Winter is the season for solitude, but where can you go in a city of 10 million to be by yourself?



By Charles Usher

In my mind, winter has always been a season of solitude. The severity and the starkness of the cold and the snow seem to encourage silence and withdrawal, time spent alone. In a way that the other seasons don’t, winter always fills me with daydreams of retreating from everything and everyone, of trudging through knee-deep powder to a cabin in the woods. Sometimes my wife and dog are there. Sometimes I’m alone.

To which my real life in Seoul says, “Ha ha ha ha! Alone! Good one.”

In Seoul you’re never alone. With 17,000 people per square kilometer, the Korean capital region is one of the most densely populated metropolitan regions in the world. Even in the middle of the night, no matter what part of town you’re in, you’re almost guaranteed to cross paths with someone else within a couple of minutes and to stumble upon an open restaurant within five. In a lot of ways, this is one of my favorite things about living in Seoul. For one thing, it’s wonderfully convenient. If you’re hungry at 3 a.m. and there’s nothing in the fridge, no problem. There’s always a 24-hour restaurant somewhere nearby. For another, it makes the city safe. If there are always other people around, it creates an environment less conducive to crime.

The flip side of this, of course, is that it’s almost impossible to get a bit of solitude. Almost, but not entirely. Here are three places in Seoul where you can be, if not completely alone, at least close to it.

Yangcheon Hyanggo

Once, Korea’s foremost educational institutions were the government-run Confucian academies called hyanggo. At one point there were some 230 of these across the country, though most of them have long since disappeared. Only one is left in Seoul: the Yangcheon Hyanggo, located in a nondescript residential neighborhood on the city’s far west side, across the river from the World Cup Park. Dating to the early 1400s, the small complex contains just a handful of buildings. In the front is a pair of structures that functioned as dormitories and the Myeongnyundang, the main lecture hall. Behind that, a set of stairs leads up to the Daeseongjeon, the main hall where sacrificial rites were performed, and a single auxiliary building. It’s simple and lovely, like a minimalistic version of the major historical sites downtown. Sit on the steps with a book, and you’ll be doing exactly what some young scholar was doing half a millennium ago. The best part of the Yangcheon Hyanggyo, though, is that nobody ever goes there. This is the closest to a sure thing that I can give you to a place in Seoul where you can be completely alone.

Taereung and Gangneung Burial Sites

On the extreme opposite side of town are the Taereung and Gangneung, two Joseon royal burial sites. There are several such tombs in and around Seoul, with the most well known being the Seolleung and Jeongneung, just a few blocks from COEX. That pair gets a fair number of tourists, but the Taereung and Gangneung, because of their out-of-the-way location -- they’re barely in Seoul -- are much more rarely visited. I can, in a very modest way, even indulge my wintertime fantasies here, as the burial mounds are both surrounded by copses of beautiful twisting pines. Magpies call out from the trees. If I squint, I can almost convince myself that the buildings used for conducting ancestral rites are cabins in the woods.

Coin Noraebang Booths

If you’re not familiar, noraebang is the Korean term for singing rooms. Most noraebang places feature large rooms that you can rent by the hour with several of your drunkest friends and show each other just how badly you sing. However, there are also noraebang booths built for just one or two people. Often, these are inside arcades, but they occasionally turn up in seemingly random locations as well. These booths are coin-operated, and you pay by the song. I’ve only ever used one of these once -- at my girlfriend’s request, as I pretty much hate singing -- but for a few very loud minutes, the outside world was completely drowned out, and, despite the fact that there were several dozen high school students just a couple of feet away, we were as good as alone. Put “Hotel California” on repeat a few times, and you’ve got an hour all to yourself.

Charles Usher is a travel columnist and author of the book "Charlie and Liz's Seoul subway Travelogue."