A Tale of Three Cities
Three Things #114: April 7, 2024
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a travelogue. I just finished four weeks of intense travel and writing about it here will help with the process of reflecting on the experience. I made four trips during this month to four very different places and for different purposes. I already wrote about the first, which was ETHDenver. Here’s the other three
Thing #1: City On a Hill 🏛️
I visit Europe fairly often for work. Over the years I’ve come to love Berlin for its culture, Italy for its beauty and way of life, Barcelona for its food and laid back vibe, Lisbon for its weather and burgeoning tech scene. One place I’ve never visited but always wanted to visit is Athens. Shortly after ETHDenver I finally got the chance. I wish I could say I fell in love with the place, but unfortunately I was there only very briefly and had very little time to explore or enjoy myself since it was an intense work trip, so the city didn’t leave me with a very strong impression.
I visited to meet the Spacemesh research team. We held a research summit to debate and make decisions about the VM and some related questions. I wrote recently about those decisions; I’ll write now about the experience of Athens.
We ended up in Athens because the AI sent us there, quite literally. We were looking for a gathering place to hold a team summit and used an AI tool to narrow the list. We specified that we wanted cheap, direct flights for the team members (including their points of origin), that we wanted somewhere with nice weather, and somewhere affordable. It suggested Athens, Madrid, and Barcelona, and I think we made a good choice with Athens. In the event Athens did check all of these boxes. While I wouldn’t want to visit Athens in the summer, the weather was spectacular in March. It was extremely affordable, and the food was fantastic. Mediterranean is one of the few cuisines I can eat every day without tiring.
As mentioned, I was there for less than a week and the vast majority of that time was spent in a conference room discussing technical issues with the team. We did venture out most evenings for dinner, I got to explore the city on foot while running, and we spent the better part of a day walking to the Acropolis and back.
I’ve been to a lot of historical places. Jerusalem, China, and India all come to mind as being especially poignant and rich with incredible history. Athens is up there. I remember visiting the old city in Tallinn, Estonia, where modern, touristic restaurants occupy buildings that are many hundreds of years old and some have dungeon dining rooms and bars that are hundreds of years old. This is sort of what Athens felt like, but older. Most old cities have a small, central “old town” and the rest of the town is new. Not Athens (if it does have an “old town” I missed it). All of Athens is old, ancient. You can’t escape or hide from history there. Simply being in Athens means immersing yourself in its history.
A modern hotel we visited has an elevator with a bottom floor labeled “2500 years ago.” In the basement is an excavation of ancient ruins that you can explore. While jogging around downtown I stumbled upon another excavation site that was discovered while building a metro station. You can peer down from the sidewalk upon a Roman bath house built 1500 years ago and imagine what life was like for people at the time.
Another thing that struck me about Athens is the mountains: the city is surrounded by them on three sides and you get a great view of them just before landing. There are skinny, tall peaks dotted throughout the city, including the especially striking Mount Lycabettus that juts out of central Athens and has a beautiful chapel on top. While Mount Olympus is nowhere near Athens, it’s not at all surprising that the people who lived here a long time ago imagined that a pantheon of gods lived atop those mountains.
Towering above it all is the Acropolis—the city on a hill. (I never thought about it before but the name makes sense! Acropolis literally means “high city.”) The history of the Acropolis is too rich and complex to explore here, but suffice it to say that for thousands of years it’s been a site of worship, gathering, and entertainment (in fact there’s still an active amphitheater there). It’s an extremely unique geological formation; I can’t think of any other city I’ve visited that has such a large promontory rising so high in the middle. We humans have always associated ascending to physical heights with ascending heights spiritually or metaphysically. The Acropolis and the Parthenon are possibly the best example of this anywhere.
I had very little opportunity to interact with locals so I can’t say a whole lot more about Greece or about Athens, other than to say I’m keen to visit again and see more and meet more people. Everyone we met was laid back and friendly, which is par for the course in Southern Europe. As a language nerd I found the Greek language fascinating and really enjoyed slowly learning to piece together familiar words over the days I was there (e.g., signs reading “έξοδος” or “exodos”).
