Seoul is a city lacking parks. There is barely any green space to be found. But surrounding the city are lovely mountains--it was established as the capital because the hills make it defensible--providing good opportunities for hiking.
We woke up too late to make a major expedition, so we decided to visit an area not far from where we live, called Inwangsan 인왕산 (Mt. Inwang), a spiritually rich area where Korean shamanistic rituals are carried out.
We took a bus over to Gyeongbokgung, where we planned to get on the subway. As soon as we got out onto the street, we realized that something odd was going on. These are police riot buses, dozens of them, parked on the street.
Large groups of riot police were stationed at the intersections.
They were ignored by the pedestrians, who went about their business.
Erma called her mother, and found out that a major protest was scheduled to take place later that day, led by disgruntled farmers unhappy with Korea's free trade agreements. I think these kind of protests are fairly common in Korea. Partly they are due to genuine economic grievances, and partly I think to anti-American sentiment, although the two are sufficiently tangled together (both geopolitically and psychologically) that it can be hard to separate them.
We took a fancy elevator down to the subway station.
This subway line -- Line 3 -- stops at a lot of historical and cultural sites, so there are many related art installations in the stations. Here's Erma posing with a life-size replica of one of the famous Shilla Dynasty sculptures (really just a few inches high) that we saw two weeks ago in the Gyeongju museum.
Way to go with the typical Asian V-pose there, Erma!
We got off at Dongnimmun 독립문, Independence Gate. Installed on the wall of the subway station is a copy of Korea's Declaration of Independence, made in 1919 in protest of Japanese imperial rule.
The declaration is written in a very formal style that is a hybrid of Classical Chinese and Korean.*
We had some trouble following the directions in our (quite up-to-date) Lonely Planet guide from the subway station to Inwangsan. We soon figured out the reason -- a huge complex of new apartment buildings was going up, blocking the road.
We met up with several other foreigners looking for the mountain, and together worked our way around the construction. This new retaining wall by the new road wrapping around the construction site seemed pretty unusual-looking.
At the top of the road we had to walk over these mounds of dirt and freshly poured concrete, just as the woman with the visor is doing, all the while avoiding being crushed by a blow to the head from the giant swinging backhoe.
At last we safely reached the gate to the shrine area of the mountain.
Here's Lance above Guksadang, a famous shamanistic shrine. When we passed it, a female shaman was performing a rite in the doorway, singing, dancing, and waving a fan. The purpose seemed to be to bring good luck to a student taking college entrance exams in a few days.
There was an interesting article on the revival of Korean shamanism in the New York Times a few months ago. (May require that you have a subscription to read it.)
As we climbed up, we began to get nice views of the city. Unfortunately the weather was pretty hazy. That's Seoul Tower in the background atop the distant hill.
This is Erma standing in front of Seonbawi 선바위, a pair of eroded rocks said to look like robed Zen Buddhist figures. When we went up, several people were burning incense, lighting votive candles, and making food offerings to the statues.
Here's a view of the same statues, from above.
As we climbed higher, the views got more spectacular, except that the Seoul skyline is actually pretty ugly. Yonsei University is just behind the ridge on the right side of the frame.
This pleasant-looking Buddha was carved into the mountainside.
There was a flock of pigeons clinging tenaciously to a nearly-vertical rockface.
Just east of Inwangsan runs the old city wall of Seoul, which has been recently rebuilt along this stretch.
After we came down the mountain, we followed the city wall down farther until we reached city streets. We saw more riot buses, these parked right in front of a shrine.
Turns out the shrine is dedicated to Dangun 단군, the legendary founder of Korea 4340 years ago.
There's a rather cheesy-looking statue of Dangun inside the shrine.
One of the things Koreans enjoy most when hiking in the autumn is looking at the spectacular autumn leaves (danpung 단풍). Unfortunately, as you could see from some of the earlier pictures, it's rather too late in the season. But outside the Dangun shrine was a small stand of trees that were sufficiently sheltered to have been spared the brunt of the wind and rain that brought down most of the leaves around Seoul yesterday. The colors were pretty spectacular.
We wended our way through a small park below the shrine, and then came out onto Sajingno 사직로, the huge main thoroughfare that runs by Gyeongbokgung. Dusk was approaching. The riot police were still out. In fact, they had barricaded off the street with their buses.
Erma and I walked on top of a pedestrian flyover to get a good view. This group of riot police was sitting on the right side of the road. They've got truncheons across their backs, and are sitting on their riot shields.
On the left side of the street, groups of police wearing somewhat different uniforms were camped out on the sidewalk.
After a while, some of the police began climbing up on top of one of the buses, walking across to a neighboring bus, and climbing down again. It seemed to be a practice exercise.
Looking the other way, you can see how odd the street looks with all ten lanes completely devoid of traffic.
We waited about 30 minutes to see what would happen--the police were acting as if some kind of activity was imminent--but no rioters or protesters appeared, so we eventually decided to go home. We saw later on the evening news that there had indeed been some confrontations with police earlier in the day, but they must have happened in a different part of town.
Before we left, we took this picture from the flyover. You don't see too many of these clusters of old buildings left in Seoul anymore.
We got off at the Ewha Women's Univeristy subway stop, which is about the same distance from our home as Shinchon Station. There's a rather unusual hybrid elevator-escalator in the station. In this picture Erma and I are reflected in the glass as we wait for the car to arrive. The slowly descending car is visible at the top of the frame.
Erma got on while I snapped pictures. See ya at the top, Erma!
There she goes. This is an unusually deep station, so the escalators are quite long.
The elevator moved slowly enough that it wasn't hard for me to dash up the escalator ahead of Erma and catch her emerging at the top.
And that's our exciting day in Seoul! Now I have to prepare for tomorrow's class.
*As far as I could tell, all the noun and verb stems were Classical Chinese (with Sino-Korean pronunciation), with native Korean used for inflectional endings, adverbs and grammatical function words.
