Seoulscapade

One of the first places I visited when I arrived in Seoul years ago was Jongno Tower. The building is intriguing with its three pillared design, standing like some giant metallic invader out of a sci-fi movie.

I found out there was a restaurant up in its top section, so I immediately booked a table. The restaurant is called Top Cloud, and I celebrated my first pay check there one evening—to the tune of around $280 for dinner for two, if I remember rightly.

Yes, the place is pricey, but you’re paying for more than food: your investing in a spectacular downtown view through massive windows in setting like no other in Seoul. That’s what I said to myself to feel better about the restaurant bill.

Actually, if I had not been in such a celebratory mood, or had not wished to impress my female companion, I guess I could have simply had a coffee in the cafe beside the restaurant. A basic coffee there will only set you back $13 or so.

With the idea of getting my money’s worth out of my visit, I took a long time in the men’s room. I don’t mean for traditional reasons. It’s because it too had a scenic view. What I discovered in there was a whole window from floor to ceiling where you’d expect a wall to be.

One feels pretty exposed. But I found you can’t do your business while exposed or looking out at the view. That’s sectioned off. You can, however, stand at a circular washbasin in the middle of the room and take in the sites. At least the chuckle the place gave me helped eased the pain of what the evening cost me.

This leads me to Seoul Tower, pictured below, whose men’s room on the lower circular viewing deck goes one step further, as it is purpose designed for enjoying the view while letting it all hang out. It has actually become famous—a tourist destination in fact, as I learned on a recent visit to the tower.

I was only made aware of its fame after I happened to be standing outside of it recently and was approached by a woman with a proposition. No, it’s not what you think.

She was an Asian tourist, and she came up to me gushing something in broken English about a famous toilet. What she wanted me to do was take her camera inside the men’s and get a picture for her of the interior. Sure, I said, a little perplexed, and proceeded inside to see what she was raving on about.

Those urinals are each directly in front of their own window, overlooking the Seoul downtown area. You can even see the Jongno Tower from here. Now that’s what I call a convenience—your viewing pleasure need not be interrupted even if you have to relieve yourself! And it’s so inviting, isn’t it? You feel you just have to go.

What you see while having a pee.

No one was in there at the time, so when I came out I urged the woman tourist to duck in and have a good look for herself. A friend of hers had just joined her, so they both made a mad dash inside. I could hear the laughter and squeals of delight as I stood watch by the entry. It sounded like the men’s was giving them a greater thrill than the panorama of Seoul ever could!

It certainly made my day, seeing that famous men’s loo. Ironic, really, that I got to learn about it from a woman.

Like people in cultures everywhere, Koreans latch onto cute fads or focus on the trivial with a kind of in-joke mock seriousness. If some action is quirky and cute, like a dance style in a pop video or a mannerism from a soap opera, people begin to mimic it. It takes on a life of its own and is soon quoted in other media.

Recently a comedian wore a towel in a jim jill bang (spa house) in a funny way. He’d curved both ends in a circle and rolled them to the middle, leaving a gap to fit on his head, like a cap. When he wore it, it gave him a kind of Princess Leia look. Pretty soon, people were showing up everywhere on TV wearing towels the same way.

And here is another example of a quirky craze in Seoul, seen on the observation deck of Namson Seoul Tower. These are called “love locks,” and they’re just the kind of thing Koreans love—not just cute and quirky, but romantic, too.

The love lock idea is nothing new, but in recent times it has taken off around the world. The craze gained in popularity after lovers in Rome started hanging padlocks around a lamp post on Rome’s oldest bridge, the Ponte Milvio, in imitation of events in an Italian romance novel. That was over a year ago. Perhaps every country by now—probably every big city—has its own love lock locale.

In Seoul, it’s the Namsan Tower. Hundreds of people have bought up all kinds of padlocks, written messages on them and left them locked on the tower’s observation deck. Rome’s youth throw their keys in the river, so maybe at Namsan Tower lovers throw theirs over the side and down the hill.

The locks are so prolific now, it’s hard to get a good view overlooking Seoul, especially for shorter people. On the day I was there, so many people were in the way, I couldn’t get a long shot of the fencing. But trust me, it’s like this all the way around it.

Cute, quirky and romantic—that’s all you need to start a phenomenon in Korea.

One rainy Sunday afternoon we went to this cafe, though not for the coffee. You can get the usually assortment of overpriced coffees and beverages, if that’s what you want, but if you pay a little bit extra, you can also get your feet cleaned by doctor fish—little fish that chow down on the dead skin of your feet. Yummy!

