them are cooking (no English menus or signs) we are finding good cheap food.

The street our building is on is narrow (by Toronto standards); it rises and falls along a hill, winding here and there. It feels more like a lane than a street, except for the astonishing number of cars and trucks that manage to drive along it, skirting the fairly steady stream of pedestrian traffic. Looking out our third floor windows I’m reminded a little of Siena by the street’s incline and the way the houses/buildings sit right at the pavement’s edge.

It’s perhaps a five-minute walk to the larger commercial street that leads past the entrance to Sookmyung Women’s University. Along that walk we can buy fruit, groceries, baked desserts, housewares, and clothing, or sit down with a coffee and sweet, order a meal, get clothing dry cleaned, take a hot yoga class—and who knows what else in the buildings and shops with only Korean characters on them. On the larger street we find drugstores, cosmetic shops, lots more clothing stores, tons of eating places, an optician, a phone shop (I think that’s what it is) and a stationery store jammed with file folders, portfolios, notebooks (Sponge Bob covers anyone?), letter paper, wrapping paper, rolls of ribbon, paper clips, hair clips, and racks of socks. From mid-afternoon the street is jammed with people, mostly students, and their numbers increase steadily at least until 8:30—which is about the latest we’ve managed to stay out so far. We’re waking about 6:30 a.m.—the sun already high in the sky, but the street then quiet, nearly empty. Except, one morning, for the corps of women wearing broad sun visors and wielding brooms and dustpans clearing rubbish into little carts.