April 2008 ArchivesMain page is here. |
April 27 2008
What are they doing to Sudo? It seems every time I visit this school, there's something radically new and different happening. The film crew is gone, and I was surprised to discover that renovation work has begun on the school. Many of the buildings are freshly painted and actually looking nice. The parking lot is in the process of being repaved. Also, I managed to get inside the athletics building to finally get a picture of the gym. Plus, I checked the auditorium to see if there were still any film props left. Still no idea what they filmed there. |
April 27 2008
Yaksu Apartments Another impressive find, I discovered the Yaksu Apartments not far from the previous area in Sangdo I was looking around. There are eight buildings in all, ranging from three to five floors high. Security was minimal, but I wasn't ready to get in. I'm planning to return during the long weekend. |
April 27 2008
Other Sangdo Area This area still sits here as a museum of half-demolished buildings. A few more buildings are gone, but otherwise it looks as I remembered it. |
April 27 2008
Sangdo 5-dong I stopped by Sangdo 5-dong to see how it has changed. It is almost completely flattened now. The only buildings left now are the holdouts up in the mountain who are fighting for their rights. Clearly there has been some damage to a few of their homes, and I believe that their headquarters has vanished. |
April 27 2008
Moon Village Here's a new Korean word I learnt: "dal-dongnae," or "moon village." At the end of the Korean War, when people started to move back into Seoul, the poorest people made their homes higher up in the mountains. Probably because it was inconvenient to reach, but now that cars are common, the idea of living up high with a fantastic view is catching on, so many of these moon villages are being razed. The area in Sangdo 5-dong is another good example. This place wasn't entirely abandoned yet, and there were lots of elderly people around. I think that people living in this neighbourhood would be extra healthy, due to all the walking they have to do. |
April 27 2008
Reborn City On the way toward Sangdo, I stopped a few times to take pictures of the area around Express Bus Terminal. Jung used to live in this area and wants to return here to see her old home and school. |
April 27 2008
Gangnam On a tip from someone on an expat website, I found this big empty department store down in Gangnam. I wasn't ready to get inside, but it looks quite impressive. There is a bit of construction around back, as you can see in this picture on the right, but the main building is abandoned. |
April 27 2008
Dongdaemoon Sunday afternoon looked like another rainy miserable day, so I started off by taking a short trip to Dongdaemoon. I managed to climb another building to get a look into the stadium to confirm that it has been abandoned. All traces of the flea market are totally gone. Some of the vendors were still out front selling off their things. It sounds like they've been promised an area a little more north, but they're not happy with it. |
April 19 2008
Birthday/anniversary weekend This weekend was very difficult for me. Not only did I have to prepare for Jung's birthday, but we also celebrated our four-year anniversary (of dating, not marriage). On Saturday we got my scooter repaired and took it out for a ride. It was a hot day so Jung bundled up to protect herself from the Sun, and I dressed light to protect myself from the heat. After getting the scooter fixed, we rode to Itaewon for lunch and then took a ride up along Namsan.
There wasn't much left inside, although some of the rooms had a lot of stuff on the walls.
The market had been closed down by April 16 at 4am, but the vendors did not want to leave. They were the same people who'd earlier been displaced by construction on Cheonggyecheon. Lee Myungbag, then the mayor of Seoul, promised they could move into the stadium indefinitely. He then became president and another member of his party took over the mayorship, who had different plans for Dongdaemoon. The people who ran the flea market were told they would have to move again. To help move them out, the city paid for about 500 mobsters to attack the stadium, beating everyone still inside, including women and elderly people. When we showed up, the people of the flea market were camped outside the stadium. They stopped us from getting close to the stadium.
Also, looking closer at this picture here, I realised that the five towers in the background are none other than Lotte Castle on the edge of the grey market. I never knew everything was so close together.
There were banners for this website which seems to be a group for the rights of victims of urban renewal. I haven't figured it out yet but it looks like there is a lot of information.
