Day: January 1, 2014

I went walking around Seoul today with my friend Mary, who was visiting up from Daegu where she's been living.

We went to a neighborhood I'd never visited before, east-northeast of downtown, near the Seoul National University Medical Center and various universities, including the ancient Sungkyunkwan U and Korean Catholic U. There is a park called Naksan on a small mountain by the same name, where a fragment of the old Seoul city wall still exists (or rather, has been restored). Near that park there is a neighborhood called Ihwa (not sure if the name is historically related to the eponymous university spelled Ewha now located on the west side near Yonsei), and in that neighborhood is a thing called the mural park. There are murals on many of the neighborhood's modest homes' walls. So we walked around the hilly area taking pictures, went to the top the mountain, and descended into the more gentrified and bohemian area near the medical center and the Catholic U.

It was a not-quite-freezing but extremely windy day. Here are a few pictures from the murals and the old city wall – I might post more later. First of all: me as [broken link! FIXME] 좀비천사.

One street we went up does a loop-the-loop on itself, climbing the hillside amid dense low-rise housing.

We saw a bucket-list wall.

The north side of the mountain had snow and a nice view of Bukhansan.

We happened to notice an interesting house with a wall around it and a plaque indicated that it was Syngman Rhee's (이승만 = postwar South Korea's first president) private residence in Seoul, and still occupied by descendants. We were trying to take pictures but the area normally open to the public was closed due to the holiday, and so I was holding my phone over the fence taking a picture.

Here are the pictures I took.

An elderly woman nearby gestured us over, and in the first moment I thought she'd tell us not to be taking pictures.

Instead, she invited us up to her rooftop, through her house, to take pictures from there. We did. Then she offered us persimmon-ginger tea. Then she offered us cakes and snacks and coffee and we talked for a long time, reminiscing about her career as a college lecturer and high school principal. It was impressive, and we mostly held our own with my bad Korean and her very rusty English. She was very kind.

Here she is showing us her roof.

Here is a picture taken from there.

Here is her foyer – it was a very posh, western-style residence, to be expected across the street from the historic Rhee family compound.

The calligraphy says "樂琴書" (낙금서 = [the] joy [of] harp [and] calligraphy – I guess).

The title for this post comes from the woman's insistence that this New Year's Day wasn't just the beginning of the Year of the Horse (which is clearly established) but specifically a Year of the Blue Horse – something I'll have to research further.

We stayed over an hour, and finally we left, walked some more, and then my energy gave out on Mary and we headed back to a subway station.

I'm feeling like I have cold symptoms, coming on. Or something. But it was an interesting and pleasant day.

[daily log: walking, 6 km]