The rooftops were our home. It was sometime during our second week in Korea, word came through that Rodney and Memo, upon exploration of our newfound home, stumbled upon an unlocked door that led to an exposed roof, six stories up. Of course we had to explore it, and it was simple enough. It was a building whose doors remained unlocked after dark and whose purpose we couldn’t tell (it seemed like a dorm and a computer lab of sorts), a simple 5 or so minute walk from our dorm, and you could simply walk up the stairs up to the 6th floor, follow the “Rooftop Access” signs, and suddenly you would be on a roof. There were the normal heating and air conditioning units, but in one corner of the building the roof was higher. It was above the staircase, a small maybe 8' by 10' rectangle where we could gather. The roof had no railing, indeed the only deterrent from falling was a slightly raised bump that circled the roof, the kind of thing one would see if deterring skateboarders from riding on a bench.
The fact that it was unlocked, unguarded, and potentially unsafe made it a kind of haven for us. We were all college students studying abroad in this small school in the middle of South Korea, and we hailed from all over the US as well as internationally. It was up on this roof that we drank, we opened ourselves up, and we let our legs dangle as we watched the students walk unaware beneath us. If we looked eastward, we could see the small village of Sinchang (신챙), and if we looked westward, we could see Global Village, the dorm where the international students and some Korean students lived.
Nearly all of us had a roomate, and suitemates. The way the rooms were set up, our small bedrooms had space for our clothes, our bunkbeds, and our desks. The suite consisted of 6 bedrooms connected to a central area with two bathrooms and a living area that had a window that usually looked out onto another of the wings of Global Village. In other words, we were surrounded by people nearly all the time in this dorm. The rooftops were our escape.
This rooftop, the Unitopia building, was the main roof we went to but it wasn’t the only one. It was on top of the multimedia building where we persuaded Tammy to climb higher than she had before, and I lent my sweater to a very inebriated Melissa, who opted to lay on a bench below. It was on top of the arts building where I sat on one of my last nights at the school, eating my dinner and looking at the town and reminiscing on all of my memories. And it was on the roof of the engineering building where you could take a hidden smoke break (not that anyone cares, smoking was so prevalent in our school that although it was banned in the dorms, the staircases had ashtrays on every floor and windows that opened for ventilation), and on this roof where we started a snowball war with the people below.
There’s something about being on a roof. Maybe the literal elevation change leads to elevated thoughts, maybe the fact that we collectively sought a kind of solitude created a community, maybe looking at the twinkling of the night’s lights help to put things in perspective, maybe it’s the fact that it only takes one single step and we could have all ended our lives. Of course, none of us did. We could have. We came from diverse backgrounds, with home lives that ranged from abusive to coddling, and we all stood at this same precipice, and in the end, we all chose to stay. We all chose to keep experiencing, even though we knew the future could hold pain or pleasure or more realistically both.
The person I grew closest to in my time in Korea was Sam. She was one of my first friends (in hindsight, I realized that my first two friends in Korea were redheads for reasons unbeknownst to me). She had brilliantly curly hair, glasses, hailed from Ohio State (Go Buckeyes! I wouldn’t have known to say that before meeting her), has a fondness for Guy Ritchie films, and is one of the most perceptive and intelligent humans I have met. We adventured throughout Korea, and I recall two definitive times where ‘bonding’ occurred. The first was when we were lost in Cheonan by ourselves, and after finding our way back to the train station (after many zigzags and broken Korean conversations later), we had to wait for the train. I had cards, and showed the the few magic tricks I knew, and I just remember being us laughing and even though we were lost in this moment we had found something great: a weird and strange friendship. The other bonding moment occurred on the roof.
Sometimes a group of us would gather and slowly disperse, especially since our dorm locked at midnight (more about that later), and sometimes small groups would find themselves on the roof of the Unitopia building. If my memory serves me, I was showing Sam up to this rooftop hideout. It was a kind of sanctuary, and it was open to those who were open minded, and I feel like everyone who knew about it was initiated in some way to coming up there. In addition, one couldn’t bring someone liable to tell admin about this minor screw-up and get us locked out of our rooftop refuge. Sam was different though, I knew this when I met her. She has the spark.
