s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Some more notes from me (Tam).

Vanessa’s filly pooks her lips out exactly the way the alpacas do when they are having a good scratch:

Seoul is very large. I mean, *really* large. 10.3 million people, 5th largest city in the world large. It’s also very well swept, and rather noticably devoid of wildlife. I am mildly frustrated by the fact that all of my photos are of small, intimate spaces — alleys, old houses in the hanok district, individual floats in the parade. I can’t give you a feel for the giant metropolis-ness of the place. I’m not sure if that’s me and my subconscious choice of subjects attempting to make a big thing into bite-sized chunks, or if Seoul itself readily subdivides itself. There are huge steel and glass skyscapers and malls that you could get lost in for weeks, but there are also mazes of alleys stuffed with shops and restaurants. The alley our hotel was in was host to a bunch of printing presses. Around the corner was a street where every little shop for about three blocks sold tiles — just beyond them was a street of lighting fixtures, and around the corner from that were little hole-in-the-wall hardware shops. The courtyard where the pushcarts lived when they weren’t in use (from 2am to 11am, as far as we could tell) had a bit net strung over it to catch the baseballs from the batting range on the floor above.

In historical Seoul, the broad thoroughfares were where the nobility traveled. There were no laws preventing the common folk from using them, but they avoided them anyway: the regular people kept to the narrow parallel streets so they wouldn’t have to spend all their time bowing to every nobleman that went by. The real Seoul still lives in these smaller spaces.

This is the Palace of Shining Happiness. (As opposed to the Palace of Illustrious Virtue, a couple blocks away.)

These were in the gardens near the National Museum — they used to have them outside the vilages. Aren’t they awesome ? I think Tawa needs one of these.

Seoul seemed to be either empty (at eight in the morning on a Sunday), or absolutely elbow-to-elbow chokka.

Stephen is vastly relieved that I did not acquire one of the lovely and delicate tissue paper lotus lanterns and then try to transport it all over Anatolia and the Caucasus for the next month.