23 November 2022
The new part of the old side
A nice walk to Yongsan and back
Train journey days mean not enough steps are done. So this evening I decided to rectify that by walking to Yongsan and back. Not a massive walk, but long enough to give me a respectable total for the day. Yes I am a sad old pathetic little man staring at a number on his fancy watch like it is important (39,432 for today).
Yongsan is where a lot of the bullet trains leave from, I left from there 11 days ago to go to Gwangju. I had never actually been outside the station before, just from the subway into the station and onto the train.
The journey from my hotel to there goes past the main Seoul station, and then a large American diplomatic compound with military police. I suspect it is also an army base, it is not on the map, or perhaps it is now just administrative offices for the army, it used to be the main base as the next suburb over is Itaewon which was the notorious place soldiers got up to no good, but is now the Halloween crush site. That was a really long sentence, tomorrow is a hiking day, yeah yeah, whatever, onto the pics.
I took a photo of this gate from afar recently, it is normally closed. I was here earlier tonight and it was open, so I walked through the gate, and took this photo. Gates are meant to be open and closed and walked through.
The walk to Yongsan was largely uneventful, just a few colourful areas of bbq group eating places. Once you get there however, it is all modern sky scrapers.
The station is enormous, but strangely looks a bit small from this angle.
If you want, you can go out on a ledge and take a long exposure by perching your camera on a glass screen.
Handheld shot of twin towers.
I took a photo of this roof garden during daylight times as I left, the dinosaur looks better at night. It was a bit cooler tonight, a sign of things to come, but still I did not put on my jacket or gloves, just a long sleeve t-shirt.
I found an entire level of nerd stores. Everything you could dream of... Tamiya pictured here, Gundam, Lego, Marvel (pictured below), Nintendo and various things I had never heard of. Gundam seems to be be the flavour of the month. I have never seen an episode of Gundam.
My dinner is a very spicy risotto. This fusion of a Korean stew and risotto seems very popular with multiple different chains specialising in it, so I thought I better try it. It lived up to the spicy warning which means it was delicious. At first I was disappointed with the serving size, but like all risottos, it grows in you.
Marvel store. I have no interest in Marvel whatsoever.
On my walk home I took a detour through the clothing market, one of the streets has re-branded to have a row of shops selling xmas decorations. They all play music. It was almost unbearable.
Final photo for this evening, my hotel is on a laneway off the street. Despite this area being quite close to where I generally stay in Seoul, I had never actually been anywhere in this entire city block before, which was mildly surprising and probably quite uninteresting and irrelevant.