view from the top

the first time i went up the rooftop of crimson house was also the first quasi-sunny afternoon i spent outdoors in seoul. people who live here say the weather this spring has been very very strange. it snowed a couple of weeks before our arrival at the end of march, and the cherry blossoms and other blooming things were quickly blown away by the freezing rains that came in the weeks that followed. so you can just imagine the utter utter joy i felt that day we went up the roof. the sky was clear and the sun was warm on my face. of course, we had to celebrate by taking a slew of photos. below you will see some ridiculous posturing; call them my titanic evita moment and leave it at that.


this is koryo de hakkyo, as seen from the crimson house rooftop. it was still cold-ish whe we took this. more recently, in these balmy days approaching summer, it's normal to see hordes of students sprawled on the lawns. much like the sunken garden at 5pm sans the trash, the poor kids picking through the trash, and the occasional used unmentionables.


and this is me looking ridiculously happy at not having to wear three layers of clothing. see those pointy spires in the distance? churches. there are lots of them here, most of them sporting neon red crosses at night. but don't let the spires fool you. those could be the only remotely gothic thing about the church; many of them are in squat squalid buildings. the spires just make them look good from far away.


speaking of squalid... it's a word that italo calvino uses many times in Hermit in Paris to describe the 1950s america he saw during his brief travels there. and as we all know, that's not at all how america chooses to remember itself. squalid, squat, squalor--these words are just dripping with malice. which is not my intent with the pictures below. it's just fascinating that there are little pockets of squalor hidden behind the spiffy skyscrapers and wide avenues of this sprawling city. take that seoul metropolitan authority, heh heh. they give the city character, i think.


you can see here some old houses squeezed into the small side streets of dongdaemun-gu, aka my neighborhood. note the traditional peaked roofs and tiles used. i saw exactly the same architecture when we visited gyeongju historic city last week. more on that trip in another post, promise.



from this vantage point, seoul doesn't look very pretty. it doesn't smell very pretty either. and this is what suprises me most about seoul--even in the most fashionable and swanky touristy places like insadong, myeongdong and the hotels around city hall, you always always get a whiff of the sewers when you least expect it. like when you're eating ice cream or laughing with your mouth wide open. mukhang makati CBD pero amoy recto. bad wordplay there but am not making this up.


i like this building because it looks so incongruously european. and if you look closely, the house right beside it has a traditional korean peaked roof with tiles and everything. in the distance, you can see some of the buildings of korea university. at night, they light up in lurid beerhouse colors so that they look like a cross between disneyland and hugh hefner's porn palace.


between those high buildings, you can see the elevated street that runs past my neighborhood. i can't really see it from my windows. on our first sunday here, we walked towards it because we were looking for a church and we had seen some pa-gothic spires and the telltale neon red crosses near it. i was suprised at how huge it actually is. it's so there. and yet at night, it seems to melt into the blackness.

the day i took this photo, i actually ran up and down the stairs several times from the roof to my room. it was a cloudy and very windy day best spent indoors in a heated room but every so often, the sun would shine and i couldn't resist the idea of me basking in the sun on the rooftop. so i'd grab a book and run. by the time i'd reach the top, the sun would be obscured by clouds and it would feel chilly again, so i'd run back down to get a wool sweater and this green silk scarf you see being blown artfully by the wind. that's korde (pronounces korr-deh) behind me. short for koryo de hakkyo, or korea university.


this was taken on that same day. yes, it's a backlit photo and you can barely see anything but i do like the little rainbow i caught there in the middle.


these i took on a different day, a week or so later when the weather was definitely warmer. don't knock it. i really tried to look like a three-headed monster wearing a red sweater in this photo. again, that rare sight of a blue sky can be seen behind me.


the big empty crimson house rooftop with no one and nothing in it. not even me, heh heh. that's my orange camera case in the foreground, some parts of seoul in the background. fake gothic spires somewhere in the middle. i just like how quiet and bare the roof looks compared to the noise and bustle of the city out there.