Waiting to step off a bus here in Seoul not long ago, I got an idea for not just a tweet but a whole Twitter thread. As usual, I had just tapped the exit-door reader with my transit card — but strictly speaking, it isn’t a transit card of the kind used in Los Angeles or New York, one you have to keep topped up with periodic money refills at a machine. It’s just my regular bank-issued debit card, the one I use to buy everything. It also works not only on all the buses and in all the train stations in Seoul, but on all the buses and in all the train stations everywhere in South Korea. Having by now grown used to that convenience and other, even more convenient conveniences besides, I got to wondering whether they’ve collectively made it impossible for me to live outside Seoul, let alone in any of the comparatively ramshackle cities of the West, ever again.
Right there at my bus stop, I began a thread of “things Seoul has that give me serious reservations about ever living in any other city” as follows:
- The card I pay for transit with is just my regular debit card (so no need to “fill it up”) and it works in every city in the entire country
- Every subway station has bathrooms, without exception, and not the kind you would only use under great duress
- Almost every subway station has coin lockers (just a name, since I pay with the aforementioned debt card), so you seldom have to worry about dragging bags, etc. around all day
- You save your table at a coffee shop by putting your most expensive personal item down on it. You don’t ask a nearby random to guard your stuff if you have to go to the bathroom
- A Starbucks can move into a neighborhood — or more than one Starbucks — without “driving out” the smaller chains and indies, which just seem to multiply as a result
- Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.