Seoul Has My Heart (And My Middle Finger)

-April 16th, 2026 — Day 6 in Seoul

I am sitting in a local coffee shop somewhere in Seoul, and the world outside is doing what Seoul does best: buzzing, moving, existing at full volume and full speed. Cars stream past the window. People weave through each other with the practiced fluency of a city that has long since stopped apologising for its own intensity. From somewhere in the back room, a coffee roaster growls. And over all of it, from an old-fashioned gramophone in the corner, jazz is doing its best — charming, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the chaos it is trying to cover.

I read my last blog post this morning — the one about the slow Sunday in Hualien, the rain, the pancakes, the pink umbrella. And I had to laugh a little at the contrast. That version of me feels very far away right now.

But that is exactly what I love about this life.

We arrived late on a Sunday evening after twelve hours of travel — dragging our enormous luggage through unfamiliar streets, exhausted in that particular way that lives behind the eyes and in the soles of the feet. The apartment we are sharing with friends is not large. Understatement. On first sight it felt like a creative exercise in human spatial relations. But we are nomads — we have learned, across many countries and many improbable living situations, that a space is largely a state of mind and that the right people make any space feel like enough. Within a day we had rearranged ourselves into something that worked.

And then Seoul did what Seoul apparently does to everyone who arrives here with low expectations: it made up for every square metre we were missing and then some.

This city is alive in a way that is difficult to describe without sounding like you have just fallen in love, which I suppose I have. It is big and layered and relentlessly interesting — every neighbourhood telling its own particular story, with its own atmosphere, its own soundtrack, its own specific way of being Seoul. Clean streets. Extraordinary food on every corner. Coffee shops that would make any city in the world feel mildly ashamed of itself. I did not expect to love it this much. I love it more than I expected to love almost anywhere.

I will confess something: I think I love it even slightly more than Japan, which has long been among our family’s most beloved places. Japan is extraordinary — refined, precise, breathtaking in its own way. But Seoul feels somehow more relaxed in its own skin. Less bound by tradition for tradition’s sake. More willing to be irreverent and inventive and loud. There is a particular freedom to a city that does not take itself entirely seriously, and Seoul has that quality in abundance.

My first morning here, I woke before everyone else and went out to explore.

This required navigating Seoul’s maps situation — which is to say, discovering that Google Maps and I would not be the companions I had relied on everywhere else, and that Naver and Kakao, Seoul’s preferred navigation tools, operate on a logic that took some patient deciphering. I am not, by nature, a person with an exceptional internal compass. I have gotten lost in places significantly smaller than Seoul. But I set off anyway, because the alternative was lying in bed listening to everyone else breathe, and the city was right there, outside, waiting.

Near Myeongdong I discovered a small vegan doughnut shop with a pumpkin spice latte that stopped me completely in my tracks. Since three of us cannot tolerate dairy, finding genuinely good vegan treats is always cause for quiet celebration, and this was not quiet at all — I bought enough to surprise everyone with breakfast and walked back feeling unreasonably pleased with myself.

Then I got my middle finger caught in the door of the shop.

It bled extravagantly, with great commitment, all the way home and intermittently for the next two days. It looks, I am told, quite dramatic. It hurts with an enthusiasm disproportionate to its size. It has made my recent gym sessions creative in ways I had not anticipated, since I have simultaneously decided to sign up for Hyrox in Chiba in August — which means I am currently in a training program with my personal trainer, building toward specific fitness goals before the end of August, while navigating a throbbing finger, unfamiliar gym equipment, and the particular challenge of finding a gym in a new country when you cannot read the navigation apps.

Korea, I have discovered, has a gym culture all its own. Day passes are expensive. Gyms are harder to locate on Naver than you might imagine. And when you do find one, you are handed a uniform to work out in, which is both charming and slightly surreal. By the end of this week, however, I am suddenly seeing gyms everywhere — which is always how it goes. The city reveals itself in layers, and only to those who are patient enough to keep looking.

Between the finger drama and the gym logistics, we have somehow also managed to be extraordinarily active.

One day we took the metro to Gangnam and ran along the river beneath cherry blossom trees — and I want to say that plainly, without embellishment, because it needs none: running under cherry blossoms in Seoul on a warm April morning is exactly as beautiful as it sounds. Seoul has stunning nature woven through it — mountain trails and river paths and green spaces that appear unexpectedly around corners — and we have made good use of all of it. One day we walked for seven hours, winding through different neighbourhoods, stopping for coffee here and food there, arriving home with aching feet and the specific satisfaction of a city slowly becoming known to you.

And then there was the night market from the Netflix street food series.

We went for the famous knife-cut noodles, which delivered everything they promised. But what none of us were prepared for was the marinated crab — or more specifically, the Korean seller who prepared it for us in the corner of her tiny stall, with the focused attention of someone performing a ritual she takes very seriously. She watched us as we tried it. She clapped. She cheered. She appeared genuinely delighted by the expressions crossing our faces — which ranged, I should say, from curious to enthusiastic to something is happening to my mouth that I did not consent to. The heat built slowly and then all at once, and my mouth burned pleasantly for hours afterward, and we laughed until we cried, standing in a night market in Seoul with a woman we would never see again who had just become one of our favourite memories of this entire journey.

Six days in and I am still learning the shape of this city — still figuring out which neighbourhood to disappear into, still discovering coffee shops I like better than the last ones, still finding myself surprised by how much there is to love here.

In ten days we move to Busan, and then five more weeks in this country before the next chapter begins.

But right now, the jazz is still playing on the gramophone, the roaster is still growling in the back room, and outside the window Seoul is doing what it does — moving, buzzing, alive with a particular kind of energy that gets into your blood and makes you feel, against all evidence of your exhaustion, that you could walk for seven more hours if only to see what is around the next corner.

Some cities ask something of you.

Seoul gives. Loudly, generously, a little

chaotically, and with great enthusiasm.

I think I will let it.