I felt inspired by the city and its incredible history as the birthplace of western democracy. It felt like an ideal place to be planning how to build the most democratic, accessible blockchain and how to build the most developer friendly VM in the world—which we named Athena in the city’s honor. I was also very excited to run past the stadium where the Athens Classic Marathon finishes. I hope to run that race one day!
Thing #2: Well Built 🧱
After Greece I spent a week in Taiwan for the ETHTaipei conference and hackathon. Taiwan is one of my favorite places so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend some time there, and especially to meet the Ethereum community there. In fact the first talk I ever gave at an Ethereum event was in Taipei in 2017. (That was also the last time I attended an event there!) In my opinion Taiwan is the perfect balance between developed and developing, and between eastern and western. It’s surprisingly livable, even as an American.
Taiwan is also the most utilitarian place I can imagine. That’s one of the things I like so much about it. Taiwan is an island built by engineers for engineers. Engineering is an extremely common, popular, respected profession and as an engineer I’ve always felt at home there. This is especially interesting as it stands in sharp contrast to Taiwan’s neighbors. China is all about bigness: big buildings, big cars, big factories, and about showing off in general. Japan is first and foremost about presentation. It’s not without substance, but presentation matters at least as much there. And Korea… well, more on Korea in a moment. Taiwan stands alone in the region its focus upon substance and utility above all else (and perhaps more closely resembles Germany in this regard than it does any of its neighbors).
That being said, Taiwan isn’t without beauty but it tends to be of the natural variety. In my opinion its cities are quite ugly. With the exception of a few new buildings at the center of Taipei clustered around Taipei 101 (which itself is pretty in a hulking, utilitarian sort of way; contrast this to the gentle slopes and fluid curves of the other supertall structures in the region!), Taipei is one of the ugliest cities I’ve been to. Most of the city consists of endless rows of multistory, old townhouses with ugly, dusty white tiles and with formless, soot stained concrete. It’s as if the city was put together without a second thought given to presentation, which is quite possibly true.
But this surface ugliness belies integrity, honesty, and a lot of substance. Taiwan knows its limits; it isn’t pretending to be something it’s not. It’s regretfully isolated on the international stage due to complex politics and policies but it nevertheless punches far above its weight globally in trade, most famously in semiconductors. Today Taiwan manufactures over 90% of the world’s high end semiconductors. For this reason Taiwan is also highly geopolitically significant.
I love that honesty, simplicity, and integrity. Taipei is the sort of place where you can move through society just fine in shorts or sweatpants, sandals, and a hoodie, and where no one will give you a second glance for dressing or acting casually. (I was invited to dinner at one fancy restaurant and asked if I’d be okay in sweatpants. My friends laughed at me and said, “Bro, this is Taiwan.”) Taiwan inherited many traits and values from Japan during its lengthy occupation; one of these is modesty. As in Japan, wealthy Taiwanese tend not to make a show of their wealth, which I appreciate.
Taiwan is also shockingly affordable, at least coming from the USA. It’s been that way since the first time I visited around 15 years ago: I’ve always described Taiwan as having the quality of life of Japan at half the cost and I’m amazed that it’s still true, especially given inflation and how everything everywhere feels expensive lately. (Although Japan has gotten cheaper lately too.) To put things in perspective, a normal lunch costs around USD $4-5 and a nice dinner around $10-15. A tea or coffee usually costs around $1. I made an effort to find the very biggest, fanciest, most expensive bubble tea that I could, and it came to around $4—compare this with $8 for a very mediocre bubble tea back home. Taxis and hotels are cheap and the metro is so cheap it’s a rounding error (it’s around $1 per ride). Oh, and it has some of the best food in the world. Locals will tell you the rent is high but it feels cheap compared to where I come from. Its cost of living is 37% that of New York; rent is only 21% as high!
On top of all of this Taiwan is extremely open and friendly to foreigners. This is especially rare in the region: while it isn’t trivial given language and cultural barriers and a certain degree of racism is unavoidable, it’s much easier to live in Taiwan than it is in Japan, China, or Korea, where in my experience these issues are much greater. And it got a whole lot easier recently with the introduction of the Employment Gold Card, which is one of the friendliest, best-designed schemes in the whole world. For around USD $100 per year, most people who work in tech and other industries automatically quality for an employment visa that can be extended and that entitles the holder to access to the excellent national health insurance scheme, to permanent residency after only four years, and to a host of other benefits. I was seriously considering moving to Taiwan even before learning about this program, and the Gold Card program makes it even more likely.
