Buildings and Food

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It's vacation week, and while others have taken the opportunity to visit far-away locales, I've had neither the time nor resources to comfortably plan such a trip. Instead, I've welcomed the opportunity to explore Seoul a little more.

There's certainly no shortage of things to see and do here. Just taking the subway to a random stop to just get out and wander around for hours can be entertaining for hours. This weekend I started at Myeongdong. If you take a closer look at this fountain you'll see not one but two huge video billboards on the buildings in the backdrop. Again, I'm impressed by the weird combination of modern and not-so modern here; Koreans have a real flair for anachronism. Not that the fountain is that old, just that it clashes with the various electronica behind it, on an ideological basis at the very least.

This area has an underground mall. In fact, a lot of areas around here have underground malls. Not underground as in they're secretive, just that they're underneath the road. This one had a few nice finds, including an amazing hand-crosstiched wall hanging of Morgan Freeman (that probably costs more than I'd want to imagine) as well as quite an impressive lot of vinyl. Unfourtunately, there's no organization of the records by artist, genre, decade, condition, or anything. So, essentially you've got 5 or 6 stores each with thousands of vinyls and you'd have to search through every single one to know you hadn't missed anything. this type of insane lack of order is pretty common of Korean shopping. It makes it exciting, albeit potentially frustrating.

I may have insinuated before that this place is pretty damn crowded. With forty million people in the country, and almost half of them in Seoul and its surrounding areas, there are people eeeverywhere. Of course it's easier to show that than to say it. Or more effective, at least.

One funny thing about the culture here is the accepted manner to deal get through the crowds - you just push and shove and elbow and make no apologies to anyone. I'm not criticizing it, I figure it formed out of neccesity. I've still got this inborn natural reaction to turn and say 'sorry' everytime I bump into someone. That's doubly pointless, of course, since most people understand neither the word nor the sentiment.

Speaking of understanding words, I'm starting a learn a tiny bit of progress in my funtional Korean. I've managed to order a couple of meals in broken Korean. The meals here, by the way are delicious and cheap. I'm still in the process of trying out a lot of different things, but so far, I've liked pretty much everything. I don't quite get how people come here and just get North American foods most of the time. Sure they're familliar and availible, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of travelling to another country?

So for a lot of the rest of my free vacation time, I've checked out a few of the parks here. They've got nice grass and streams and the little duckies in the pond. There's some real prettiness here, and for a moment you can kind of pretend that you're not in the middle of urban sprawl.

Until you take a breath, or look around and see the skyscrapers or the scads of Koreans trying to live-out the same fantasy of Seoulessness. But I'm not ripping on the urbanality of this place - hell, it's why I chose to move to Seoul.

In fact, I'm still so taken with the iron building giants that I've taken way too many pictures of them. On Tuesday I went to Yeouido (an island in the middle of Seoul) and walked around for hours. There is some impressive modern architecture and sculpture around the place, and I went all touristy and snapped an assload of pictures.

There's also the National Assembly which, judging by the abundance of police officers guarding it, must be the centre of all that is governmental here in Korea. These Police, by the way are armed with what is essentially a bo staff - a long beating stick. I wonder how the feds back home would react to being outfitted like Donatello the Ninja Turtle.

See that crossy-thing in the upper-right corner? That's the Yeouido Full Gospel, a church that claims to have the largest congregation of any Christian church in the world.

Jesus! Are you telling me that those heathens have a bigger church than us!?
Goddamn right they do.

Or course, no collection of photos on Yeouido would be complete without the 63 Building. This is the tallest building in Korea, home to Korea Life Insurance. (Actually, it's not techinally the tallest anymore, I've read that's Tower Palace Three, Tower G, but that one's not as purrty, and the name is dumb.) All shiny and tapered and gold-coloured, it's quite the blinged-out megaphallus. I guess you can get inside of it and take pictures of the city, but it was getting late and I'd already filled my daily panorama quota, anyway.

And that brings me up to date. Back to classes tomorrow. The Korean summer break lasts a couple of weeks, tops, and for the poor kids at my private hogwon, they get half a week off of classes, same as me. I asked some of them where they're going on summer vacation, expecting to hear of intersting and far-off locales. They said things like 'Swimming!' I guess half a week doesn't afford much time to travel.