I visited Deungchon the day after Seoul’s first snowfall, and despite the cold temperatures the day was brilliant. Even as my breath fogged up my glasses for fleeting half-seconds, the sun was glinting off the ice and snow, melting what was on roofs and causing water to drip off eaves onto the sidewalk below. This…
The prevailing ethos of Yeouido is that size matters. There may not be a single one-story building on the entire island, and crossing some of the intersections have to qualify you for some sort of mileage rewards, but nowhere is this lopsided sense of scale more pronounced than on the island’s northwest tip, which is…
Change is a constant theme on this blog, one that’s unavoidable when you talk about Seoul, but there are few places in the city that have undergone it quite so dramatically as Yeouido. In the Joseon era, this island, whose name literally translates to ‘Useless,’ served as a sheep and goat pasture, and that’s pretty…
Almost none of the buildings around Airport Market Station are more than three or four stories tall, and this makes the wide Gonghang-daero (공항대로) just south of Exit 4 seem bigger than it already is. I used to live close to here – my first place in Seoul was south of the nearby Songjeong Station…
Gimpo Airport Station presented a rather expected problem, namely, as an airport, there’s not much walking around you can do, and the local topography is limited mostly to three things: big buildings, big roads, and big parking lots. Coming out of Exit 4, I was presented with the latter – an enormous spread of asphalt…
Seoul Sub→urban 