Peeling Potatoes #26, Walking, Wondering, and the Art of Being a Beginner
Potatoes in Seoul.
By the time the recording light blinks on, Frank has already climbed a mountain, nearly melted his lips on ceremonial tea, and discovered that even in one of the world’s most connected cities, you can feel strangely disconnected.
He’s in Seoul, South Korea, sitting at a borrowed desk in the apartment of friends he’s seen more through a screen than in reality. The chair belongs to Cléa. The room has become three dimensional. Outside the window is the view he’s imagined for three years but never actually seen.
On the other side of the world, Fruitloop is in South Africa, laughing into her microphone as he announces a milestone: the 26th episode of Peeling Potatoes. Half a year of weekly conversations, now stretched between time zones and seasons.
It’s less an interview and more a long-distance lunch: one person jet-lagged and full of Korean barbecue, the other wide awake and hungry for stories.
And we, as listeners—or readers now—are invited to eavesdrop on something gentler and more radical than travel tips: a live exploration of what it means to be a beginner again in midlife, to be lost in translation, and to discover that a “pretty ugly city” can still quietly rearrange the furniture of your inner world.
A 14km Karaoke Hike and a Cup of Very Hot Tea
Fruitloop begins with mischief.
“If your 14km hike suddenly turned into a karaoke trail,” she asks, “which song would you be forced to sing to unlock the next kilometre?”
It’s the kind of question you only ask someone you know well enough to tease. And Frank, breath still catching up three days later, laughs in protest. Eye of the Tiger? Not a chance.
“You totally underestimate the agony I was under in Nathalie’s boot camp,” he says, half dramatic, half honest. The hike wasn’t heroic mountaineering—“little mole hills” north of Seoul, he points out—but that doesn’t make 100 kilos of tired human any lighter on a rocky path lined with roots and dead leaves. Going up was a test of endurance; coming down was a test of balance and mortality.
He didn’t have the oxygen to think of a soundtrack at the time, but in hindsight, he offers a song:
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.”
It’s self-mocking, but it’s also a quiet admission: sometimes our bodies tell us truths our minds have been politely ignoring. He thought he was fit. The mountain disagreed.
When was the last time your body told you a truth your ego didn’t want to hear? And did you listen—or climb another “mole hill” anyway?
The second question takes us somewhere softer.
During a traditional tea ceremony they stumbled into—after the mountain, before the soreness had set in—Frank found himself in a different kind of intensity. A small house. Pottery on display. A moon jar. A host who moves slowly and deliberately through the ritual. Thirty minutes of quiet choreography.
The tea is scorching. It burns your fingers if you hold the cup wrong, your lips if you rush. But the room is warm, the floor heated under the cushion, the host’s movements almost meditative.
“If your tea had a secret personality,” Fruitloop asks, “what would it whisper to you? To calm down? To run? To buy snacks?”
Frank pauses and then answers seriously. The tea, he decides, would give him a choice:
Calm down and appreciate me—or I will send you back up that mountain. This time running.
Beneath the joke is a gently brutal truth: life has its own curriculum. If you don’t learn the lesson in stillness, you may get it again—louder, steeper, and with more stairs.
K-Pop Dinosaurs, Subway Students, and the Women Who Run Everything
As the questions become stranger, Frank’s answers become sharper, more revealing.
Fruitloop wants to know: of all the people he’s met in Seoul, who looks most likely to be an undercover K-pop star on a lunch break?
Instead of picking a beautiful twenty-something in perfect streetwear, Frank chooses someone else entirely: a man in his seventies or eighties, standing in front of black-and-white photographs from the Korean War.
The man approaches them in fluent English, asking where they’re from. When he hears France and Germany, he thanks them—for their nations’ support of his people during the war. He studied in Cambridge, worked at the United Nations, and spent his career helping other countries develop, inspired by how support from abroad helped Korea become the “tiger state” it is today.
“Is he a K-pop star?” Frank muses. “Probably yes—before K-pop was even invented.”
In his story, the elderly man becomes a sort of K-pop dinosaur: the origin of a cultural mood. If K-pop today is about polished performance, relentless discipline, and a softer, more human message inside a high-pressure society, then maybe this man carried an earlier version of that energy: hard work, gratitude, outward-facing ambition.
On the other end of the spectrum is Tony, a young man on the subway, head bent over his phone. Not gaming; not scrolling—learning English vocabulary.
Frank describes the inner hesitation before he taps Tony on the shoulder. It’s easy to imagine ourselves doing it when we watch a feel-good YouTube clip. It’s much harder when the stranger is right there, live, breathing, staring at phrasal verbs.
He taps anyway. A small conversation unfolds. A tiny bridge built between worlds.
Then there are the women.
Frank talks about the middle-aged Korean women with short hair and uncompromising expressions—the guardians of traditional values. These are the women you do not argue with, he says, half amused and half in awe. They decide where the children study, what they will become, how the family behaves.
He recalls hearing a story about one such woman “correcting” a traffic policeman when a moral issue was at stake, gently but firmly beating him into social submission—and somehow getting away with it. In a society ruled by efficiency and economic growth, these women carry another kind of authority: moral, domestic, cultural.