This building is one of the most beautiful structures I've seen in Seoul, built right into the foot of the mountain with some very nice grounds. I look at this and think about how western countries so often restore old, run-down buildings by turning them into lofts. I wish something like that could be done with this place.
We also visited the site of Soongraemoon, which is still under repairs since it was burned down a couple months back. Jung doesn't seem too happy with the fact they're rebuilding it. I suggested they spare the Hoehyun highrise complex and build whatever they were planning on here instead. Nope, not going to happen.
At the top we found the usual sorts of mountaintop stuff--a pagoda, as well as exercise equipment, and a lot of people drinking. It was a pretty peaceful place, until I felt something crawling on my sleeve. It was a 3-cm-long millipede (or is that centipede? I can never remember). We went and sat up on the second floor of the pagoda where it was less likely we'd be attacked by these things. |
April 14 2008 Seohyun I was in Seohyun so I decided to find a rooftop where I could get a look at Pangyo. There's a lot of hardcore construction going on to the west, and it's hard to tell if there's anything left that hasn't been razed yet. It's scenes like this that best represent urban Korea. I'm surprised at the news that Seoul has been named World Design Capital for 2010. Did anybody from this ICSID actually visit Seoul? I have trouble describing the landscape of identical eye-wateringly white skyscrapers as soul-crushing. Building design peaked in Seoul with the invention of the hanok, and it's been downhill ever since. Wikipedia actually has a pretty accurate description of modern South Korean architecture: Buildings were built as quickly as money and demand would allow in a workman-like anonymous way, but without individual identities. Architects were almost to a man trained in the United States, and brought American design, perspective, and methods without much recourse to the local community look and feel. As the need for housing for workers increased, traditional hanok villages were razed, hundreds of simple cheap apartments were put up very fast, and bedroom communities on the periphery of the urban centres grew, built and financed as company housing. Little effort was made to have a sense of an architectural aesthetic.Source By 2010 I think the designers of these bright new highrises are going to regret having painted their buildings such a pure white. |
April 13 2008 Rooftop While starting to head for home, I decided to go up this apartment building to see what I could see. It looks like I missed out on some pretty serious demolition. Oh well, I can't be everywhere at once. |
April 13 2008 Grey Market How's the grey market holding on? While I was in Dongdaemoon I decided to stop by this old bullied market and see what was left. They've wiped out another block, but there are still stores open, although the area is starting to look the worse for wear. What's more, the parts that were fenced off last time are now opened up, and there are two lovely barf-coloured buildings standing there. This might mean they've stopped tearing into the grey market, but I doubt it. |
April 13 2008 Dongdaemoon Stadium The baseball stadium is totally gone now, just a field of dirt, and the eviction process has begun on the main stadium. The flea market is being shut down, and when I went on Sunday there was only a small section left. I guess that the vendors want to sell off as much of their merchandise as possible before they move out. I ended up with a pair of Levi's for the suspicious price of 10 000 won. There was a lot of activity in here, vendors moving out, bargain-hunters doing some final shopping, potential dumpster-divers sorting through trash, and a few laughing Canadians. I'll be back here soon to check on the progress. |
April 13 2008 Nail Church I just noticed that one gallery I uploaded last month wasn't linked properly, so you might have to take a look at these photos to catch up on this location. Basically it's a church standing in the middle of a huge excavated pit along with two other buildings, with only one road leading in. I decided to go back on Sunday, and found all the doors and windows in the place smashed out. Of course this makes it easy to get in, but I'm sure it looked a lot nicer before the workers/gangsters/scavengers/vandals/angry Christians had at it. |
