A night in a hanok in Bukchon

By late afternoon on my first full day in Seoul I had walked the old city end
to end and was standing in Bukchon, the hillside neighbourhood of tiled-roof
hanok houses that has somehow survived in the middle of the capital, wedged
into the end-of-work crowds like a fish in a barrel. The thought arrived on
its own: why would I go back to my three-square-metre hotel room? A
traditional hanok nearby had a room. I took it.

What you get is not a hotel with a costume on. The room had sliding doors,
wooden windows and a low table you sit on the floor to use, and a small
reception room looked out over the rooftops to the city. Tea and cookies
arrived on a tray as a matter of course, and I sat with them and let the day
drain out of me. The bed was the part I had been curious about: a mattress
laid straight on the floor. Oh well. If that is traditional, I can do
traditional.

There was no dinner, so I went out into the lanes and found a local place that
was about to close, ordered something I could not read, and got a dish so
spicy that after a day in that heat it was the last thing I wanted. I was
hungry enough to eat it anyway. Back in the room I put on one of the sheet
face masks my wife had told me to bring home by the box, sent a photo to the
family chat, and learned from the laughter that I had it on wrong. What did I
know.

I slept really well. In the morning there was another cup of tea on the
terrace, the rooftops below and the towers behind them, another fifty
photographs, and a hanok I waved goodbye to on my way out to the next day. The
tiny hotel room had been a joke I was telling myself. This was the real thing.