I have a lot of good things to say about Taiwan and very few bad things. About the only complaints I have are that the architecture is ugly, the weather is really nasty for more than half the year, and it’s far from home. But no place is perfect and earthquakes and invasion risk notwithstanding Taiwan is quite high on my list.
Note: I wrote the title of this Thing before the earthquake that just occurred in Taiwan. I wasn’t referring specifically to earthquake resilience but this is another way in which Taiwan is well built! The tiny death toll is testament to how well built and resilient Taiwan is, structurally and socially.
Thing #3: Goofy People 🤪
Let me be upfront about my biases. I’m very familiar with China and Japan, having spent many years studying, living, traveling, and working there. Korea is just similar enough to those places that if you’re in Seoul and you squint you could just about be in Tokyo or Shanghai. Just about but not quite. The superficial similarities can be deceiving and this comparison is tempting but dangerous since Korea is in fact unique and quite different from its neighbors in some important ways.
My familiarity with its neighbors causes me to have a false sense of closeness with Korea: I feel like I know it better than I actually do, like thinking you know a person you’ve only met in passing since you’re best friends with their best friend. I expect it to be more similar than it is, and tend to get frustrated when it isn’t.
I’ve long had a deep fascination with Chinese and Japanese culture, but somehow Korean culture never particularly appealed to me. I don’t have a good reason for that. The things that appeal to me about Chinese and Japanese culture—the language, the food, the aesthetics, the arts, to name a few—are quite appealing in Korea too. There’s no one thing I can point to that turned me off to Korean culture, but if I had to pick something it would be the sense that it seems quite insular. Over the years I’ve had countless close Chinese and Japanese friends, but very few Korean friends. The sense I’ve always gotten is that Koreans like Korean culture a lot but don’t have a particular desire to proselytize or convince others to like it, and don’t make a particular effort to share it or translate it. While nothing has ever turned me off to Korean culture, there was never a spark that turned me on to it, either.
I visited Seoul once before around 12 years ago for a wedding. It was a brief trip, and while I had fun it didn’t leave me with a very positive impression. I had a lot of trouble getting around, as there were very few signs in English and no one we met spoke a word of English. I got the impression on my first visit that Koreans are a bit rude to foreigners, although in retrospect that’s probably to be expected when someone is speaking to you in a language you don’t understand. Apps that we use every day like Apple and Google Maps don’t work there for mysterious, hand wavy reasons involving “national security” and “data policies.” In fact, I think Korea is just trying to protect its homegrown competitors, Kakao and Naver, at the cost of making the country much less friendly and legible to foreigners. It isn’t quite as bad as China, where nothing works, but everywhere else I’ve been in Asia—Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, etc.—everything works. In this as in so many things, Korea struck me as somewhere in between Japan and China: not as refined or westernized as Japan, but not as exciting and energetic as China.
Good thing I got another chance to visit this year, and good thing it was a longer, better trip. I attended for the BuidlAsia conference and ETHSeoul hackathon, which I had missed in previous years. BuidlAsia was fantastic, one of the best events I’ve attended in a long time. It was just the right size, not too big and not too small (perfect for an introvert like me to reconnect with old friends and meet some new ones), and the speakers were really excellent, nearly all founders of very legitimate projects. Given the timing (shortly after ETHDenver) and location, it was particularly impressive that the organizers got so many great speakers to travel all the way to Korea for the event. I spent less time at ETHSeoul but did participate in judging and really enjoyed that event too, which also featured some excellent speakers and interesting talks. And I also attended a Bitcoin event, which was also excellent.
While the events were great, my initial impression of Seoul was, again, less than positive. It didn’t help that the event venue and my hotel were located directly on top of an absolutely enormous collection of shopping malls. This reminded me a great deal of Hong Kong (the first place I stayed there was also on top of a massive shopping mall). Let me be blunt: I don’t like shopping malls. They’re where culture and history go to die. I try to avoid them as much as possible. But you can’t escape them in major Asian cities. It’s where you go to do everything—not just to shop but also to eat, to get coffee, to visit the bank, to get on a train or bus, you name it.
