its been about a month now and i have finally digested my recent trip to Korea (and have also finally digested that last korean meal). what can i say about my experiences in seoul? in all honesty i was very much overwhelmed with the entire journey, and probably took so long to write this because i didn’t know where to begin. now that i think about it, i would say it’s about hopeless for me to encapsulate the time i had there, so i will just post an email i sent to an old friend:
i have to say that seoul and korean peeps and korean culture has really blown me away. i was only in seoul for a week, but had the most amazing, most memorable time. other then the usual starstruck wanderings, i really feel that seoul is a place in mid blossom. we went down for a project regarding re-branding the city and are contracted to help it along part of its 15 year plan to change it into a knowledge economy. my minuscule bit of a tiny part of a small section of a grand scheme involves designing experiences for tourists that include the old seoul city walls and gates.
i see many parallels between korea and germany before reunification and this is most apparent in the people. there is something so inherently strong about being korean, but the split has offered two very diverging paths between one peoples, i think i saw some korean cinema on the plane about it. paired with such a sudden and rapid growth in south korea, the culture has been so engineered and is in need of conceptual thinking within its design process. an empty space breeds room for innovation and creativity, and i believe seoul has the void, resources and potential to engineer its own renaissance.
seoul is built on the scale akin to berlin but bigger, just waiting for people to come live the city. sure there is traffic like any city, but there is a feeling of space when you’re on the pedestrian level. seoul’s highest and lowest geographical points offer so much.
one day the grad students from IDAS took us up to the top of one of the many mountains that surround seoul, in a DMZ where the north gate and blue house resided. we were told some funny story about the women who would come out here in full moon to bask in the light for fertility and the men that would stand around the gate singing songs trying to court them (i wouldn’t know where to begin nor would be competent to even talk about korean gender politics).
and the food! korean food is my super-fav now! every night we ate like japanese businessmen, from bbq to traditional dinners, drinking soju and bamboo wine like water (and some milky, slightly fizzy from the fermentation, cool rice wine), going to karaoke and hiphop/r&b clubs and window shopping at 4 am in the morning at dongdaemun sitting in little tent cities of street vender’s, eating dumplings. on the last night we sat in our studio and ate cake and smoked mackerel using chopsticks and sipped on egg broth while downing soju till the morning to catch a plane. one of my colleagues lost his passport while on his way to the airport (so he says ;-P) and had to stay a few more days by himself; our contact at the school brought him out to a sauna as absolution (lucky devil).
for some images of Seoul take a look at my flickr album here.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
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