We had a tub—one of three—opposite the couple above, over by the other window. It looks like it is designed to seat four, but as couples were the main clientèle, the monitor was delegating a tub per couple. After buying coffee, we had to wait about fifteen to twenty minutes for our turn. Buying a beverage is required. You can’t just walk in off the street to dip your feet. So, we paid 9, 800 won for two coffees and 2, 000 won each for fifteen minutes with the doctor fish.

Some people will definitely find this creepy. Actually, one of my wife’s friends found the sensation abhorrent, and has sworn she will never allow doctor fish to visit her again. It’s a little disconcerting at first, as it’s not what you would call ticklish, having a hundred or so little mouths chomping on your soles. Nonetheless, I got used to it, and I was actually disappointed when the time ran out because I obviously needed more treatment.

It’s a reciprocal relationship: people get their feet cleaned and the fish get a meal. You could argue that this is exploitation, but I couldn’t see how the fish would suffer. I presume at night that they are returned to a more natural environment. The tubs would have to be cleaned, wouldn’t they? I’d be interested to know what happens behind the scenes.

At least the fish seemed happy and healthy enough. One has to be thankful for a rare instance, when human beings are not subjecting exploited animals to torture and cruelty before an inevitable death—the usually practice, for example, in the meat industry.

I did notice a difference afterwards. Once I had put my shoes back on, it felt like I’d just walked on mildly hot sand or bitumen. Even now, hours later, my feet are kind of tingling, but not uncomfortably so. Their skin seems smoother too, unless I’m imagining it.

Other bigger cafes like this one—part of the same chain—can be found in Jongno and Sinchon. People refer to them as the Doctor Fish Cafe, or the Korean name of the cafe chain translates as Tree’s Shade Cafe, which is suggestive of a kind of shady resting spot. That idea, resting under a tree, is alluded to in the chain’s website name: http://www.restree.net. The site is all in Korean, though.

I might look into the exploitation side of it more, and if everything checks out, I’ll return for further treatment from the doctor fish. The way they were attacking me in great numbers did suggest that I was in need of it.

• Skip Kid
  —The Who
  (This always reminds me of Clockwork Orange. Empowering beat.)

• Love Removal Machine
  —The Cult
  (For cruising when tiredness has set in.)

• Coming Down
  —The Cult
  (Good for keeping the legs pumping.)

• Just Because
  —Jane’s Addiction
  (Inspires you to keep up the pace.)

• The Daily Planet
  —Love
  (Great for when you’re just starting out. Power up.)

• Soon
  —My Bloody Valentine
  (Excellent for a steady pace. One of the best songs of the 90s for me.)

• Sich Offnen
  —Not From There
  (Great to keep pace with.)

• Bombs Away
  —The Police
  (A good mid-run pick-me-up.)

• Let It Go
  —Weta
  (A tragedy that the band broke up. This rocks.)

• No Excuses
  —Alice in Chains
  (Also good for when just starting out. Feel the stress fall away.)

More to come . . .

This was the start of the 2004 St. Patrick’s parade passing through a theatre and arts district in Seoul. It doesn’t look like much here, and it didn’t look like much as it’s passed by, either. But there were some interesting moments. These involved groups of people who mistakenly stumbled into the wrong parade, or so it would appear. Take this group of lasses below.

I’m no expert, but do they look Irish? I mean, is that traditional Irish dress? It looks like a Scottish marching band to me, especially with those bagpipes. The theme here is definitely Scottish. Some questions arise however, like what are these Korean girls doing in a Scottish marching band? Is it the chance to wear a kilt or squeeze on a bag that attracted them to it? Who would start a club like that and for what reason? Equally perplexing is the group of people below.

No, I’m stumped. No green anywhere, no hint of Irishness at all. No, I’m definitely detecting a Spanish theme here. Those guys are like cheap matadors. But the Basso suit bag that girl is carrying, with something other than a suit in it, is far from settling my mind on what is going on. It also very, very annoying that it’s hiding her legs.

OK, this is just getting weird. I think from the look of them that they are Mongols. It’s just a guess. This group would constitute the most distant, out of all groups in the St. Patrick’s parade, from anything Irish, including in terms of presumed geographical origination. But not to worry, some Irishmen at last. Nice to see you could make it.

The most anticipated event for me of St. Patrick’s Day for me was a function on at The Western Chosun Hotel in downtown Seoul. Tickets were 50, 000 won or around $50 per person for a buffet dinner and as much Guinness as you could possibly drink. How could anyone pass up an invitation like that! The Western Chosun is one of the few places in Seoul where you can get Guinness on tap. I got there early.