I did a lot of people watching and was very sad to see hardly any children. I was aware that South Korea has the lowest birth rate of any country, but it’s one thing to be aware of a statistic and another to witness it firsthand. I watched the flow of people for about an hour in the crowded shopping mall. The entire time I counted only a handful of kids under age 10, and when I looked more closely I saw that most of them weren’t Korean. I got excited when I finally saw one stroller, until I saw that it had a dog in it. I finally did see a stroller with a baby—but the mother was speaking Chinese, not Korean. A friend traveling with their infant told me anecdotally that they had trouble finding diapers.
Readers of my Substack know that I’m extreme pronatalist. I can think of nothing sadder than a country without babies, and Korea is what happens when you take a very liberal culture and very liberal policy to the logical extreme. When I mentioned this, a friend joked, “Haven’t you heard? The last Korean was born five years ago.” It’s quite literally the picture of a society in decline—its population will soon dwindle. Which is sad, because Korean culture and society are rich and beautiful in a thousand ways.
I spoke to a few young Koreans about it and they all said more or less the same thing: people aren’t having kids because they feel that they can’t afford to. Financial nihilism took over Korea a long time ago; it’s probably about ten years ahead of the rest of the rich world in this respect. Young people feel that houses are totally out of reach, and that you can’t get married or start a family without owning a home. They feel that they’ve spent their entire lives competing to get into the right schools, the right university, and the right job, and by definition only a tiny fraction achieve all of this, and everyone else is left with table scraps. In short, Korea today feels like where the rest of the world is heading—we’ll be there soon enough if we don’t make some drastic changes soon.
As a result Koreans have developed a penchant for gambling and flashy shows of wealth, even beyond what one witnesses in China for instance (which is already quite extreme). Nearly every car on the road is a fancy, expensive car in pristine condition (people spend money on cars because they see no point in saving for homes or for the future). I don’t think I saw a single car more than five years old. And I’m finally beginning to understand why Koreans love speculating in cryptocurrency so much.
I did eventually see a few kids in the mall on the weekend. Every single one of them was alone with their mother; I didn’t see a single father with a kid (seriously), which was a bit disturbing. This isn’t a hugely representative sample so take this with a grain of salt, but it did surprise me nevertheless.
Having said all this, I did eventually start to get used to the place and even grow fond of it. I didn’t have much opportunity to interact with folks outside of the conference and hackathon until the very last day, when we went out in Itaewon. We enjoyed a private DJ set by one of Korea’s top female DJs, Seesea. I got to chat with her and several of her friends, and they were a really fun, goofy, happy-go-lucky group who are clearly enjoying their lives. I don’t use the word “goofy” often but it was the only one that seemed to fit—and I had a lot of fun trying to explain what the word means! Seesea’s friends told me that some of their friends and family see them as rebellious for enjoying music and clubs, which traditional, conservative Korean society frowns upon. But they’re unapologetic and confident in their lifestyle.
I finally began to see a brighter side to Korean culture: young, hip renegades who eschew the conservatism and ridiculously competitive traditional culture and blaze their own course. They really impressed me. When I asked Seesea if she’d be interested in playing at our Burning Man camp, they were all fascinated and excited by the idea of Burning Man, which is like a foreign legend to them, and probably represents the polar opposite of traditional Korean values!
And I began to see the place in a new light. It just took a few days. A lot of my frustration was down to cultural misunderstanding and having the wrong set of expectations, based on my experiences in China and Japan. I began to understand that, like those places, Korea is the kind of place where you have to invest time and energy before it starts to pay dividends. Like in China and Japan, like any place different enough from home, you’re missing a great deal if you have no understanding of the language or culture. And I’m spoiled because I’ve invested that time and energy in Korea’s neighbors.
Seoul really does have a lot to offer. The food and drink are incredible, among the best I’ve had anywhere in the world. The city may have the highest cafe per capita ratio of any city on earth, which I appreciated—a good coffee is literally never more than a few steps away, and I’m not talking about Starbucks. This is especially rare in the region. The music and art are first class. And Seoul is clean and safe to boot. I was sad to leave when the time came and I’m already planning my next visit. There’s hope for Korea after all. But they’re going to have to do something about that birth rate!