Books, blog and other blather

Category: Seoul (Page 5 of 5)

Morning links

  • I had no idea Yeomni-dong (not far from Shinchon in Seoul) was such a crime-ridden area. I used to live close to there. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Korea’s organized crime targeting … universities? (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A summary of the weekend’s hip hop “wars” in Korea (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • 3,000 Koreans living in Mongolia these days as Mongolian economy and Korean investment there keeps climbing (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • It’s always nice reading sensible thoughts on the Korea-Japan relationship (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • The second KCON (or K-pop convention) was held in Los Angeles last weekend (LA Times)
  • I always hate to see schools restricting access to books. In Japan, 39 schools have restricted access to Barefoot Gen, a famous graphic novel about surviving the Hiroshima nuclear bomb (Japan Times and here). The classic comic book just turned 40 in June (Japan Times).

 

Vinyl Underground

I love finding dingy old LP bars.

 

This is Old Music, located across the street from the Jongno District Office. Tiny, incredibly musty, nothing on the menu but beer and whisky, but a very good vinyl collections. The owner tells me it has been around about 10 years and occasionally gets folks from the nearby embassies.

Seoul From on High

Yesterday Seoul had perhaps the clearest skies I’ve seen since returning to Korea. From my office in the west of Seoul, I could see Mount Gwanak in the south and apartment complexes from all over the city. There were some great clouds, too.

My office is pretty high up, but the windows are tinted, so you cannot really take decent photos from inside. But then I realized that the building has a helicopter pad on the roof. So I headed up and tried taking some photos from there.

First I went up in the middle of the afternoon. Here’s a pic looking west. You can see Banghwa Bridge far off on the left, and Ilsan to the distance, slightly to the right:

Later, I went up around sundown, when the magic hour was turning the city orange:

And here’s the view to the east. You can see the new high-rises at Hapjeong, then Yeouido behind them, and in the distance Mount Gwanak:

The same view, but a bit further back with the helicopter pad in view:

Then I tried out the panorama setting on my Galaxy S3 camera. There’s a few wonky stitches, but overall I thought it looked pretty good:

Argh. This blog format doesn’t allow me to throw in extra-wide images. Need to find a good place to show off these panoramas…

Morning Links

  • Moon So-young takes a great look at new Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Seoul, with architect Mihn Hyun-jun (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Beer popsicles! Beer ice cream. And plenty of craft beers. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A look at one of the Han River rescue teams responsible for a 22km stretch of the river that contains 15 bridges. The team responds to 774 suicide attempts and drownings last year — saving 258 people and stopping another 185. Still, that’s a lot of suicides. (Hankyoreh)
  • Enjoying the hot weather? I hope so because the Korea Meteorological Administration says it is going to stick around until Chuseok — that’s Sept. 19 this year. Which I suppose means we’ll have snow by Oct. 1. (Chosun Ilbo)
  • This is the first Gwangbokjeol (Independence Day) I’ve ever spent in Korea so close to the Japanese Embassy. As of 9am, there were plenty of police everywhere, with all the side alleys and roads around the embassy closed off. Could be exciting.
And in movie news:
  • The summer may be mostly over (especially for Hollywood), but the competition at the Korean box office is ramping up, as two big films were released yesterday for Gwangbokjeol. Kim Sung-soo’s first movie in a decade, The Flu, is the new No. 1, with 306,000 admissions yesterday. Hide and Seek was second with 294,000 admissions. (All stats from KOBIS)
  • Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer fell to third with 200,000. It’s now at 7.1 million admissions and 51 billion won ($45.6 million).
  • The top four films in Korea yesterday were all Korean. Then the next six were all animated films (Japanese and Western). No live-action Hollywood movies in top 10.
  • So far this year, Korean films have had 56.3% of box office. 40.3% for Hollywood. Nearly 1% for Japan.
  • Lee Young-ae goes from JSA to the DMZ (Chosun Ilbo).

Sometimes the Cheonggyecheon Really Is a River

This is my favorite time of year in Korea — I love it when the hot, summer rains pelt down — so after dinner this evening I took a little walk through the drenched streets of downtown Seoul. And, well, this is what I found:

Pretty cool, huh? The Cheonggyecheon was pretty swollen. Usually, the stream looks more like this:

This was the start of the Cheonggyecheon this evening, when the rains were really coming down:

As opposed to this:

Anyhow, one of my favorite parts of Seoul is just walking around, seeing what I might find on a random street on a random day. Like yesterday, I was walking near the Seoul History Museum, when I suddenly realized that I had never checked out Gyeonghuigung Palace before, and I really should. So I did:

Heunghwamun Gate was originally further east, then moved by the Japanese during the colonial era, and finally moved here in the 1980s.

Gyeonghuigung was apparently destroyed by the Japanese during the colonial era, so this is almost all a reconstruction … But it was quite a nice reconstruction.

The main entrance to the palace is under construction until August, so that was a bit of a bummer.

Unlike the other palaces in Seoul, this one was dead quiet. No tourists anywhere and just a few folks walking around.

Here’s a view of the palace from a hill behind it:

After checking out the palace, I stubbornly refused to retrace my steps and leave the same way I came in, so I started looking around for a back gate. But apparently there wasn’t one. Undeterred, I kept looking, eventually heading up into the forest hill behind the palace. There I found an old wall, with little steel doors in the side. It wasn’t locked, so I walked through and found myself on a little roadway.

I kept walking up until I got to the top of the hill, and what did I find? The old Seoul Weather Observatory, in operation since 1933, I do believe.

Around the observatory, there’s some rebuilt  sections of the old Seoul wall (looking very unhistoric, by the way) and quite a nice path snaking its way around the hill. It led to this park:

Which had a whole bunch of cats sleeping on the stones and in the undergrowth:

By now I was up pretty high, in an interesting taldongne area.

There’s even a walking tour and map through the alleys:

And a few forlorn hanok:

Eventually the road took me back down to Sajik Park. Here is a view of Inwangsan from the park:

Oh, right, I started this post talking about the Cheonggyecheon being swollen by the rain. So here are a couple more pics:

Newer posts »

© 2024 Mark James Russell

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