It’s hard to see much but the place was really jumping after the buffet. They had a couple of bands on and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. It was wall to wall foreigners. For my part, I lost count of the amount of Guinness I drank, in the interest of getting my money’s worth. Actually, to tell you the truth, I would have got my money’s worth at around two or three Guinesses because Guinness is usually outrageously expensive in Seoul, way beyond my budget.

All up it was a good night. Towards the end I could still hold a camera still despite the amount of Guinness I had had. This is Sunah, my girlfriend, starting to look weary. She’d drunk her money’s worth as well, but why not, it was St. Patrick’s Day in Seoul.

It means a good thing in Korea. . .

It’s been a month of floods throughout Korea, and as you can see Seoul has not been immune. I first became aware of flooding in some Seoul streets when it was reported on TV. Then one night they were showing how high the water was in the Han River. It was close to overflowing the Han River bridges, which was amazing considering how high those bridges are.

I decided it was about time to have a look for myself. These shots above are after the worst of it. They show a clean up in progress on what is ordinarily a jam packed main route into and past the business district. The water obviously flowed over that route at some point, perhaps during the night. How much over I couldn’t say, but going on the news reports, it was just below the spans of the bridges, like the one below (from which I took the other photos).

To give an idea of how high the water still is here, the main route above—built beside the river bank—usually has around a 10 metre clearance from the water line.

Very few people were out and about having a look. Perhaps they’d seen it all before in years gone by. I wanted to investigate further and headed with Sunah closer to the business district. At one point we got soaked walking along the curbing of a flooded road, as earth movers and vehicles churned up the water.

About at this point I became concerned about the prospect of being electrocuted. We really weren’t supposed to be where we were, and I didn’t push it by going closer to the clean up nearer the river. We were virtually the only “tourists” around and I was starting to feel self-conscious about that—like we just didn’t belong there. We eventually made our way around to the tall 63 building, featured in the top photos.

This was the scene in front of the 63 building, once again, after the worst was over. The building surrounded by water is a riverside function center atop a kind of pontoon. We were only here briefly and this shot was taken hastily because there was an irate worker expressing his disgust at the few people having a look around. I was prepared to tell him to get lost if he came near me, but he directed his anger at other Koreans.

His objections may have been more legitimate had we be standing at a site of devastation and death. But it certainly wasn’t that. Homes were wiped out and people had died in the south, not anywhere in Seoul. I really dislike people inappropriately taking the moral high ground (pardon the pun) and using it boss people around. He resembled dickhead council workers in Australia who see it as their place to act as social police, intimidating and pushing people around, as if the general public were just a plain nuisance.

We didn’t move on because of him but because there wasn’t any devastation and death to see.

This is the famous Woodstock bar, well known to many foreigners and Koreans alike, in the middle of the Sinchon bar and restaurant district. It’s rough and casual, and all about loud music, loud reverie, quick waitresses, and free flowing beer. Small and dimly lit inside, it is full of old wooden tables and chairs and booths; and by the door, a wall of shelved LPs are presided over by a DJ. You can request any song you like and there’s a good chance he’ll have it, or else your second choice, on vinyl, and he’ll add it to the list. It’s grubby and unkept looking, with garbage strewn just by the main entrance. It looks like it really has been there since the 70s. What a romantic venue! This is where I met my wife.

Every kind of bar you can think of can be found in Seoul. And there are bars everywhere. Three kinds exist that I know of. The first kind is like Woodstock, just a straight forward drinking bar, the second kind is known as a hof (the name, I think, has German origins), where eating and drinking are done, and the third kind is a Girly bar where throwing away money is done.

At a hof one is obliged to have food; you can’t order a drink on its own, although this rule has been bent for me once or twice. I love these places and their variety. You’ll always get served as quick as they can. But you have to understand going in that the food won’t be of the highest quality for what you pay. It will nonetheless go well with what your drinking.

I haven’t taken nearly enough bar pictures given the number of bars I’ve been to. I often haven’t a mind to because that’s usually not the priority on a night out drinking. At the bar above, however, everything about it called for a photo. It’s the Platinum microbrewery bar in the wealthy Gangnam area, whose decor on three floors is themed according to the elements, earth, fire and water. Water is obviously the theme of the basement bar here.

