#100 Hiking through the snow in Seoul

Transcript

Alright, it's a couple of weeks later and it's snowing. So I thought I would record something because it's just fucking pretty as fuck. This is the most brand new snow you could ever have because I left the house when it was raining and another nice thing about living in a soft house, these communal Airbnb type setups in Korea are just so much better than anywhere else. You just have every little thing that you might need. All of your needs are anticipated, including umbrellas, tons of umbrellas. So I grabbed an umbrella and I noticed just on my way to the subway.

Do you remember that day? The day when the rain turned to snow. The rain was turning into snow and then when I got off the subway, sometime later, 40 minutes later, it was snowing. So it's still just the whiteness in the distance, just the white background behind everything, but it's so nice this time because it's not pollution-based. It's much deeper than that. It's like the visibility is even shorter. I can't see shit, but in a good way. Because even just the rain, it's like it literally washes the air. You know, the pollution index was green today. It was good. It was no problem. It's like, don't worry about it. You're good. So I'm not even wearing a mask. It seems fine. It's amazing.

Yeah, that left me with a slightly weird situation of having an umbrella in the snow and it's pretty heavy snowfall, but I've closed it for now while I record because that's just too much stuff to juggle in my hands. Yeah, I expected to do a nice little mountain hike through the rain. Instead, it's a mountain hike through the snow and it's fucking awesome. God, it's pretty. All the snow on these trees.

This was like my little dream in Japan was to see some snow and then I got that super duper warm winter and got no snow. Because I would always see snow on Instagram and stuff and I'm like, God, it's so beautiful.

Japan and the winter is so fucking gorgeous. And I just love winter. I love snow.

I didn't like it when I was a kid, but I think this happens to a lot of people where as you get older, you just become what you are, you know. You just become whatever you grew up with. I'm just becoming more and more Canadian. At this point, I feel like cold weather. It's funny to me that so much of the population lives like right by the equator because to me, cold weather is a quality of life increase. You know, things are better when it's cold and when it snows.

I think.

See, this is a very nice, gorgeous day. And I just thought I would record a little update now that it's a couple of weeks later. My first booking here in Seoul is almost up in just a few more days. So this is where I was looking into canceling. If I could have canceled my second leg of this day, I would have, but I could only get a 50% return so I didn't. And yeah, I'd say things are going well enough now at this point that I don't mind that I'm not leaving. I still find the pollution thing incredibly fucking creepy and unpleasant. Like this week in particular, seeing the weather forecast.

You know, well, I mean, it's weird because you just, you just adapt to stuff. Most days were moderate. We're like orange level. We're like, it's not good out there, but you know, put on a mask, you'll survive.

But if it ever did get worse than that, it's like, okay, you've decided my day for me. I will not go out hiking. I will just go explore a new part of town to find an exciting new Starbucks and hang out there today.

And it's not so bad. I mean, it's like, yeah, you know, if anything else, run in myself a little ragged in Japan, where I was going off having fucking crazy hiking adventures every fucking day.

Being forced to stay inside once in a while is not the worst thing, although it's just for such creepy reasons. But the pollution very rarely got much better than that. You know, it always vacillated between bad and very bad. The best it would get down to is like, kind of bad. And the very bad is just so fundamentally creepy. And yeah, the weather this week, the forecast showed it going up to not just the red of this is really bad, but to purple beyond red to like, this is fucking nuts. Don't go outside today.

And I don't know how any of that works or how the, I mean, I did see the weather map. That same weather map that you can see about typhoons and stuff swirling over things. 5:00 There's one of those for pollution too. And man, it's just so creepy. It's just, there's China, just the death swirl. And there it is just swirling across South Korea.

And some of the swirl hits Japan. And my friend Brad, who lived for a couple of years in Fukuoka, he said people in Fukuoka sometimes they would have air problems a little bit there. And they would generally kind of blame it on South Korea. And he didn't know if that was true or if that was just some weird bias they had. But yeah, now that I'm here and I was telling him all about it, he's like, oh, maybe it was kind of true. But yeah, it's just rolling downhill, you know, from China to Korea to Japan.

But anyway, this insanity they predicted luckily didn't happen. It was just a moderately polluted day that day. And then today's the next day. And yeah, it rained and it literally is just so fucked. It just washes the air. Everything was all right. And now it's snowing and everything is fucking great.