April 6 2008 Return to Seoul I caught the KTX at 7:20 with Diane, Jeff, and Trash (although those last two got there with only seven minutes to spare) and we returned to Seoul shortly after 10. First thing on my mind was to get home, throw all my clothes in the laundry and shower. Then I said hi to Jung's parents who had been standing there gaping at me. There were a lot of cameras on the trip so I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone's got. So far I've seen Jeff's stuff. Jeff made it up to the amusement park, and then the next day he and Trash hung out in Busan. Rachel has a gallery on Facebook. She didn't make it up to the amusement park but she has some good pictures of Okpo as well as a lot of everyone during our transit. Everyone else, show me the links to yours. |
April 6 2008 Bae Jung Elementary Our last stop in Busan was the Bae Jung Elementary School, which Will had recently discovered not far from his home. He and Ed had visited it the previous week, but their visit was cut short by some workers out front. The only way I know of to see their pictures online is on this site. Will's second visit (with me) And you really have to see more of Will's pictures. His gallery of an abandoned leper colony in Busan is spectacular, as are his travel shots of Cambodia and Burma. |
April 6 2008 Busan All the places we went in Busan were within walking distance of each other, so I got a lot of city pictures while we were on foot. In this part, we passed by a massive abandoned construction site and tried to figure out what was going on with a closed-down hotel next door. |
April 6 2008 Chin Goo Theatre When Will first contacted me, he mentioned there was an old dilapidated theatre he wanted to check out, but he couldn't go there alone as it is a well-known gay hangout. I brought along Diane to serve as the opposite of a beard, we paid our 3000 won at the door, and started taking pictures, careful not to photograph any of the middle-aged men trolling around inside. Diane and I got out on the roof, where I poked my head inside a door only to see two Korean men engaging in a session of (fully clothed) heavy petting. I decided it was time to get out of there and called Will and Ed from outside to let them know we'd be waiting. |
April 6 2008 Busan Everyone wanted to leave early in the morning, but I slept in and headed back around noon with Will and Diane. We had a lot to do in Busan. Just a couple minutes out from the harbour, Diane and I looked out the window and discovered an abandoned skyscraper. This was the best shot I could get after we got off the ferry. Hopefully Will will have a chance to get closer soon. |
April 5 2008 The Journey Continues This picture kind of reminds me of Cartmanland, that South Park episode where Cartman has his own amusement park. Our group splintered as soon as we reached Okpo. Most people wanted to check into hotels, and some people wanted to shower. I knew we had to hurry, so I went with Will and Tel ahead. We tried to climb up the hill to reach the park, looking for a shortcut to the bottom of the green slide, but ended up on a vicious climb, finally reaching the swimming pool. From the roof of the swimming pool, I saw Carsten and Diane climbing up the green slide. Somehow they made it. Shortly after, Trash and Jeff arrived, taking the long, safe way. A bunch more people gave up on coming up, and just walked around the paths at the bottom.
Most amusing was when he told me on the roof of the swimming pool that he's afraid of heights.
We drank at a foreign bar until we realised it was filled 98% with creepy old expat men, then we drank on the roof of the hotel until we were kicked out (although the guy was very nice), then we drank on the docks, and then we went up to the amusement park and drank on the spinning rockets. A good time indeed. |
April 5 2008 The Journey Begins The thing to remember when planning a trip with Korean punks, is that to them, 8am is late at night, not early in the morning. We met at Seoul Station between 7:30 and 8am, and I discovered that the majority of people coming along had stayed up the night before. The impressive thing is that everyone pretty well made it on time. |
April 1 2008
Ryugyong Hotel For those of you who don't know, I recently got back from a trip to North Korea. I had special permission from the government to go inside the Ryugyong Hotel, as far as I know the first time this has ever happened. There were a lot of restrictions on what I could and could not photograph, and I didn't take half as many pictures as I'd like. |
CONTACT
Jon underscore Dunbar at Hotmail
010-3212-2812
Please remember that these photos are all copyrighted to me. If you want to use them in any way, there's a 90 per cent chance I'll give you my permission, and be able to give you a copy with a higher DPI.Copyright Jon Dunbar 2004
Photos taken by
Nikon CoolPix 950
digital camera.