with everything, including the scent of the shampoo in the bathroom. The one big difference was that the COEX InterContinental was considerably more technologically advanced than I was used to, including air conditioning and lights that seemed able to sense when I was in the room, switching on and off accordingly.
During my time in Seoul, I crawled around in a tunnel in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and glanced across the fence into the former at a soldier staring back at me. I made a Korean paper lantern with a group of schoolchildren, toured a palace, lay on a bed that a Korean princess was murdered on, and had lunch in a high-tech restaurant with a glass floor that was about 60 floors above the bustling city between two colossal office towers. But none of those experiences compared to the surreal episodes I had each day at the health club and then at the restaurant, The Brasserie, in the hotel, where I ate breakfast each morning.
To this day, living as I do in the Royal York, I put in an hour’s worth of laps in the swimming pool before breakfast, then commence working. My time in Seoul was no different. I timed it so I could swim for an hour and have breakfast in The Brasserie before meeting my guide for whatever was planned for that day.
The health club at the COEX (called the Cosmopolitan Fitness Club) is state-of-the-art. That first morning when I headed down for a swim I was given a rubber bathing cap by a pretty young Korean female pool attendant. I handed it back because I don’t wear bathing caps. She smiled and returned it to me. I passed it back and told her I didn’t use bathing caps. She then said in broken but serviceable English that wearing a bathing cap was a requirement for swimming in the pool. I apologized and said I would wear the cap if that was the rule.
When I got into the pool, I tried to put the cap on, but it kept sliding up my skull and off. The young Korean woman noticed I was having trouble and entered the pool area to help. She offered to put it on for me, but given my height (six foot four) and hers (not a hair over five feet), I literally had to get on my knees in front of her as she expertly snapped the cap on my head, where it stayed in place for the whole hour. Every subsequent morning I went down for the swim, and she put the cap on for me.
After swimming I went to The Brasserie for breakfast because I wanted to have one meal of the day that was familiar to me, since everything else I would eat during the day would be authentic Korean. The Brasserie looked almost exactly the same as the all-day restaurant at the InterContinental on Bloor Street in Toronto, only much bigger to reflect the size of the hotel. At The Brasserie I could have a bowl of oatmeal and some scrambled eggs and toast and coffee. On my first morning there I made the mistake of allowing the waiter to put kimchi in front of me. He explained that Koreans usually ate kimchi at every meal and that while there were many varieties of kimchi (there is actually a Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul), the kind I was exposed to was made from fermented cabbage stuffed with vegetables and seasonings (perhaps even nitroglycerin!).
I made the mistake that first morning of having oatmeal, then getting some eggs and toast and letting the waiter lay some kimchi on me. It was so spicy and tasted so diabolically vile that once I swallowed it I thought it might actually kill me. I drank about seven glasses of water and had three cups of coffee, but still the raging esophageal wildfire remained and a taste that couldn’t be described in words still lingered. At virtually every other meal I had in Korea, including every breakfast at The Brasserie, I was offered kimchi. Finally, I told my regular Brasserie waiter that if he dared bring kimchi to the table again, I would have no choice but to throw it on the floor. He never brought me more and seemed to go out of his way to not even mention it. Once, he even covered the word kimchi on a special addition to the menu so I wouldn’t have to think about it. That was nice of him and much appreciated.
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