So it's weird. It's like in a way it's like a small request it kind of seems like. It's like the only thing that we really would need around here for Korea to be very beautiful. Especially the more I explore Seoul and the more I realize how many mountain trails and stuff there are and how accessible they are, if you could just deal with the pollution, everything would be great. But that one request is like the most huge global problem facing the earth right now. You know, I feel like every time I ever bought something that said made in China throughout my whole life. Now I'm paying for it. And these poor people are paying for it every fucking day.

Oh man, yeah, this is wild. I'm just looking out over the trees and I can hear traffic vaguely in the distance. But I can't see anything. It's like I'm inside a cloud just floating in the whiteness.

But yeah, it's just how you do just kind of get used to stuff. Like I definitely had a little dishevelment shock when I first got here because to go from Japan to here was just a shock on a basic trash level. I have some pictures I took in Japan. I was going through my pictures where I accidentally pressed the wrong button on my phone and took pictures of my feet. I have two of those. And I was looking at them and it's like just look how there's nothing on the ground except leaves and some weather staining. Like the sidewalk under my feet has some weather marks and that's it in Japan. Where I was thinking if that was South Korea there would be cigarette butts and a trash wrapper and there'd be all kinds of stuff in that inadvertent picture.

The other day I saw somebody just squatting down checking their phone, having a smoke. A lot of smoking around here too. But they were doing it just next to a pile of trash. They didn't think that was at all weird. But you just get used to it. That seemed like such a big like oh geez what a come down when I first got here. Now I'm like whatever I don't care. You know it's fine.

And I'm even getting there to some degree about the pollution. You just get used to it. It's like well I got my masks.

If it's a moderate day I can go hiking. If it's a worse day I'll just go for a short walk to a coffee shop. If it's a terrible day I guess you just stay the fucking doors I don't know. But I'm used to it as a visitor. I just don't think I could live here. I just don't know it's just nuts. But anyway yeah again I'll try other cities. We'll see how that goes. Because the pollution swirl on that map it does hit a lot of this country. Busan seems to be one of the very few places that doesn't get hit. But I'm not going to go there right away.

So anyway we'll see.

Man that's one thing that's interesting though. So some of the people I've met on this journey way way way back at the start. The dude I met from India who got locked out of his Airbnb room and I hung out with him and sort of helped him out that evening. What little I could.

We started following each other on Instagram and when I posted like hey I'm not in Japan anymore. The Japan trip is over but I still got pictures so I'm just going to keep posting them. And he posted like hey man you know I'm going to go hide you had fun. It's been neat to follow your journey. Hope the next leg of the journey is fun too. And yeah I got the message back like yeah man you were there at the start. You were there at the start of the journey it's fucking awesome. 10:00 So it's just kind of neat to just vaguely be in touch.

And then the other one was Daniel from Vancouver who I met at the Airbnb near the Skytree in Tokyo. Which again he you know he couldn't get in he didn't have his little code. They never sent him the door code. Whatever so I helped him out too. And he's the guy who he gave me his email address and I was like this is interesting. I kind of mean what are we ever going to do with this. But he's actually messaged me a number of times just about little things like the British Columbia government has given him hassles about being out of the country for more than six months and they want to revoke his health care. And I couldn't help him directly but I did have BC health care so I get at least confirmed they are much much more annoying than the other provinces. Ontario and New Brunswick they don't give a fuck what you do they're just cool they're fine.

BC is always was always sending me shit annoyed about this or that it's so much bureaucracy. So I couldn't really help him but I could at least commiserate this like yeah I'm afraid that is how they are sorry about that.

But anyway he told me his his mom is from Busan. I gave him the heads up about the current state of Seoul and I was like you know maybe don't aim to come here in the winter. Do some research first and he got to tell me a bit about Busan or at least his memories of it when he was a child which remained just that it was cold but again he's from the west coast. It's not going to be cold for me.

Cold is good to me but anyways just kind of cool these little people that I met along the journey that I got to stay in vague contact with here in there.

Oh man I met one of these like overlooks where they have a sign that tells you what you're looking at in the distance.

Here's this peak here's that peak but I can't see anything.

It's just white what a cool day this is awesome.

But yeah one of the other things I learned is obviously I like walking around going hiking and I learned a bit in Japan stuff like how I much prefer the Ome Hills hiking course. That's not extremely high and is just like walking along the ridge of mountains and then once I got to Mount Raiden which was an actual peak didn't like it that much. And then across from there I also went up some for real mountains was a bit uncomfortable and I've learned that for sure here. Because there's a lot of these paths like this where I'm I'm a ways up but it's not so bad and I'm basically just walking through the woods across a small mountain.

