South Korean surprises: Dave Hanson discovers puppy cafes, a hanok and lots of socks.

I was astounded at every turn by the kindness, hospitality, elegance, integrity and zest of everyone we met. Our accommodations were beautiful, neighbourhood after neighbourhood was pleasant and inviting, the transportation was exquisite (subways couldn’t be better, and the train we took on a day trip went 200 miles an hour but felt like it was going 60) and every meal was fresh and delicious. It was autumn so the weather was pleasant, allowing people to eat and drink outside, and the boisterous camaraderie at the tables was joyful and rejuvenating. And we’ve never felt safer. Plus there were .....

14 THINGS I NEVER EXPECTED TO HAPPEN ON MY TRIP TO SOUTH KOREA

1. In Seoul, the arrival of the subway is heralded by a peppy mechanical hybrid of "The Farmer In The Dell" and "The William Tell Overture" that actually seems to put a little “YAY! THE TRAIN IS HERE!" spring in everyone’s step.

2. The people are incredibly helpful and polite, to the point that it almost seems they’re tending to you. In the subway several times someone adjusted my rumpled collar or noticed my backpack zipper was 12% open so they offered to fix it; a woman picked lint off my wife’s shawl for her and straightened the bow on her hat. And it was all done in a way that was clearly NOT pushy or superior, it was the way a kindly neighbour would pick up your trash bin that had been blown over by the wind. When we were flummoxed by an electronic ticket machine in the subway – a situation that in many countries will draw vultures -- a helpful stranger sprang to our rescue. We soon realized that this is a nation of helpful people.

3. In our neighbourhood in Seoul we noticed a crazy-huge display of arranged flowers at a Buddhist temple. Thousands of fall blooms decorated flowerbeds; thousands more were decorating dragon sculptures, trees, and a 20-foot high manmade hill. There was also a Bonsai tree exhibit and a huge tree filled with paper lanterns. We found out it was part of a festival and went back that night; the paper lanterns and flower arrangements were illuminated and the place was a wonderland! They served us buckwheat tea, taught us how to make paper chrysanthemums, and taught us some meditation basics. Then there was a wonderful concert with elegant Korean harpists playing mesmerizingly, hauntingly beautiful traditional music (plus a random-seeming cover of Norwegian Wood) and -- complete non-sequitur -- a whirling whip of a girl playing Abba songs on an electric violin who was dressed like a hoochie-mama dancer on the old Dean Martin show. The monks studiously videotaped her on their iPhones and iPads, which we found hilarious. It was one of those magical, serendipitous, dreamlike evenings that only seems to happen far from home but makes you forever a little homesick for that place.

4. The Dongdaemun clothing market in Seoul is the most epic amassment of clothing I’ve ever seen. Humongous building after humongous building are filled with booths and rooms and showrooms of every imaginable kind of clothing. Acres, hectares, miles, oceans of clothing. On a lark I decided to take pictures of socks. SOME of the socks… in ONE of the buildings. I took 19 sock tableaux, each filling the frame top to bottom with socks, and that was just one building. There were a lot more socks, and a lot more buildings. {This is a small sampling of the pictures I took but it’ll give you some idea of what we were up against, sock-wise.}

Sock heaven...or possibly hell

5. The coffee-shops are unbelievably gorgeous. Each one looks like a designer was given a unique space, a fat budget, and absolute creative freedom. Each was unique, gorgeous and stylish in its own right, some with natural light and others showcasing sophisticated designer lighting, some raw and some polished, some new and some old -- more like the salons of insanely tasteful people you see in magazine spreads than the Starbucks locations of my homeland.

6. We spent one night in a hanok, an old-school Korean style of lodging that offers a full breakfast, rich traditions, and spinal anguish. (In general most old world traditions are not on the same page as my slouchy American spinal cord.) The hub of hanok life in Seoul is Bukchon, a hilly, gracious, beautifully preserved part of Seoul where almost all the buildings look temple-influenced. Generally a hanok is centered around a courtyard, shoes placed neatly in front of the guestrooms.

We entered our room to find that it was small, about 80 square feet, with a tidy mound of bedding and a thin mattress rolled up on the floor. The only chair in the room was a hickory milking-stool that punished both my crooked spine and my asslessness. There was a desk big enough for a toddler to do her homework, and a TV that would only show one channel (Korean tween drama) and we couldn’t raise or lower the volume. The only lock on the door was a little thing on a string (not a problem in Korea where there’s basically no crime, but as Americans who’ve been taught to assume everyone wants to steal our passports and money, it’s a bit unnerving). However, the people who ran the place were wildly nice – they let my wife try on a traditional satin Korean bubble dress, they wouldn’t stop feeding us breakfast (coffee, toast, jam, eggs, yogurt, cereal, fruit) and though their English was spotty and our Korean was nil, we had a great time playing with Google Translate, and they thoroughly enjoyed my imitation of an American who needs a recliner because he’s too klunky to sit on the floor. When we left, our gracious hostess walked out with us, accompanying us a couple hundred yards to the boulevard to make sure we had our bearings.

