Seoul, Eventually

I’ve been to New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Tokyo—Tokyo most of all, which still feels like the city closest to the shape of my own brain. But there’s one place I haven’t gotten to yet and can’t stop thinking about: Seoul. South Korean capital, right below the most hostile border on earth, at the edge of everything.

I want to eat kimchi at a street stall and understand what people mean when they talk about K-pop as an actual cultural phenomenon rather than a punchline. I want to walk through Daehakno and Hongdae and feel whatever those neighborhoods feel like from the inside. I want Gangnam to mean something to me beyond a song I heard at parties a decade ago. Seoul has become a kind of shorthand for a confluence of things I find genuinely interesting: hypermodern pop culture colliding with deep tradition, aesthetic intensity, technological density, the specific electricity of a city going somewhere fast without losing sight of where it’s been.

The Monocle Travel Guide dedicated to Seoul is the kind of object that makes the wanting worse rather than better. The Monocle guides are careful things—detailed and particular, more interested in the specific bar on the specific corner than in vague assertions about a city’s character. This one works through the clubs, hotels, and restaurants worth seeking out. It’s available at Do You Read Me and other well-stocked bookshops. It’ll sit on my shelf until I finally go.