My Favorite Part of Seoul

Hello friends. It's been a while since I've posted anything, because I've found facebook to be so endlessly fascinating. This Saturday was the St. Patrick's day celebration in Seoul, and it was pretty fun. There were a ton of sloppy obnoxious waegukin (wae=foreign, guk-land, in-people) acting like jackasses, but the city put on a pretty good show, from what I heard. There was a small parade in the Jongno area, which I have decided is my favorite part of Seoul, in the one week that I've been here. Here's a picture facing north:
I'll eventually get some other photos going to give a sense of how central this district is. To the west, east and south of this intersection is downtown Seoul, which has just as much steel, glass, and inscrutable public art as New York or Chicago, if not more. There's a great shot if you can get in the middle of the boulevard, which I think here is called Gwanghwamun-sam-ga (sam for "three" and "ga" being a special designation for large streets. Interestingly enough, a named street in Seoul is something of a rarity) In the foreground there'd be a statue of Yi Sun-shin, a Korean admiral who defeated a Japanese fleet under Hideyoshi in 1532 using the world's first ironclad boats, the geobuk-seon or "turtle boat", and behind it, Bukhansan.

I can't stress how often one sees some peak or another while taking a bus or walking down the street here. It's quite a change of pace from Chicago. You're really in the middle of everything here, and look at that view. There's an English language bookstore about fifty yards south and all kinds of street vendors selling various wares for at least a square mile around here. Really really nice place.