But some of the mountains here in South Korea are for real mountains with actual peaks. That has happened to more extreme degrees where I got back on the path toward the Bukhansen mountain range that I'd been on the first time when it got too dark and I had to turn around. I found my way back there and I walked along it and I just went up and up and up and up. So this was near near the peak that I just talked about but this is like the next peak over and it's higher up. The highest one in the the mountain range is 800 which is insane. This one I was heading toward was like I don't know less than that four or five hundred something. But because it just narrows to a peak like most of the walk I'm just on a path and it's quite nice and it's quite wide and the views are quite cool and then it gets steeper and steeper and steeper. And when it got to the point that I was literally climbing like I'm needing to use my hands to proceed I'm on all fours climbing up stuff. At that point I was like I am scared I'm going back down and it's not just my fear of heights but I'm also not equipped for that. I'm equipped to walk I am not equipped to climb you know people have poles and equipment and even just my shoes that my shoes I've still got those shoes that were slippery in the rain in Tokyo. And then it just never rained so I never replaced them. They're totally fine for normal walking but once you get on a wet surface or it turns out in incline. Not so good Al little slippy. So it would have been ridiculously negligent for me to even to try to go up higher and I just didn't want to. Everything gets narrow everything gets small and contained and high up and you're just looking out over the world and it's scary as shit.

So yeah, I've definitely learned I am not a mountain climber. I could be like a mountain hiker, but I want, yeah, I want things to be more or less level and across. I'm a distance hiker, I guess. Let's put it that way. Once it gets real steep and yeah, like once it hits the point that I'm using my hands, that's not for me. That's not what I'm here to do. That's a whole different discipline. That's a whole different level of shit. That I don't have the equipment for and I probably will never get because I don't even like it. I don't like that feeling. I don't care about getting to a peak means nothing to me and it's fucking frightening. It's like, man, because that's the whole thing I like about hiking. You get these amazing views, but it doesn't feel, you know, my fear of heights generally doesn't really trigger because you just walked up an incline and it took a while. And you gradually get up and then, you know, like where I am right now, there's, you know, it goes down on either side quite far down, actually. And it's quite steep, but there's all these trees and brambles and stuff. I know I've rambled about this before, but it's like, if somehow, I don't know how, if I somehow had the most Clusa-esque trip of all time and tumbled over this guardrail and fucking summer salted down the hill, I'd be fine. You know, I'd grab some shit. It'd be okay. I'd break my arm, but I'd be fine. Where when you're just up and it's just steep and if you fall, you're just going to keep falling and you're just on like bare rock on the edge of a mountain. That can fuck right off. That shit's nuts. I hate that. I don't like that at all. Leave that to Spider-Man. Leave that to someone with suction cup finger grips. That is not for human beings. Certainly is not for me.

Though I'm clearly a big woose because there's so many older people hiking in South Korea and they got all their gear. And, you know, when I'm heading toward one of these death hikes, they're coming back. They clearly did it. But, I don't know. Good for them. I don't know. It's just weird when you have a phobia. It's so hard to imagine how a person doesn't have it, you know? How is a person not scared of heights? How does your body and your brain work that way? I don't know. Because not like I'm scared of pickles or something. It's a fucking fear based, I think, in a fair amount of reality. But anyway, I got no way to avoid it. It's just how it is. So I just won't do it. That's fine. I don't care. There's plenty of other stuff to do in the world. Plenty of nice hikes. And it's kind of nice to sort this out for myself because in Ome in particular, whereas like, oh, there's all these mountain hikes and blah, blah, blah. Now it's nice to know just like for next time I'm there, like I don't give a fuck that there's all these peaks. I'm not going to do it. That's not what I do. I don't like that.

Give me a moderate mountain hike. I'm a happy motherfucker.

All right, I got a couple other little little wee anecdotes before I go for this episode. So one of them that's just kind of neat is on the subway.

