When our social world is a media world, travel becomes a hall of mirror images. We seek images of a place and reproduce those images in a loop. Seoul, where I just was, currently exemplifies this Mohini status, given that South Korea, as Euny Hong writes in The Birth of Korean Cool, “has been setting up the mechanism of pop culture domination since the birth of the world wide web”. Seoul’s surfaces are smooth, its androgynous fashion and cosmetics muted and cuted, designed for blending in at scale, not standing out. Eating hangover soup (without hangover), convenience store kimbap, saying kamsahmnida, all heighten the feeling of K-drama cosplay. To be clear, I’m not complaining, boss. To encounter the ordinary, you need only take the wrong bus (in my case every bus I took) and end up lost. The thrill of arrival into a dreamscape soon turns to restlessness for that other romance, of the unexpected encounter.

Itaewon’s hills—Home Hill, Hooker Hill, Halal Hill—signpost the neighbourhood’s diversity (It has Seoul’s only mosque) and make it an LBGT and expat friendly hub of clubs and stores. A friend takes me to a divey bar called The Grand Ole Opry, up Hooker Hill. Themed as an American Western saloon, with an aficionado’s playlist of country music, it is festooned with international currency notes signed by patrons from around the world. The owner, 84-year-old Kim Sam Sook, better known as Mama Kim—also how she introduced herself—mixes the very strong cocktails. She tells us she started the bar in 1975—real estate was cheap before the gentrification—making it the oldest bar still standing in the neighbourhood.