June 18, 2026
Seoul strolling – and skyscrapering.
My usual schedule in South Korea (Seoul) doesn’t normally leave any room for real tourism – thanks to our APAC region bosses, who try to cram every single hour of my time with some very important, can’t-miss event, meeting, business lunch, or similar. Getting out somewhere to actually see something of touristic interest is an unexpected treat – but it does happen. Let me dig through the archives for a sec… ah, here we go: 2016: the DMZ – the Demilitarized Zone, plus a walk around the city in 2023. But that’s the lot!
This time we arrived a couple of days before the business program kicked off, so there was time for some ordinary, everyday tourism – hurray! Here, for example, is a lovely shot from the Lotte tower:
And here’s the tower itself; more on it – and the views therefrom – in a bit:
But first, a quick digression on the “Lotte” brand – because it’s quite an unusual story.
These days Lotte Corporation (in Korean, these sprawling, multi-sphere conglomerates are called chaebols) is made up of around 60 companies spanning all sorts of different fields (at least, that’s what the internet tells me). There’s oil and gas, construction, food, a retail chain, and a chain of hotels all over the world – Russia included. The chaebol’s turnover runs to the tens, if not a hundred billion dollars, and it employs around 60,000 people.
Why am I telling you all this? Because the fun part is coming up – I promise!
So: the company was founded in Japan by a Korean entrepreneur named Shin Kyuk-ho right after the Second World War. Then, for some reason (which I don’t know of), the company had a kind of second birth – this time in Korea, in 1967. The business started out making… chewing gum – and now look at it: a global corporation of gigantic proportions! But that’s not the interesting part. There are plenty of examples of Asian (and other) business empires built from scratch like that. The interesting part is the name of this Korean chaebol.
The names of most other Korean chaebols (and of their geographic neighbors, the Japanese zaibatsu) are perfectly easy to make sense of. “Samsung”, “Hyundai”, “Daewoo” – these are thoroughly Korean names. Or else they’re abbreviations like “LG” (Lucky Goldstar!), and so on. But here we have the distinctly out-of-the-ordinary “Lotte”.
Here’s the thing: somewhere around the middle of the last century, the company’s founder was really into reading German prose. And he named the company after Charlotte, from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
You read that right! One of the main pillars of South Korea’s economy – the Lotte chaebol – is named after a character from an 18th century novel! And there’s proof of it both online and right next to the Lotte World Tower in Seoul. Here, beside the skyscraper, stands a monument to the genius that brought us Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
And here’s the confirmation of it all, carved in stone:
Funny how things sometimes turn out in this world. The book came out in 1774, and a (future) giant of a company got named after one of its characters almost two hundred years later! Talk about a lasting legacy ).
// Back in my youth (some 45 years ago) I read it too, but – alas! (or “hurray”?) – it didn’t make all that strong of an impression on me. Quite the opposite, in fact. I couldn’t get over the dreariness of the protagonist’s life, the spinelessness of his behavior, and the pointlessness of his death. I closed the book – and forgot all about it… for 45 years. Maybe I should give it another try? :)
But let’s get back to the Seoul skyscraper, which we’re now about to shoot up in a high-speed elevator. First off, it’s one of the tallest buildings in the world. At 555 meters (123 floors), it ranks sixth (as of June 2026).
So – tickets bought, into the elevator we hop, and up we shoot! Next stop: the 121st floor!…
And here we are up near the top:
The views! ->
You can also step out onto a little balcony and look up – ooh, tummy-churn! ->
No – better to just look out to the sides and down:
And what’s all that green down there below?
Why green?!
Oof – they live pretty cheek-by-jowl down there…
The skyscraper also features what is apparently the highest glass floor in the world. For some reason I turned out to be completely unprepared for that kind of gimmick in towers and skyscrapers (even though I’m hardly ever afraid of heights out in natural mountains and rocky landscapes), but my travel companion, NK, worked up the courage. First – just one foot! ->
She did it! (Main thing: don’t look directly down!)
And to make up for the moral and psychological vertigo-stress: a delicious Korean lunch up in the heavens :)
And that was that – time to head back down to earth…
All in all, an excellent experience; highly recommended (if you’re not afraid of heights)!
Next up: another skyscraper! The YTN Seoul [TV] Tower. Not as swanky as Lotte World Tower, and the weather had turned a grayish, overcast color, but this outing still deserves a write-up.
The TV tower sits upon a hill in pretty much the very center of Seoul – it’s somewhere just below and to the right of the letter “e” in the word “Seoul”, here ->
I realize it’s a bit hard to make out, so I’ll zoom in:
There’s a decent-sized park around the tower (and Seoul in general is a very green city (including the roofs!)), and you can reach the top of the hill on which the tower stands by all sorts of different paths. But we were tourists who’d only just arrived and were a little tired, so when it came to choosing between on-foot or the alternative, we naturally went with the alternative: cable car ->
And here we are at the top of the hill – the base of the tower. One thing that surprised, delighted, and reassured me right away: the sheer number of love locks: I’m sure it means the demographics around here are going to be just fine :) ->
Yep – hundreds of meters of pedestrian railings here are festooned with these little padlocks:
There must be literally millions of them!
Next: time to climb up the tower! Naturally, at the entrance they offer to take an “unforgettable souvenir photo” of you against a green screen, with Photoshopping to follow. Thanks – yes, yes, but maybe next time.
But this next thing – we just couldn’t walk past it. What a great idea of theirs – putting together a retro attraction like this! Somewhere a camera (yep, it’s right in front of us) is filming everyone – and feeding the picture into old-school TV sets! Ah, nicely done! Like!
The views over Seoul are not quite as oh-my-grandiosely-panoramic as from Lotte World Tower, but still impressive:
The surrounding mountains really do do the city a lot of favors – the result is rather stylish!
In the foreground of the next pic is the Shilla hotel (the conspicuous brown building), which I know – I stayed there… ooh, a full 10 years ago!
I’ll say it again: how the surrounding mountains do wonders for these urban landscapes!
You can stroll around the tower too, taking in the views in every direction while you’re at it (and check out some curious distances to places around the world) ->
If you look closely at the life going on below…
…It looks rather cramped down there, and I’m not sure how cozy it is…
However, if there’s somewhere nearby serving tasty food and it’s quiet at night – then why not? :) // though I have my doubts about the “quiet” part…
Now for something a little unusual – shocking even, for some. Apologies in advance if any of it rubs you the wrong way.
Let’s head into the men’s restroom…
No comment.
What goes on in the women’s restroom remains a mystery to me.
After that – just a walk back down along one of the many paths. The walking’s easy enough, but by early June it’s already very hot.
There are some lovely views of Seoul to be had along the way too:
And that was that. Seoul-strolling: done!