7. This could happen anywhere you’re traveling but it happened to us in Seoul, so South Korea gets the credit… we were flipping through dozens of channels of Korean broadcasts in a post-dinner stupor looking for something to watch... Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes came on and my wife wanted me to turn it off because she doesn't like monkeys but I was like "But they're the only ones speaking English! We have to watch!"

8. If you like to walk, you’ll like Seoul. The Fitbit rang us up for 140K steps in 7-1/2 days. And if you want to take public transportation to the airport, wear your sneakers! In our case it involved a 15 minute walk to the subway, 1 hour 45 minutes on subway, a 5 minute walk to change subways, a 10 minute walk to the airplane shuttle, another 5 minutes in the airport to some escalators and other 10 or 15 minutes in the vast terminal, plus more escalators and shuttle trains etc. But every bit of the way it was clean, efficient and organized, and when a couple times we were lost people immediately helped us. And the whole thing cost about 3 dollars (and got us ready to “fly tired.”)

9. We didn’t encounter a single person here who spoke English as a first language. This was awesome. When you’re overseas and someone hears you speak English, they immediately want to talk to you even if they’d ignore you at home. When I go on vacation, I like to go somewhere where I don’t speak the language, where I have to be like a cat or dog and use things other than language to communicate. Having no English speakers around really makes you feel you’ve escaped your life for a while, and it adds a kind of intimacy to a couples vacation. I guess we didn’t even think about it until we got to the airport and started seeing people from Western countries; before I even processed the strange emotion I was feeling I turned to my wife and said “seeing all these white people is kinda grossing me out” and she completely agreed.

10. We’ve been to the fish market in Tokyo and we were dumbfounded by the scope of it, but the one in Busan (Korea’s second most populous city, on the southern coast) is pretty astounding too. Honestly I don’t know how there’s anything left in the water with the extent of the aquatic genocide that occurs daily. Clustered around the port are what seem to be an endless chain of seafood related businesses, all spreading out from an armory-sized building full of people with aquariums and bubblers selling every imaginable sea creature, from normal looking fish, to some much larger predatory-looking beasts with Al Capone faces, to nocturnal-looking, barnacle-like things a surgeon might find in the deepest folds of a problematic bowel. Outside this main building are tents where people sell the fish that’s already cleaned… some fish is heaped on ice, or threaded with wooden sticks like a crafts project, other long skinny non-vertebral silver fish is draped over the edge of the table and glitters like tinsel, yet more fish is filleted and hung on a rack in front of a fan like some kind of piscine laundry.

Then there are the piles and piles of wooden crates, which are packed with fish and then stuffed into trucks and piled onto motorcycles… there’s a guy with an outdoor workshop and an electric hammer who spends his entire day just repairing the wooden crates! There are several tents full of people devoted to untangling the fishing lines (one of whom waved me off when I tried to take a picture). As you walk away from the water, the tents full of fishmongers give way to tents with people selling other provisions, vegetables and mounds of red bean paste and kim chi. The commerce, of course, spills into the adjoining neighborhood, with seafood restaurants of all levels, some simple and some foofy, but all insanely fresh.

11. In Seoul, we were missing our dogs so we couldn’t resist spending a couple hours in the Sandang Puppy Café (we considered the Raccoon Café but weren’t sure how our latte would pair with a potentially feral animal… there’s also a Sheep Café but that seemed potentially malodorous). At any rate, in a nation that PR-wise has some dodgy spots on dog issues, it was good to find a place where the dogs were clearly loved and very well cared for.

The pups were all gentle and affectionate, but not needy, and were instantly attuned to which customers were the most eager for dog-love. One older one toddled right over to me 3 minutes after we arrived, plunked himself down in my lap, and slept for two hours, while my wife did more of a sampler platter. At one point, one of them fell asleep on her lap while mine was still dozing on me and we realized “If we had Netflix, it would feel like home.” They were all very calm and serene until -- I am not kidding – the postman came by with the afternoon mail delivery. All 12 or so dogs went ballistic. We were like “come on guys, that’s kind of hackneyed.”

12. One night we went for Korean BBQ with a Korean-American friend-of-a-friend who’d relocated to Seoul to work for Samsung. When I asked him what his job was, the description was unlike anything I’d ever heard: “to evangelize technology to production companies.”

13. We’ve all heard how hard schoolkids in Korea work, so I was surprised to see when they got out of school, released onto the sidewalk in uniformed hordes, they were full of joy and exuberance, and looked rejuvenated – not a single one looked bored or ground down (like I felt when I finished a day of school, and I guess like I always assumed all kids did!)

14. We rented a hotspot wi-fi device at the airport but, on Day 2, we realised there was a problem with it. We dreaded the long trip back to the airport and we figured we were doing something wrong, so we asked the guy at the hotel desk for help. It turned out there was a problem with the device, but this guy took it upon himself to be our fixer and our advocate! This was not a fancy hotel with a concierge, it was a modest little place and he was the desk clerk, but he called the rental place multiple times; when he couldn’t fix it, he got the company to cancel at no charge and arranged it so we could just drop it off the next week at the airport when we flew home. Then he found us another hotspot rental place a block from our hotel that was cheaper. I aggravated my carpal tunnel writing positive reviews on TripAdvisor.

Did Dave mention he saw a lot of socks?