This is how it goes. You move to a new place, you have a miserable first year. The whole country smells funny. You blow out various appliances in the 220-volt outlets. You bump into the cabinets every damn day until you learn that your apartment is impossibly small. You learn to live without black licorice. You spend whole days on simple tasks. And then, gradually, you grow into your life and forget about all that stuff.

Then you blithely decide to pick up and move at some comfortably distant date, thinking, “What an adventure! It’ll be great for the kids,” and you wake up in a sweat one night, all those months of pain and anxiety coming back to you after four years of repression. (Kind of like the way one decides to have another child, conveniently forgetting how barbaric and brutal childbirth is.) And then you realize how precarious the solid easiness of your current life is, and how quickly it will all disintegrate.

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One of the first things I noticed about this city was the jarring and generally chaotic collage of signs of all shapes, sizes, colors, fonts, and levels of brightness adorning buildings here. In many cases, I could barely see the buildings underneath the signs. My sensory capabilities were accustomed to tame suburban life, my reading speed was slow; these signs affronted both my aesthetic sensibility and my romantic vision of city spaces full of clean, modern facades — something out of Atlas Shrugged. Instead, I found visual pollution; I experienced visual shock therapy.

I couldn’t read the signs. I mean this in a literal sense as well as a figurative one; new to this city space and accustomed to taking my Korean pills in measured, chaptered dosages, I couldn’t handle the promiscuousness of this text that seemed to colonize every available piece of empty real estate; I also couldn’t understand the way the signs functioned in that space. Like most ex-pats, I threw up my hands and proclaimed (to myself, not very loudly, and in English), “Those Koreans don’t prioritize aesthetics.” I followed this up with a more learned stance about military dictators and the way they shape the urban landscape since most of the building of my neighborhood (the visually appalling parts) took place during the early 1980s (hence my mom’s first reaction upon seeing our ugly, cracked apartment building: “Is this subsidized housing?”).

The signs seemed to mock me during those first few months, when I was surrounded by places to go — labeled, no less — without a clue about how to actually get things done since the categories of things and the way one acquires them here were different enough that every simple errand was a collision with several foreign systems. Take sending a child to preschool, for instance. My in-laws had, thankfully, hammered out the details before my arrival, and all I needed to do was acquire the correct shoes. Shoes, you say? Of course, he already had shoes. But wait — he didn’t have indoor shoes. Cleanliness, I discovered, had its own logical categories here, related to a foreign system of ideas about insides and outsides (perhaps to be elaborated in a different post) so people wear different clothes inside and outside the house (in their own houses people wear naebok, literally “inside clothes”) and kids wear different shoes inside and outside the school. So, assuming one knows about the special shoes, where would one go to buy them? Not the department store, I found. Not even the shoe store — but rather the stationary store, or moonpangu, which sells school supplies, including uniforms and special indoor shoes. (The special bag for carrying around the shoes, however, I ordered over the internet to match his backpack, Power Rangers all the way.)

But not only did the signs flaunt my ignorance of underlying cultural and economic categories; they represented a different way of navigating life in this city. This was my epiphany as I set off one day to acquire allergy medicine. I finally knew enough about the medical system to know that I could go to whatever doctor was the most convenient (for such a simple problem) without a referral and that allergies, whether involving a skin condition or not, belonged to the dermatologist. If I had been in the U.S. I probably would have pulled out the Yellow Pages (or electronic equivalent) and mapped my destination, got in the car, and driven there, point to point. But in Seoul, we just get out and walk around until we find what we need by reading the signs on the buildings. Within a block I had found a dermatologist, gotten a prescription, read some more signs, and located the pharmacy.

I’ve written about the overwhelmingly sensory experience of living in Seoul when we first moved here, made all the more overpowering because we were always walking through the city, not insulated from its fumes, noise, or graffiti by the boundaries of a car. But it hit me that day as I sneezed my way to the dermatologist that, as a foreigner, I could only consider (or not) the aesthetic quality of the signs because I didn’t understand their functional significance in a walking city. I was accustomed to one-stop-shopping, to my one doctor with almost all my medical needs; or my one store (Target, etc.) which had everything from food to toiletries, to medicine, to prescriptions; or my one mall, which contained all my various fashion desires. I hadn’t had to rely on such a strong visual navigation system.

Our automotive navigation of the city is visual as well, based on landmarks. Although most streets have names now, with the exception of a few big ones no one knows what the names are. Addresses give apartment blocks and districts but not necessarily streets, and on streets with single houses or villas the numbering is not, as far as I can tell, based on spatial location. I tell the taxi driver, “Head towards the Kyobo building intersection, turn towards the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, pass Cha Hospital, and turn into the alley by the gas station.” Cellphones have become an indispensable part of this system because if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to have to call someone at the location and have them describe it to you. (“Where are you now?” “By Woori bank.” “Ah, go one more block, and you’ll see a Mr. Pizza, then take a left.”)

Getting a good read on a landscape is like being able to size someone up (age, social status, occupation, origin) based on dress, posture, physical characteristics, and accent. You have to understand the categories of that social universe and the way people move through space. You have to understand the available options. Being able to read the signs in Seoul requires understanding the function of so many small things — why all restaurant cards and many people’s personal name cards have maps, why everyone carries a cell phone, why each block has multiple dentists, bakeries, banks, and salons. As you replace your black licorice addiction with a dried seaweed one and become slowly integrated into the system (giving your dry cleaning to the man who walks up and down the halls chanting each morning, who you once assumed was a Buddhist monk) everything makes sense, you know where everything belongs. You read the signs, and somehow, with the right mixture of arrogance and the panic needed to motivate linguistic training, you think you might be able to learn to read them again.