A great many bars and hofs are not nearly as classy. And as a rule, if the bar looks a bit shabby the toilets are going to be very basic. At another bar in Sinchon, the gents was like a long narrow passage and did not even have a light. That’s not to say there wasn’t light; there was neon filtering in through a hole in the wall at one end, where you could see people passing by. It only had one urinal, and what the floor was made of is anyone’s guess; dirt, I think.

At a hof I visit in Shillim, a renowned student area, I went into the toilets in the stairwell to find two cubicles side by side, one male and one female. These were the old-style squat kind of loos. I went into to do my thing and was squatting there while next to me some strange women, obviously drunk, was doing her thing. She sounded like a horse. Not only did I hear it all, I could see part of what was going on because of the gap between the floor and the thin partition. Quite frankly, as I am free of most fetishes, this did nothing to delight me.

On another occasion, at a coffee shop in another part of Shillim, I sat myself down in a cubicle (on a regular porcelain this time) only to sense that a woman was already occupying the female one next to mine. Now, the trouble with these arrangements is that you become incredibly self-conscious of every sound; your body is put under a lot of stress with the restraints imposed on it. It’s bad enough as a foreigner, never really being anonymous, but if you were to emerge from a toilet and someone in the place has recently heard your ablutions and can now put a face to them, well, it’s just too much exposure for me.

While I was concentrating with all my faculties on keeping it quiet, the woman next to me began talking to herself. I thought she must have been on her cell phone. Really, I wanted her to just get it over with and leave, so I could let go, so to speak. I waited, and it was then that another woman started talking—in the same cubicle. There were two of them in there!

Here’s a photo of a room at an upmarket bar/coffee shop in the ritzy suburb of Apkujong. The bar/coffee shop had a number of different rooms like this one. It was a slow night. Upstairs was a stylish bar with girls wearing fishnet stockings. I wanted to sip my beer up there—yes, I confess, I do have one fetish—but I was with a work crowd, and we took over another room similar to the one photographed, with no girls in fishnet stockings, for a private party.

Well, that’s a start. I’ll try and be more diligent about getting photos all the weird and wonderful premises I come across and put them here.

Right there, along that concrete slab, is the dividing line between North and South Korea. I took the shot from behind a window in a blue meeting room, like the one opposite, straddling the dividing line. Technically speaking, I suppose, when I was at the other end of the room, I was in North Korea.

I took the photo from a window on the right here, in the table room at the Joint Security Area compete with ever-ready MPs.

This was the culmination of a day trip out to Panmunjom about an hour north of Seoul, at the North Korean border. The bus trip was organized by the institute where I work for Korea language students, who didn’t have to pay the 70, 000 regular tourists pay. I no longer took classes but I was allowed to tag along.

Now, a dress code does apply when going there; however, I neglected to read about this part in the handout I was given. I was in sandals. This worried the organizers and a spare pair of shoes were found. I was annoyed with the fuss then and in hindsight because we spent most of our time in a bus, waiting or looking out the window.

This kind of scene begins in Seoul and it’s like this all the way to the border, fencing and guard towers. One forgets in Seoul that the world’s most heavily guarded border is just north of the city.

The DMZ itself is a two kilometre wide “nature strip” across the 38th parallel. It has remained untouched for 50 years, making it one of them most well-preserved nature reserves on earth. What a good idea! It abounds with species of birds and animals. I saw birds everywhere while I was there.

Our day trip was pretty much like the regular agency tours conducted out there. Other locations are open to tourists as well. I guess everyone basically gets the same tour. When we arrived, all of our passports had to be checked while we were on the bus. That took quite a while. Then we were shunted to a lecture theatre for a lecture and short film. Then it was back on the bus and off to the Joint Security Area.

The tourist industry, in fact, is alive and well and doing very nicely out of the DMZ. Apparently, the same goes for the North because while we were at the JSA, I spied some tourists looking at us looking at them looking at us looking at. . . etc.

The impulse to wave, however, must be stifled. Another one of the rules tourists have to follow out here is not to make any gesture of any kind in a northerly direction, in case you start an international incident or something of that sort.

Here’s the wide view from an observatory platform:

It was difficult to restrain one’s self, after being told not to gesture, because all you want to do at those North Korean guards is put your thumbs your ears and wriggle your fingers. Here’s one looking right at me while I take picture on the North Korean side of the room.

All of this was interesting but what intrigued me most out of the whole tour was the deserted village. You can see it here in the distance, in this shot taken from the same observatory mentioned above but in a north easterly direction.

This village, apparently, is empty. It’s just there to intimidate or as a show piece of some kind. Here’s a close up. The flag pole, we were informed, serves no purpose other to be the tallest flag pole around, as a rival to a flag pole the South built somewhere or other.

