Adventures of A Tourist without a Camera — Seoul

By Trina Talukdar

Published in

Global Shapers Bangalore

4 min readMay 20, 2018

My phone was in the same bag as my leaking water bottle, while I trekked on the outskirts of Johannesburg. My battery fried. I had just started traveling on a 4 country — 6 city tour almost immediately and had no time to fix my phone. The hardest part of not having a phone was not, not being able to call or message, surprisingly, because I could easily keep in touch with people using my laptop. The hardest part was not being able to take photos — obsessively capturing every moment of my life, as if without the visual proof no one would believe me I had had these incredible experiences.

But I had. And as I reconciled myself to not taking photographs of every beautiful sight and experience I had, I actually HAD the experiences! I looked around me, with my eyes, and not through a lens, I heard the loudest and softest sounds, I felt the breeze, the sun burning my skin, my hair roots tickling my scalp as it blew in the breeze. I was present, and not trying to capture the present to be able to refer to the past in the future.

Four Season’s Hotel, 9 April, 1:20 am

When I found myself wide awake in my hotel room in Seoul soon after midnight, I didn’t toss and turn in bed trying to get back to sleep. After 28 hours of flying, where I lost 13 hours of my life in time zone differences, I was expecting nothing less. I didn’t groan and raid the mini-bar, as had become my customary jet lag ritual. Instead, I sat on the single couch in the room and looked out of my 27th floor French windows.

People say New York City never sleeps. But no city stays awake like Seoul. I went out for drinks with a friend at 9 pm, and interpreted the empty pubs as a week-night phenomenon, until it filled up with a line out the door by 10:30 pm.

Within one generation, Korea had transformed itself from a poor agrarian society to a modern industrial nation, a feat never seen before- “the miracle of the Han River”. Its GDP has risen from USD $80 to a whopping USD $30,000 in just over 50 years. What makes Korea’s experience so unique is that its rapid economic development was relatively broad-based, meaning that the fruits of Korea’s rapid growth were shared by many.

A bird’s eye view of Jongnu-Gu at midnight is a scene out of a futuristic fantasy movie about a dystopian society. Giant screens high up on building rooftops are playing pixelated advertisements on loop, the glass fronts of all the other high rises reflecting the neon lights until the dark night sky is flooded by white light like the floodlights in a football stadium.

The first electric light bulb in Korea was turned on in the Gyeong-bok Royal Palace of Chosun dynasty. Since then, power facilities have been expanded to about 30 thousand kilometers of transmission lines, 190 GVA of transformer capacity, and 400 thousand km of distribution lines. Transmission, distribution technologies and the power quality has reached world-class level with multiple loop transmission networks, voltage upgrade to 345kV, and HVDC power network interconnection between Jeju Island and the main land.

Down below traffic lights methodically switched red-orange-green-red-orange-green, and toy cars wrestled and raced each other. Korea’s first car, ‘Sibal’, was manufactured in 1955, and a modern assembly line was first implemented in 1962, as the ‘Saenara’ was manufactured. The Saenara Corp. imported parts of the Japanese Nissan ‘Blue Bird.’ The import of parts continued until the independent domestic production of the ‘Pony’ in 1976. Since then, Hyundai, that then acquired Kia, have taken over centuries old companies like Ford, in the global markets.

Even in their elbowing of each other, the cars were neatly lined in three rows on either side of the road, and tiny ant people, all in black, heads down, staring at the microchip implants in their palms, waited in shoulder-to-shoulder lines for their turn to walk. Even though they are not written anywhere, and they don’t teach it to us in school, we all, unquestioningly, follow the rules of lights and lines, because they pre-program us with the code at birth. There was a lulling peace about the order, the clockwork direction and speed of movement down below that put me to sleep sitting straight up.

I was startled awake by bright light piercing my eyes. Shielding my eyes with my curved palms, the darkness behind my closed eyes first went orange, red, then white. When I finally opened my eyes, first one, then both winking, and finally wide awake, I was accosted by the sun rising from behind the low foothills bordering the north of Seoul, far in the distance, that had been completely invisible to me at night, because no giant TV screens were perched atop these hills calling attention.

Korea’s urbanization rate was 39.1% in 1960, and is 91% today, at the cost of agriculture and forest land having decreased by a tenth. But their distance couldn’t undermine the effect of the mighty hills cradling the city- a reminder of their permanence and the transitory nature of the city, a reminder that they will be there long after the large TV screens are switched off, the cars stop running, and the traffic lights stop flickering.

In many ways, breaking my phone was a blessing, that enabled to experience my life fully. These moments that I experienced in the last month were those that I wasn’t able to take a photo of, and because I couldn’t, I’ll remember then in the most vivid detail, forever.

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Adventures of A Tourist without a Camera — Seoul

By Trina Talukdar

Four Season’s Hotel, 9 April, 1:20 am

Written by Nithya J Rao