I arrived at Yongmasan Station, named for the nearby mountain, on a bright, crisp January day, and coming out of Exit 2 the first thing I noticed was how hilly the neighborhood was. Apartment towers to the east sat up on bluffs, and the street just in front of the exit dipped down into a…
And after five years? What then? The minute someone sits down at a keyboard, sets an f-stop, or turns over a fresh page in a sketchpad and tries to describe a place, it’s already a little bit gone. Unavoidable and just fine really. It clears the way for new records, allows for comparisons (maybe even…
If someone were to blindfold you and then drop you off at the intersection above Gongdeok Station, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Gangnam and not Mapo-gu. The neighborhood is starkly different from the much more modest nearby areas of Aeogae and Daeheung – massively more developed, a forest of brand new…
Hidden among the soaring glass and steel towers of southeastern Seoul is a wormhole, a portal to a land that physically exists within the Songpa-gu dimensions of time and space but which could seemingly secede and declare a sovereign one block corporation-state at will. Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the People’s Republic of Lotte. You don’t…
If there’s one station that can be said to be the center of Seoul’s subway system, the nexus from which everything expands and to which it returns, it’s Jongno-3-ga. One of the system’s oldest stations, it’s also one of the few that connect more than two lines, and it sits right in the heart of…
Seoul Sub→urban 