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남대문 - the Great South Gate of old Seoul - now gone.
Very lazy on Sunday after the all-nighter and a rather low level of blood in my alcohol system, so Bill and I did a bit of street photography in North Seoul.
Monday I hot the markets again and discovered a whole new area of photo gear shops. Incredible place is Seoul! Had to force myself to run away, but not before I got a nice Minolta spot and flash meter and a new Lowe-Pro Photo-Trekker AV-II pack at half the price they are in Australia.
This area of photo shops is on the road to Namdaemun - the "Great South Gate" of old Seoul which burnt down as a result of arson just recently. I had seen the gate before many times when I used to live in Korea but had never photographed it. I was sad to see the ruins covered in scaffolding and even now, three weeks after the fire, a crowd of Korean people standing there with shocked expressions mourning the incredible loss of cultural heritage. The gate was over 600 years old.
I stopped at the gate a while and talked to some people about their feelings. All were sad, most were frustrated by the Korean government's failure to have any security or even a sprinkler system in the tinder-dry wooden structure. An old bloke I spoke to for quite a while showed me where he had lived all his life, just a few hundred metres away overlooking the gate. He hopes to see it re-built in the traditional manner. His passion was clear, he was even swearing in English to me. There have been exaggerated claims in the Korean press about the fire - that it is Korea's 9-11 (no lives were lost) which had made me rather cynical about the incident but seeing these people gathered it seems to have deeply affected the folks of Seoul. Hard to imagine what to compare it with in Australia as we have no very old buildings. Perhaps if someone opened a mine on Uluru...
Anyway, pockets depleted I headed to Ansan to meet some old friends and have a few more beers. Wound up in the sauna again...
Yesterday I travelled back here to Busan and slept on a bed again. Woke up with a terribly sore back!!! Nice day here but I'm doing nothing much.
picsbymac says:
I recall seeing a story on the news here about that gate. It is too bad that there were no sprinklers and such. Recently there was a bad fire here that destroyed a stretch of old Toronto architecture and I can empathize with missing something that cannot truly be replaced.
Are you itching to go back to home now?
jayavant replies:
also - going home means going back to work. i am really missing some home comforts but on the whole, i prefer to be here on leave.
Andrew Purdam says:
Aren't your posts supposed to take longer or something?
The Bobster says:
On the subject of work, I'm often curious myself about why we do it. I read where some anthropologist or other determined that orangutans are able to take care of all of their food and shelter needs by using no more than 4 or 5 hours out of their day. The rest of the time is spent grooming their friends, seeking status, and making whoopee. One starts to wonder if coming down out of the trees was such a good idea after all.