I don’t know why it stood out for me as a highlight. It just did. It’s just, well, bizarre. All around the village, in the fields and among the hills are guard towers. We got a better look at them and at the village after leaving the JSA. The next part of the tour was just all by bus. Here, snapped hastily from the bus, is the famous Bridge of No Return, looking the worse for lack of use.

We did have another stop after the JSA, a brief stop at a high vantage point for the view, but then it was back to the bus and our Humvee escort for the return to Panmunjom tourist shops. After that we headed home. Admittedly, the whole trip was worth it, but it did sometimes feel like it was all part of a large tourist operation.

The massive interior and “ice crush” at Lotte World.

There are many forms of entertainment here that you can’t find where I came from. I’ve become a regular patron of a number of them. Before you jump to conclusions, Seoul is not Bangkok, got it? However, hostess bars and other establishments do exist. I don’t think I’ll go to one soon; costs are exorbitant. I’ve heard of $30 being paid each time a hostess pours you a drink. Now, that’s not for the drink itself, it’s for the act of pouring it! I’d hate to think what a favour beyond that might cost. So clientele are often businessmen, whose antics are paid for by their company. At least, that’s how it used to be until a recent tax department crack down.

A close up of the . . . er . . fun at Lotte World.

No, my preferred venues are the Chim-Chil-Baang and DVD-baang (”baang” simply means “room”). The first is usually a large multi-floored place with saunas, hot and cold tubs, oven rooms, perhaps an ice room, movie and TV rooms, sleeping rooms, massage rooms, massage chairs, restaurant, ice cream shop and coffee bar, and sometimes entertainment areas and a gym. You pay around $7 upwards and can stay as long as you like. They’re open 24/7.

Some people even use them as a cheap alternative to a hotel. Mostly, couples and families visit them, so I don’t know why they have a reputation for being packed full of adjuma–maybe it was like that in the old days.

Everything is centred around the oven rooms, averaging four, built with various heat releasing materials: jade, wood, charcoal, mud, salt. You just go in and sweat it out, then cool off somewhere before doing it again. It’s great for the muscles and seems to improve the skin. After an average of 4 hours (time goes really quick), I always emerge totally relaxed and refreshed.

Some Pretty Xmas lights

A DVD-room is where you can go and pick a movie to watch in a small, private, darkened room. It costs about the same as movie ticket, which, by the way, is cheap here. There is a couch for two or three, footstools, a wall-to-wall screen and big sound system. The room would be a bit bigger than half an average apartment bedroom. The good thing is that you can lie down, eat, drink, talk—whatever. I much prefer it to a cinema.

Some places have rooms with a window, but people hang their coats over it to ensure privacy. This is because a number of them are not interested in the movie. It is well known that couples have other things to do, which has given DVD baangs a bad name. In fact, I’ve accidentally seen some strange activities through a window when walking past a room. A girl was bobbing up and down, but I could swear she wasn’t watching a musical. Thankfully, attendants clean rooms after each customer has left.

More Xmas lights—another way to recycle plastic bottles.

Another thing gaining popularity is the Game Cafe. This is like a coffee shop where you can hire board and parlour games of every description. I couldn’t see how it would be viable, but that’s probably because I was thinking from the point of view of a small city full of suburbs, like the one I came from. Here, it works. The problem for me is that the games are in Korean, and, besides, there are just so many other things I’d rather be doing, like going to a Chim-Chil-Baang or watching a DVD-baang musical.

It’s peak hour at the top! This was the scene one Saturday on the highest mount in the Bukhan mountain range north of Seoul. It was enough to convince us to forget about reaching the peak and to head down. This pleased me immensely, as this was one of my first mountain hiking experiences in Seoul, and I was not prepared for a number of things; namely, the amount of hiking we did and the poor choice of hiking boots I had made.

I knew little about the day’s outing. I just followed Sunah, my girl friend at the time, and her friend, catching a city bus to north of Seoul and heading through a park entrance. From then on it was just steps and steps and more steps up. It seemed like they wouldn’t end. Then we headed along a ridge. Some part of the way we came across old walls and guard houses. This initial phase was pleasant enough, especially as there was no more steps.

We stopped to rest on a peak and had a look around. Sunah’s friend motioned in the direct of a peak in the distance, what seemed like a couple of kilometres away. At the time, I didn’t realize that she was explaining that that was where we were heading. It soon dawned on me, though, when we started off and just kept on in that direction. This is when it began to advance from pleasant to a trial. Sure, the views were great, but my feet were just torturing me.