They appear again in the restaurant where Frank, his wife, and their friend Nathalie are trying to eat bibimbap with cautious Western politeness. The table is full of small plates: kimchi, vegetables, sauces. Frank’s instinct is to eat one thing at a time, separately, thoughtfully.
The middle-aged restaurant manager has other ideas.
She lifts his wife’s bowl, dumps every side dish into it, aggressively stirs the mixture with chopsticks, then slams it back on the table with a clear, unspoken order: Now you eat.
For Koreans, he explains, food is fuel. It’s inhaled, not contemplated. There’s efficiency in the way everything is mixed together—flavour, heat, nutrition, time. Korean barbecue might be exquisite, but it still gets inhaled between conversations and subway rides.
The Eternal Student and the Scroll of Destiny
At one point, Fruitloop gives Frank a fictional scroll—his destiny, written in calligraphy.
What would it say?
His answer is unexpectedly tender.
He admits he regrets not travelling widely in the last twenty years. The last long-haul flight before this trip was in the mid-80s. Everything since then has been Europe, familiar routes on a familiar map. Now Seoul confronts him with an uncomfortable question: What else have you quietly decided you don’t need to see?
He finds Korea surprisingly inexpensive compared to Europe. Equally if not more modern. Often more practical. A tiny power bank Natalie recommends costs the equivalent of three euros—simple, efficient, without the European CE mark that would triple its price. So much, he realises, of what he took for granted as “how things are” is simply “how Europe has chosen to regulate them.”
So the scroll’s message is simple and sharp:
“Go forth and explore a different way of doing things.
Don’t accept the status quo just because it’s the one you grew up in.”
There’s something deeply persuasive in the way he says it. He isn’t a backpacking twenty-year-old chasing “authenticity.” He’s a thoughtful, slightly exhausted man who had to climb a Korean mole hill to realise he’s been living at the foot of his own mountain for decades.
If you’re reading this and feeling a flicker of FOMO, you’re meant to.
Because this isn’t really a story about Seoul. It’s a story about what happens when you finally step far enough outside your habits that you can see them clearly.
The Plot Twist: When YouTube Isn’t Enough
Frank confesses something else: he couldn’t get excited about this trip before he left.
He’d watched the YouTube videos of people exploring Asia—well-produced, thoughtful, beautifully edited. He’d listened to other people’s stories. He knew, in theory, that Seoul is an endless city of eight-lane roads, high-rise apartment blocks, and digital billboards so bright you barely need street lights.
YouTube had prepared him well, or so he thought.
But as the days unfolded, he realised the real plot twist wasn’t a single event. It was the cumulative weight of tiny details YouTube can’t quite capture.
The line of light on the pavement that changes from red to green for people glued to their phones, so they don’t need to look up to see if it’s safe to cross.
The winter-wonderland bookstore in a secular, largely Buddhist country, packed with people photographing Christmas displays more than buying books.
The way young women dress with calculated provocativeness, while older women in sensible shoes silently guard the moral order.
Even the spectacular 3D advertising—dolphins that seem to leap off fifteen-storey screens, threatening to land on your head—betrays YouTube in one way: flat video can’t replicate the instinctive physical reaction of wanting to step back, to duck.
“Why couldn’t I watch this in 3D on YouTube?” he jokes. “Do I really have to travel 10,000 kilometres to feel it?”
The answer, of course, is yes.
Stuck in the Elevator with Seoul
In one of her last questions, Fruitloop asks:
“If Seoul was a person you were stuck in an elevator with, what chaotic conversation would you two have?”
Frank doesn’t romanticise it. He imagines the total inability to communicate: he doesn’t speak Korean; the other person doesn’t speak English, French, or German. Without a local phone number, he’s locked out of the hyper-connected digital system everyone else lives in. Signs are in Korean. Translation apps don’t always work offline.
“Basically, you’re screwed,” he says, bluntly.
You can feel his mixed emotions: the fascination of being in a place where you are truly the outsider—and the frustration of realising how much your smartphone habits rely on silent infrastructures you’ve never noticed before.
He describes walking around the city as a “zombie” at times, unable to read, unable to fully ask, forced into a kind of semi-mute observation. You’re flooded with data—sounds, lights, faces—but cut off from the meanings.
And yet, through this very disconnection, something else emerges: a more attentive way of seeing.
He notices the mis-translated signs that are unintentionally funny. The overly polite phrases: “Let us not throw our litter on the ground.” The serious approach to recycling in his host’s kitchen—bins within bins within bins. The invisible logic behind a city that, at first glance, looks like any other mega-city, but in the details, reveals a completely different relationship to time, work, and community.
By the end of the conversation, it’s clear that for Frank, this “elevator ride” with Seoul has already changed him. The city has pressed all his buttons: physical limits, cultural assumptions, even his sense of time.
The irony? For much of his stay, he’s actually in winter—cool air, clear light, a city lit up like a digital snow globe.
And yet, in the way he speaks, you can hear something else warming up: the sense that, wherever we are, we have the option to create our own summer—to cultivate a season of curiosity, movement, and connection, regardless of the weather outside.
