Getting to the heart of Seoul

SEOUL, South Korea - The flight from LAX took about 13 hours. The alphabet had 24 letters, none familiar from my youth. Lunch squirmed on my plate. And an unpredictable enemy waited 35 miles to the north.

Yet Seoul soothed me.

In five January days as a rookie among Seoul's palaces, parks and marketplaces, I gained four pounds despite walking countless miles down alleys full of people but empty of graffiti and litter.

For two of those days, I relied on translator/guides for help. Otherwise I trusted Seoul's multilingualism, which includes subway signs and museum labels in Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese. That worked fine.

In fact, for anyone accustomed to Greater Los Angeles (population about 13 million), the hospitality, cosmopolitanism, technological acumen, influential popular culture and relentless tidiness of South Korea's capital (population about 26 million) are likely to feel inviting, humbling and tranquilizing.

Here are a few things a first-timer learns in Seoul:

Start with a palace. One of the astonishing things about Seoul is that nearly all of it has been built in the last 65 years. South Korea since 1953 has gone from scorched earth to one of the world's strongest economies, cranking out Samsung and LG phones and Hyundai and Kia cars, along with pop music and TV dramas that entertain