We walked through the empty halls of the building pretending like we belonged, climbed the stairs, opened the door to the roof, and climbed the small ladder up to the perch. We just sat on top, the two of us, sharing stories about what life was like growing up in Ohio and northern California. We talked about how easy it would be to step off, and maybe there were times in our lives we might have done just that. I showed her the scars on my arms, she showed me the scars in her heart. We wondered about this new country we were in, about our new friends, about the people we would be living in close proximity to, and about the adventures to be had. Of course, neither of us had ever gone to Seoul, the metropolis that held a fifth of this country’s population.
We would go on to explore that city, and many more places, and it all started with her infectious laugh and curious eyes and that rooftop.
I also gained a respect for a different friend on that rooftop. San actually came from the same city as me, and we had had an Oceanography class together In that class, we had taken a field trip to Patrick’s Point where we all camped. My friend Valerye and I were walking along the road at night and at an overlook to the ocean (which was barely visible in the starlight), we ran into San and another gentleman whose name has long since left me. After that trip, San and I didn’t really know each other, until our paths crossed again on the other side of that same ocean.
It was a night when there were six or seven of us on the roof, sitting cross legged around our equivalent of a campfire. In this case, soda and Soju. Soju is the hard alcohol of choice in Korea, cheap and potent, and like a good campfire could bring people together and be dangerous if one was careless. We sat around the circle, swapping stories and taking shots, each of us gaining insight into what made us ‘us.’ We had come to Korea for different reasons. Some were hardcore Korea-philes, immersed in culture of K-pop and K-dramas, some had come as an escape, some had come riding on a wave of luck, and every story in between, but soon the evening grew long. Everyone had departed the roof as the curfew time was nearing, but San and I deemed it a wondrous night and thought we should spend the night on the roof. We had no sleeping bags, or indeed sleeping apparatuses of any kind, but the summer was waning and we were men.
We had not taken into account the fact that the nights were quite cold. The sweatshirt I had used for a pillow became the sweatshirt I used as a sweatshirt, and I remember waking up in the middle of the night to see San running laps around the small rooftop and doing jumping jacks, and when I asked him why, he told me “You were asleep and I was cold. I didn’t want to leave you or wake you, so I just decided to exercise.”
This was the most typical San statement. Gentleman to the last, he would rather exercise on this roof in the middle of the night than wake me and tell me of his discomfort. I was quite cold by now too, and since the dorm was locked (we could wake up the security guard, but we opted not to), we decided to spend the night in the library which was open 24/7. We made the trek down the hill into the welcoming and warm arms of the school library, and found some white leather couches on the second floor that would be our beds until the dorm opened at 5 am. San slept, but I couldn’t get comfortable, so I spent the last hours of night watching My Drunk Kitchen on youtube and watching the sun slowly rise. As the morning rolled on, we waited until the security guard opened the dorms, then blearily stumbled into our respective rooms for some quality sleep. I gained respect for a newfound friend that night, and to this day trust San and it started with his respectfully quiet exercise in the middle of the night on that rooftop.
The last of my favourite rooftops was the Kimchee Hostel in Gangnam. Gangman, the district of Seoul that is the New York City of cities in American (lots of wealth and style, and of course inspired the song Gangnam Style that gained Psy international attention), was the place to go to experience the best Seoul had to offer. This hostel was a part of a chain, but this one was, of course, the cleanest and nicest. My first time here was with Sam and Francisco, the three of us on our way to Namsam Island. We had a six person dorm room to ourselves, and we discovered that behind one of the curtains was a balcony that was connected to stairs where we could access the roof. It was only about four or five stories high, but we were in the center of the financial and classy district of Seoul. Giant, luminous billboards lit up the night sky. People stumbled home after a night at the enticing and glamorous clubs, and cars that gleamed drove through the streets like shooting stars. Before travelling to Japan, I spent a night here, and had my dinner of ramen and beer on the roof. It was a roof of beginnings and endings.
I can’t quite say what drew us to the rooftops. Perhaps it was that it satiated the rebellious feelings inside of us, it fostered the building of relationships, and it offered views of cities that would otherwise never be gleaned. These rooftops were our escape, were where we were safe and alone with company, and where we chose to live. Heights both exhilarate and frighten me, and have drawn me to the observatory of Willis/Sears Tower in Chicago, the observation deck of the Osaka Building, and Seoul Tower. It is rooftops where we truly can be, and where I will always find myself if the chance allows.
(For more on Soju and Korea, check out this magazine my friend put together and head to page 45).