Cheonggyecheon

As Erma mentioned, one of the things that Korea's new president-elect, Lee Myung-bak, was known for when he was mayor of Seoul was daylighting Cheonggyecheon 청계천 (淸溪川), the stream that runs through the center of Seoul.

This is what the stream looked like in 1903:


By the 1950s, the area had become an eyesore and a health hazard. Squatters' shacks crowded the shores, and local residents used the stream for bathing, laundry, and sewage. In an attempt to clean up the area and modernize the city, the government paved over the stream. Some years later an elevated highway was built above it.

In 2003 Lee Myung-bak initiated a project to uncover, or "daylight", the stream, turning it into a public recreational area and providing a respite from the concrete and steel that dominate the city. The project was completed in 2005. Now it looks like this:


(The picture was taken when we visited in mid-October, before the weather turned cold.)

Underneath one of the overpasses of the stream is a small historical museum displaying photographs of the area dating back to the turn of the century.

History goes in cycles. When the stream was covered over it was viewed as an improvement to the city. Now the stream is uncovered as an improvement to the city.

Inwangsan

A lot of interesting things happened today.

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.

Chuseok

Today, September 25, is Chuseok (추석 秋夕). Chuseok (pronounced CHOO-suck) is the autumn harvest festival (equivalent to the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival), and one of the biggest holidays in Korea. Most people have three days off of work, and because this year Chuseok falls on a Tuesday, that makes a five-day weekend for many people. Most shops and restaurants are closed, and large numbers of Seoul residents head out of the city to spend the holiday with their families in the outer cities and villages. Chuseok is sometimes referred to as the Korean Thanksgiving.

It's an odd time to arrive in Seoul and try to get settled. We moved into our apartment Thursday night. So we've spent the last few days not just getting settled, but also provisioning as the city has emptied out, so that we can survive a day or two without access to grocery stores or restaurants. Our apartment building has seemed completely deserted apart from the security guard. It's not clear if this is because (a) no one but us is living here; (b) everyone has gone away for Chuseok; (c) the residents keep very strange hours.

Of course, not everyone has left Seoul for the holiday, and the ex-pats living here don't have family homes in the countryside to return to. There are a few things going on around town for those with nothing else to do. At Erma's mother's suggestion, the two of us took a bus from our neighborhood to the Gyeongbok Palace, one of the major historical sites in the city. It seemed that half the population had the same idea we did.

As we arrived at the main gate of the palace compound, it turned out we were just in time for the ceremonial changing of the guard, a reenactment of the traditional royal ceremony from the days of the Choseon Dynasty. I really like the bright red and blue outfits of the palace guard.





The palace is pretty spectacular. Since 1990, the government has been working to restore it. (Much of it was destroyed by the Japanese during the occupation of the first half of the 20th century. What they were destroying was itself a rebuilding of the original palace that the Japanese had originally destroyed in the 16th century.) Here's a picture that shows the main palace hall against the backdrop of one of the hills north of the city.

For Chuseok, there was a special set-up on the palace grounds illustrating five traditional Korean games. All were interactive. The most exciting to watch was top-spinning. The traditional Korean top, a paeng-i, is made of wood. It has a cylindrical top part that gently tapers to a point at the bottom. The top is spun with a stick to which a length of ribbon is affixed. The ribbon is wound around the top, then pulled free with a rapid yank on the stick, setting the top spinning. The top can be kept spinning by skillful whipping -- the right kind of wrist flick will lash the ribbon against the spinning top, providing additional force.

The red signboard explains the history of the game and how it is played. Kids are playing with the tops on the blue tarp. For the most part the kids were terrible at it. It's clear that this traditional game is not widely practiced in the era of Xboxes.

There was one middle-aged man, however, who was quite impressive. He was able to whip his spinning top to a formidable speed. Probably he'd been quite adept at it as a child. In the photo, his stick is moving so fast that it's not even visible.


Quite a few children were dressed up in traditional Korean garb for the holiday. The general result of this was intense cuteness. Here's a little girl in a pink hanbok, and a small boy in a blue hanbok.


The little boy seemed to be all on his own. When I took the picture he was wandering happily through the grounds, hugging the large pillars along one of the covered walkways. We figured his parents were nearby. A few minutes later we stepped through a gate, and saw a young woman in a yellow and red hanbok running around frantically, tears streaming down her cheeks, crying out a child's name over and over again. Erma and I both had the same thought -- maybe the boy we'd seen, and photographed, was hers. We walked back through the gate, but the little boy had disappeared. After a few moments we saw a teenage boy carrying the little boy back toward us. The teenager had apparently realized that this little kid had lost his parents, and was helping him look for them. Just at this moment the frantic mother reappeared, running and wailing. Erma and I looked at the boys and pointed the mother out to them; moments later the family was happily reunited.