This week’s travel dream: Exploring the future in today’s Seoul

The future has arrived, and it resides in South Korea’s capital city, said Justin McGuirk in Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.). Though 2,000 years old, Seoul—which sits at the center of the second-largest metropolitan area in the world—appears scrubbed clean of nearly all its history. “Row after row of identical apartment blocks” cluster around the high-rise center, where Wi-Fi is ubiquitous and every commuter on the subway seems to be live-streaming TV soaps on their giant smartphones. By all appearances, “this is a nation of frenzied early adopters, road-testing the near future and then selling it to the rest of us.”

“You can’t write about Seoul without mentioning the Han River”—whose wide span splits the city in two. North of the river reside various “starchitect” attractions, including the “slug-like” buildings of Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park and the slightly less futuristic Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. In search of the past, I did discover that the tourist-friendly neighborhood of Gwanhun-dong was rich in relatively modest-scale mid-20th-century structures, but I had to wander into the neighboring gallery district to glimpse deeper history, in the form of the 500-year-old Deoksugung Palace. A descent into the subway returned me to today’s Seoul. In one station, commuters use touch screens to pick groceries from simulated supermarket shelves, then have their purchases delivered while they head home. Every station also contains gas masks in glass cabinets—grim reminders of the constant threat posed by neighboring North Korea.

South of the Han lie newer neighborhoods—mostly flush with money—including the one celebrated in last year’s global dance hit “Gangnam Style.” Gangnam’s high-end retailers and over-the-top nightlife live up to their reputation, and I couldn’t resist Garosu-gil, an area where “each little fashion boutique is cooler than the next” and I was reminded that eating is among Seoul’s great pleasures. It’s “one of those rare cities where you can take a chance on a humble restaurant and have a super meal.” Perhaps the future won’t be so bad after all.

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At the IP Boutique Hotel (ipboutiquehotel.com), doubles start at $142.