I noticed there's like a little jingle that plays that's not the normal you're arriving at a station jingle. There's like a more elaborate fancy one that I realized means you're approaching a station with a transfer. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. If you're only halfway paying attention, I mean, I'm generally having to pay attention to every single stop to make sure I'm actually going the right way and I know what's going on. But if you are just, you know, have one eye on your phone or whatever, you hear that fancy jingle and you know, like, oh, I should perk up a bit. Where am I at? Is this the transfer that I need? It's a little thing, but it's so clever. I never would have thought of that. What a cool thing.

And then also with a language stuff, I guess in Japan, I always felt a little, you know, a little embarrassed that I couldn't speak to anyone or read anything, you know, that I haven't really put in the effort to learn Japanese. And, you know, I probably won't. But it feels weird. It's like, I guess I probably should. It feels irresponsible that I like that place so much and I want to keep visiting. But I feel like there's a large hurdle to get over. You know, if I don't get past super basic stuff, then I think it's kind of better, it's better not to give off the wrong impression. 20:00 Like, if I know a little bit, just the tiniest little bit, then that suggests that I can actually speak to somebody in Japanese. I kind of feel like it's better to just come out of the gates with like, I'm sorry, I'm just an English guy. This is what I got. And if we can't talk, that's okay. We'll figure something out. But, you know, just to be clear up front, I'm the guy who doesn't know anything. I would want to get to some basic level of conversation before presenting myself as a guy who can speak any Japanese type of thing. And I just might not ever get there. It's just the facts of the matter. But I kind of realized here in South Korea, because I don't have any kind of attachment to South Korea, like with Japan, I guess part of the reason why I feel a little guilty about it, is all the manga in the video games and all the media and all the stuff Japan has done for me throughout my life. That it does feel a little, a little inconsiderate of me, maybe, that I don't speak their language.

Whereas here in South Korea, I had a weird realization, you know, not being able to speak to anyone, not being able to read any of the writing, but, you know, just kind of not minding it around here, because I'm like, hey, whatever, you know, can't learn every language in the world.

Japan is on my guilt list, but Korean is not.

But I kind of realized that I actually kind of like being a literate, and I think this might apply to Japan too deep down, like why is it that I'm not trying to learn the language? What's my problem? If I'm gonna talk about how I'm guilty about it, well then just do it.

But I realize sitting at just a burger king here, that I'm just sitting there, and, you know, there's writing all over the little placemat, and I just can't read it. My mind just sees it and just moves on. People are chattering all around me, but I can't understand them, so my mind just ignores it and moves on. And I realize how much I like that feeling. It is exhausting in North America, just the constant advertising. That it would be the exact same thing. There would be shit on the little placemat at the fast food place, and I would sit there and read it, not because I want to, because I'm just compelled, because it's right there. It's hard not to. Your eye just drifts to it, and then you read the stupid shit. It was really annoying in Toronto, where every fucking fast food place in every pizza restaurant always has a television, and it's always playing the news. And I hate that. I hate that. I fucking don't want to know who got arrested for drunk driving. I don't want to know who got hit and run accident at the fucking crosswalk. It doesn't fucking matter. It's not relevant, and it makes my day so much more depressing. But every single fucking place in Toronto plays the goddamn 24 hour news channel thing. I fucking hate it. And then is hearing people yammer as they walk by you and just seeing all the little stuff.

Or I remember back in the day when I used to use Twitter, I had to find like an extension to just get rid of the trending topics and stuff, because I couldn't help but look at it. It's impossible not to. It's right there. And it's like I don't want to know. Just please let my mind be clear, please. Please stop harassing me with all of this shit that means nothing. See, I realized here in South Korea, like man, it's so relieving to be enveloped in a culture where you can't understand what's going on. I don't mind it really. I mean, for the times that it's difficult, for the times when it's hard to communicate or the times that you wish you could read something, there's also a bunch of times where there's so much visual and auditory noise. That's just gone. And I was like, man, yeah, like I think I actively don't want to know what's going on. If I want to know what's going on, I'll go back to North America. You know, while I'm here, it's like a nice treat to have all of that extraneous noise gone. And I think that maybe applies to Japan too. I think I was blinded by my vague guilt before I realized the truth, which is that I just really don't mind. I kind of don't want to know what's going on. I don't really mind.

So, I mean, I don't know. I don't know if that's fucking relatable to anybody. Maybe that's an extremely weird opinion.

But, but that's a realization that I recently had. But what's cool is that even when you can't communicate, it's just cool how you still can communicate. 25:00 You know, it's amazing how much you can get done without knowing the specific language.

