Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

Back in January 2020, I was all set to visit South Korea for the first time, as an invitee to its annual “World Journalists Conference”, scheduled for March.

But there were rumours emerging then of some new virus in China and I wondered vaguely if this might affect plans.

Sure enough, in February, the WJC organisers took the dire step of postponing their event for a whole month (the innocence is charming now).

Then it was postponed again, until June. Then October. And by the time the conference finally happened, I had to attend it in my Dublin kitchen, via something none of us had heard of in January: Zoom.

Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Music of chance – John Fleming on his encounters with Paul Auster

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La vie en rose – Colm Keena on bohemian days in Paris

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That itself was interesting, as I emerged from a 6.30am alarm call to address what looked like a meeting of the UN General Assembly on my laptop, with 50-odd journalists (some odder than others) from all over the world.

The conference was held online again in 2021 and ‘22: my kitchen background increasingly accessorised for global exposure. Then came 2023, when the event returned to actual Korea and somebody forgot to tell me.

But all’s well that ends well. And another year later, last week, I finally set foot in Seoul as a participant of the World Journalists Conference 2024.

Whatever about the journalists, it was a different world. If not forgotten, Covid is no longer news. The themes this year were war reporting and AI, on which there were thought-provoking contributions during the formal part of the event.

Honesty compels me to admit, however, that much of the conference’s fun was just mixing with fellow press people from such far-flung places as Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, or – at the other end of the alphabetic spectrum – Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.

The diversity of experience was in some ways humbling, as the representative from Turkey discovered.

During the session on war reporting, she asked the panellists’ opinion on the Cypriot border question. But they all had to explain politely that they didn’t know much (or anything) about Cyprus.

So – not that it was part of my plans – I instantly overcame any temptation to ask what people thought about the Irish Border, just in case nobody had ever heard of it.

A functional fluency in English was one of the conditions for attending. Meanwhile, and perhaps more surprisingly even considering they were journalists, another thing that unified most of our disparate group was a love of beer.

There were a handful of conscientious objectors, it’s true. These included the Saudi representative: a charming, veiled young woman who grew up in Texas and spoke fluent American but now lived in Riyadh and preferred it there.

When I asked if she wasn’t “oppressed”, she just laughed. If anyone was oppressing her, it was the Korean waiter who filled her wine glass at lunch when she wasn’t looking.

Not only did she not drink alcohol, she didn’t like having it in front or her. So she asked the waiter to take it away. But he thought she was complaining about the quality and tried to pour her a fresh glass.

Finally, with the cultural sensitivity towards alcohol for which we in Ireland are famous, I said “Allow me” and removed the offending object to another table.

Europeans more than made up for the abstentionists from elsewhere. One night in Suwon, along with the German and Bulgarian delegates, I accompanied a party-animal Hungarian in search of a bar where he had been earlier and left the French and Portuguese journalists.

Unfortunately, his memory of the venue did not include its name or the name of the street it was on: only a series of hunches as to where it might be, which covered an increasingly large swathe of the city centre.

Some years ago I read a great novel, The Radetsky March, which – through the microcosm of one family – explained the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

But this was the Radetsky Pub Search, during which I gained a new insight into how Hungary lost its part of the empire. By the end, we were all ready to settle for any pub, and even that proved elusive.

So again, finally, I had to take charge and, drawing on deep national reserves of know-how, found us a corner café with a fridge full of beer.

I was slightly annoyed with Italy’s representative at the WJC, if only because she ruined an old joke – popular with the Irish UN delegation – whereby I too could have claimed that in the alphabetical listing, I was located “between Iraq and a hard place”.

Mind you, there was no Israeli at the WJC so the hard place would have had to be Kazakhstan, which may or may not be hard. I had beers with the Kazakh – a handsome young TV presenter – one night too and he seemed a gentle, thoughtful sort.

On the other hand, he also told me that, in his spare time, he was an MMA fighter.