Welcome to Seoul, South Korea!

This post is a little tour and introduction to Seoul, for those who have not yet been. I’ll share what my neighborhood looks like, and some of the intriguing things that make Seoul so very interesting.

Seoul is a huge city of close to 10 million people. There is an excellent system of buses and subways, but it can easily take an hour to travel somewhere on this map.

Here is a map with my hotel marked in red. My neighborhood in Seoul is called Gwanak-gu. Yesterday I travelled to the Leeum Museum, which is about 2 inches away on this map, and it took an hour. I went there to see some contemporary art, which it turned out was no longer on display, but the current exhibit features an entire floor of Celadon bowls, so I was happy. As I discovered on my first visit to Seoul last summer, I can look at Celadon bowls till the cows come home.

The gist of the exhibit, as I understood it, was Celadon Bowls to Infinity and Beyond!

Korean Celadon, or Greenware, hails from the Goryeo Dynasty period, 918-1392 CE. The use of iron oxide in the glaze, and using a low-oxygen firing technique, produced varieties of the sought-after lustrous jade color. These items are each considered to be national treasures.

Here is a slide show of just a few of the pictures I took of Celadon Bowls at the National Museum of Korea last summer.

You can send me a message if you need me to send you more pictures of Korean Celadon Bowls.

The Leeum Museum is an excellent museum. This is a trippy stairwell installed there by the Icelandic-Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson. I suppose it is trippy in every possible way. I clung to the rail for my descent.

So now we have established that Seoul has excellent museums, and one can reach them all reliably by public transport.

I’d say that the city is organized by large boulevards, with little villages set behind, each with very narrow streets. There you will find a honeycomb of tiny cafes, markets, 24-hour convenience stores and photo-booth shops, bars, pubs, bakeries, karaoke clubs, Tarot readers, and shops which sell only sticks of fresh fruit encased in hard sugar shells. Delivery scooters and motorcycles zoom through, and cars slowly squeeze along these skinny alleys. Music wafts from restaurants, and lights shine down colored ads onto the ground below.

I like this set-up, because I can come home after dark from wandering, museuming, or a bike ride on a share bike, and then go shop quickly for anything I might need for the next day. My room has a mini-fridge, and I tend to keep a stash of seltzers. Sometimes I might need a banana. Or fresh fruit encased in a hard sugar shell on a stick.

This one turned out to be grapes.

More updates about Seoul, soon! For now, I have to go figure out how to print something.