By the time the top picture was taken I already had blisters and skin scrapped from my heels. The boots I had were, I guess, just for street cred because I didn’t get any mountain cred out of them. Getting down was relatively quick, and we ended up at quite a large Buddhist temple—very nice to wander about after a hard hike, not far from which is the park entrance where we caught a bus home, and where I wish we had started from.

Koreans usually wear a hiking boot that is a cross between a gym shoe and a boot–very practically for travelling, too. Now, I have a pair, the ones above.

My hiking experiences after this have all been great. My most frequented hiking grounds have been the Gwanak mountain range near Seoul National University. This area has the added interest of a few old military installations.

After a few hours hiking, it’s good to stop and indulge in some rice wine, my preference being something called huk-ju, which is a cross between bek-ju, a sweet, yellowy coloured rice wine, and the one most people tend to drink, so-ju, a fairly neutral tasting, clear coloured rice wine. That takes out the aches and you forget any tiredness. It makes the journey down almost effortless, especially when employing an mp3 player.

For me, there is nothing like following a trail across the top of a ridge as the sun is setting, you’ve had a half bottle of rice wine, and you’re listening to great music while taking in a great view to the horizon. The sky is is various shades of orange and purple, the rice wine is relaxing the soul nicely, your body is tired but limber, like you’ve done a good afternoon’s exercise, and your listening to something mellow like Led Zeppelin’s “That’s the Way” or anything by The Sundays—those are the times when I think, it can’t get any better than this, . . . why would I ever want to leave this country?

Postscript: one day while hiking the Gwanak range, I took a few photos of the city which shows the extensive apartment style living culture here. What is interesting about one of those shots, the one below, is that when I took it I had no idea I would one day be living in an apartment almost exactly at bottom centre, just to the left of that vacant wooded area.

The Rodin museum in Seoul is located among the Samsung buildings near City Hall. It’s just down from the Namdaemoon Gate. I’ve visited the gallery a couple of times when I’ve been in the area. From memory, the glassed in section you see in the photo above is free, but you have to pay to enter the gallery behind that.

As a keen Dante enthusiast (my PhD involved Dante), I was thrilled when I heard about the existence of this museum because it houses a cast of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, which was inspired by Dante. Specifically, the scenes depicted on this sculpture are based on Dante’s Inferno. I’d never seen a real cast of it before so I made my way there pretty quickly after hearing about it.

The sculpture is actually a massive doorway, originally commission to form the main door of a proposed museum in Paris. The museum project, however, failed.

Most people know Rodin’s The Thinker, well, he’s present in this sculpture as well, centrally located at the top of the doorway. Here’s a close up:

But of all the scenes depicted from Inferno, where does the thinker fit in? Apparently, it’s Dante himself, as Rodin remarked: the figure is “Dante thinking of the plan of the poem behind him… all the characters from the Divine Comedy.”

Ugolino is among the many characters or souls from Dante’s hell that Rodin cast in bronze. He’s a soul in hell who tells Dante how he was forced to cannibalize his own children, who had died from starvation, whilst they were all imprisoned together. In hell, he is locked in ice with his captor and for all eternity gnaws at his captor’s head in reprisal. Stark and brutal, it’s one of my favorite moments in the poem. We see Ugolino below in the sculpture with the kids.

As far as I know, there are only ever two sculptures permanently housed in the glassed in section of this gallery, The Gates of Hell and Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. The Burghers of Calais was also impressive to see up close for the first time, a sculptural tribute to heroic sacrifice. It really gives a good idea of Rodin’s confronting realism. Apparently, this cast is the last of only 12 that were allowed after Rodin’s death.

Here is a close up:

The first time I went to the museum there was a Rodin exhibition as well (picture taking was not allowed), which presumably moved on after a few months. Altogether it was an enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon in Seoul.

Above is a radical building in downtown Seoul, which so intrigued me that when I found out there was a restaurant up top, I booked a table for dinner and took Sumi, my only contact in town at the time, to dinner. It was to celebrate my first pay check. We had a seven course meal of rather small but delightfully tasty portions that ended up costing me around $280. What the f…?! That was without wine.

But if you ever want to visit there, you could just sit at the cafe beside the restaurant, as it has an equally magnificent view. A latte will only set you back around $13. Enjoy!

If you haven’t even got the stomach for that, just visit the toilet near the elevators. It has a magnificent view you can admire while relieving yourself.