Whoa, that's pretty cool. Maybe it's just clearing up in general or maybe I'm at just the right point.

But I can see through the trees now and I can see some city in the distance. And I'm way higher up than I thought I was. The city is quite far in the distance. It's fairly small. These huge skyscrapers are well above the top of them.

And then they disappear into the mist. It really doesn't look real. It looks like a painting. It's kind of cool.

But yeah, the one thing about this Airbnb that is a little tricky, I kind of dig be and just crammed in with a bunch of people and paying so little money and just sharing all the stuff. You know, shared washroom, shared kitchen, shared whatever. That's fine. I don't care. Little tiny room. But very cheap. The worst part is the showers. There are a definite dearth of showers, a definite lack of showers. So it's a little tricky to squeeze into the shower sometimes. And I'm a little unclear about how the hot water thing works. You got to turn on the hot water through a panel outside the washroom. But sometimes the hot water is just run out because there's so many people. So I haven't quite internalized for sure which buttons to press to make things work because it's like I think I got it figured out. But then sometimes it doesn't work even if I did it right because there's no hot water. Anyway, the other day I did something I did it wrong for sure did it wrong because I was in the shower and it wasn't becoming hot. And I'm like, well, whatever. I'm getting very used to the cold shower. It's like, I don't care. That's fine. Whatever. Fuck.

I'll just take a quick cold shower. No biggie because even when the hot water is out, I don't know. It's not like freezing ice cold water. It's just done pleasant.

But it's, you know, it's fine. But as I was doing that, I heard there's like these older guys that seem to be more or less permanent residents, I think, of this place. So somebody came into the washroom and I assumed it was one of them because they just called out, you know, something in Korean. And you know, I'm just in the shower, shower enough. And all I could say is like, sorry, I only speak English. But it's so easy to tell through context. Obviously the guy said, hey, do you mean to be in there without the hot water turned on. And then I said, I only speak English. And then what he next said was obviously something like, well, I'm going to turn it on. Okay, dummy. And then suddenly the hot water started running and I just started laughing. And then I just called like, thank you. And he called back something, which was probably, yeah, no problem, stupid. And you know, it's just so it was like such a nice little, nice little exchange because yeah, like, you know, you don't need to say the words. It's context dependent. It's very obvious. It was going on there. And it all worked out. And I don't know. It was just funny, just a funny, nice little moment. Just a nice human moment of like, hey, stupid. I know you, I don't know anything that's going on around here. Obviously, because you didn't even turn on the hot water.

Yes, silly dick. And now you're in there washing in cold water. And I, you know, maybe, maybe you're just some weird Canadian who enjoys that. But probably I'm going to assume you just dumb and you did this wrong. So I'm going to turn on the hot water for you. And yeah, it was nice. It was nice. I got hot water.

So yeah, I mean, this whole podcast is way than ignorance. It's, you know, generally just me walking around going, I don't know what's happening. What does this mean? How does this work? And yeah, I think I've taken it to a new level where I've realized like, I don't want to read these things. I don't want to understand what people are saying. So, so yeah, there we are. There we are. Maybe I'll never learn these other languages. And that will be that. But at least I'm owning it, I guess. At least I admit it. It's nice, I guess, to kind of know this. Just do not feel guilty about it to realize like, oh, actually, I think I like being stupid. I think I like being ignorant. I think I kind of like not knowing what's going on. Man, this is actually, it's clearing up like before my eyes this view. I'm just staying at this one point because I was walking on this mountain path, but there were people ahead of me. They were going very slow. So I want to let them clear out before I catch up to them.

And yeah, shit man, like I can see a bunch of trees to my right.

And that city is clearing up more and more. I can hear some traffic, but I can't see any from this vantage point.

What a beautiful fucking day though.

So yeah, there's a little more South Korea update. Again, I'd say things are going okay. Bit of a bit of a surprise to go from Japan to here, but as I get used to it, I mean, if I was having a bad time, I would just leave. I'm having an okay time. I'm having kind of a fun time. It's just a very weird city, so there's a lot. A lot of caveats. A great big asterisk next to you. Yes, I'm having fun asterisk. See fine print for details about all these weird little things that are going on of some of them of minor importance, some of them of extreme importance. But I'm here and I'm having an all right time all in all. And man, the winter time is the best. Snow is the best. This is the best. I love it.

All right. Well, thank you for listening. Join me next episode for more South Korea adventures. Goodbye.