At last something approaching my idea of summer is here. Almost every day since I arrived has been characterized by thick cloud cover, high temperatures and ridiculous humidity; the dullness broken only by occasional torrents of rain. July and early August is the height of the monsoon season in Korea. Whilst when you’re up a mountain this can have a marvellously dreamy, mysterious effect, for day to day urban life it can get pretty tiresome. So I was more and more pleased as over the past couple of weeks the clouds have gradually broken up to reveal blue skies and bright sunshine. There’s more of a breeze, the light is amazing, the stark modernism of Anyang suddenly looks great, and you can see the moon at night. Even the humidity has dipped, although the temperature in the sun has soared into the 30s…
Here are some sun-soaked pictures, from more hiking around Gwanaksan and a trip into Seoul (to pick up my Alien Registration Card – yes I’m now legit).
I don’t know what kind of bird that is. There were a pair of them. They sounded like crows, moved like magpies, but had tawny plumage, turning to a rust colour on the almost fur-like feathers of the head.
One thing that’s great about Koreans is that they know what to do to both enjoy and mitigate the effects of the weather. For instance, they will pitch a tent anywhere.
By watercourses all over Gwanaksan, people pitch a tent at the weekend and spend the day in the cool stream bed, under the shade of the trees, sitting on mats drinking soju and eating whilst paddling their feet in the chill mountain water. (I tend to hike past sweating, followed by a cloud of mosquitoes.)
The latter picture is from Yeouido (여의도) in Seoul. This is a large island in the Han River, once home to the city’s first airport and flight school and now the financial centre of the city. The National Assembly building is here, as is Yoido Full Gospel Church, a ‘megachurch’ with a membership of apparently over a million, and a capacity for services of 26,000! I’ve read a little about how megachurches such as this one, able to leverage the support of huge congregations, constitute a powerful (generally right-wing) political bloc in Korea.
According to the Rough Guide, Yeouido means something like ‘useless land’. I know ‘-do’ means ‘island’, but so far putting ‘여의’ into various auto-translators hasn’t thrown up the word ‘useless’, so it could be an urban myth. Can any Korean speakers tell me if this is true? In any case, with its skyscrapers still rising on reclaimed brownfield land, its vast underground shopping malls, its overly manicured parks, and heavily securitised public space, I’m calling Yeouido Seoul’s equivalent of Canary Wharf.
Although even if you wanted to, you would never be allowed to pitch a tent by the docks inside the London financial centre’s ring of steel. I told you Koreans would pitch a tent anywhere.
Korea Change 