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.

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’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.

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 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.