Tag Archives: korea

Where are the best places for a simple stroll in Seoul? There don’t seem to be all that many options, but they do exist. The most notable are (i) the Seoullo-7017 walkway, (ii) a pedestrianized area along a stream with the easy-to-pronounce name of Cheonggyecheon, and (iii) Ikseon-dong – a traditional artisan/folksy district. I’ll start with the first one…

So what is Seoullo-7017? Well, they took a former vehicle overpass and converted it into a pedestrian walkway-bridge around a kilometer long. And what a marvelous thing it is! As the internet tells it, the road bridge – built back in 1970 – had grown decrepit by the 2010s, and needed replacing. But instead of demolishing the old one and building a new one, the local authorities decided otherwise: the old structures were repaired and adapted for walks on foot. Like so:

Read on…

Of course, we’re all different. Some are tall, some average height, some a little shorter; some are brown-haired; some blond(e), while others are already gray. In some places there are more Asian faces, in others African, yet others – European. Some are extroverts (as I choose to be); at the opposite end of the spectrum are introverts, and the rest are somewhere in-between. Some are “XY”, and the other, lovely half is “XX”. So… makes sense that we all have completely different thoughts and feelings about… shopping. Not for the weekly groceries, but for clothes, presents, accessories, and other bits and bats…

For example, if I go into a store, I quickly choose the item I need, try it on in a flash (if it’s clothing), instantly fill the cart (if it’s something else), and in transit airports on the way home I just randomly stuff bags with all kinds of tasty goodies (for both home and the office) -> pay fast and get out of there!

For others, it works differently. They simply go nuts over every sort of item laid out or hung up in stores. All of it has to be examined, compared, tried on, etc., etc. – and that all takes time (plenty of it!).

However, the world can be a surprising place. And here in Seoul, I spent a whole hour (60 minutes!) wandering around a store, goggling at the display windows and everything else – something I literally never do. But let’s start right at the very beginning…

This wasn’t just a “store full of all kinds of very important little odds and ends”. It was, in fact, a full-blown art object – outside and in:

And it’s called Haus Nowhere:

What can I say? It’s a total mind-blower – not just a retail outlet. Practically the whole place was filled with really impressive art objects of completely different calibers and styles:

Read on…

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.

Read on…

As regular readers will know – my globetrotting business-trip schedule can sometimes be tight: fly in, straight to meetings/hand-shakings/interviews/presentations/dinners, and only then to the hotel. Repeat for two or three days, then it’s back to the airport to fly to the next port-of-call for much of the same. Necessary, interesting, physically rather draining. And that’s how my trip to Korea pretty much started, which I told you about a few days ago. But I’ve a rule: no trip can be deemed complete if there’s no spot of tourism and photography. Thus, here, today – let’s complete Korea! )…

I’ve another rule: the small doses of tourism need to be “correct” in two key ways – in terms of both the places to be visited and the season to visit them. For example – when heading to Asia-Pacific, aim for doing so when the cherry blossom is flowering. I’ve yet another rule: don’t be too hard on yourself (or your trip-organizing colleagues:) if the “correctness of tourism” rule gets broken – you can’t have everything! If a trip needed to be mid-March, it needed to be mid-March – cherry blossom or no! Thing is – we missed the cherry blossom by just a week (it was only just beginning to sprout)! As Homer Simpson would say – do’h!

Not to worry; we’ll just have to come back next time – be that next year or the year after – at least a week later.

Aaaanyway – there’s more to Seoul than cherry blossom, right? Right…

Read on…

Alas, as often happens around this time of year around K-HQ in Moscow, the springtime goes in for an identity crisis: it keeps thinking it’s wintertime, darn it! Little sunshine, no birdsong, nothing blooming, zero other attributes of awakening nature, and plenty of… snow. Like this! ->

Still, it has its charms – I guess. It’s just those charms always become anything but charming after a full five months of the same. But what am I complaining about? It could be worse (it could be like this year-round, as in Antarctica); and anyway, “there’s no such thing as bad weather – only bad clothing”, or so I’ve been told. But it is always nice to get away from the gray gloom at this time of year. And this year’s no exception: we were headed east to the (snow-free) Asia-Pacific region to kick off my business-trip season. First stop… well, you should be able to guess it from this pic:

“Ehhhhh, sexy lady“

Oh yes: time for some Seoul searching!…

Read on: Go East, young man…

This is a veeerrrry strange place. It’s a place that’s completely isolated from the outer world – isolated by man, that is (not naturally isolated like, for example, Kamchatka). In fact, more isolated (by man) than the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear power plants. To get into it and get over to those there hills on the horizon is completely impossible, even theoretically – neither by ground nor air. You’d be shot!

An absurd paradox of paradoxes, if ever there was one: they call this place ‘demilitarized’. Turns out to be one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on the planet! Yes folks, this is the Korean Demilitarized Zone – the DMZ.

Read on: A brief history of the place…

I hardly ever take the subway/metro/underground, no matter where I am in the world. My usual MO is~: plane – car – hotel (or home) – car – office – car – hotel (or home) – car – plane… I do use those trains that ferry folks between airport terminals quite a bit, but city metros – nope.

But just the other day in Seoul someone suggested we take a ride on the metro. The nearest station was just 200-300 meters from our hotel, so we thought why not?!

What can I say? Well, though I’ve been spoiled by having Moscow’s monumental metro on under my doorstep, I can still say that Seoul’s ‘Metropolitan Subway’ really is quite something. New and modern-looking, neat, tidy, comfortable, and massive. Though opened only in 1974 it’s more than twice the size of Moscow’s ever-expanding metro, and one-and-a-half the size of London’s Tube. Whoa. The Koreans sure can dig :).

Read on: Third busiest in the world!…