The End of Hi-Seoul

Being pretty busy, I contrived to miss most of Hi-Seoul, the annual festival of culture, but last weekend ADAM and I did take a spin around town to catch what events we could. I had Friday off, and he left Daejeon in the morning, so we headed towards Cheonggyecheon to see what we could see. It was "street performance day" at the stream, and so we were treated to a pretty amusing clown doing the kinds of things amusing clowns do.

As a teacher of English in Korea, I identified!

As an added bonus, ADAM is Mr. Photography and he knew of the fabled Canon dealership in Seoul. For a measly 10K chun they took the camera apart and cleaned both the sensor and the see-through apparatus. I had known the sensor was smudged - in close up pictures you could actually see the smudges on the digital output, but I had no idea how bad the eye-piece had become.

It was like looking through an entirely different camera, and a better one at that!

As you can see however, it did not succeed in making my photographs any better. ;-)

As we wandered down from Cheonggye and I took some snapshots of about the 100th "Changing of the Guard" ceremonies that I have snapped in my life, we also went by this kind of cool installation art in the sky. Later that night Adam looked it up on the wikipedia and it was revealed that the fabric was supposed to represent rivers.

We were just impressed by how it looked, and even more impressed at seeing such a grand expanse of green grass anywhere in Korea. Most fields are of spit-permeated dust, or covered in concrete or stone. What little grass is around, is usually pretty beaten and abused, but this was in good enough shape to lie directly on (after conciously excluding the whole "coated with spit" thought from your mind!).

Then it was home for dinner, Yvonne joining us, and some time spent over in Itaewon. Never my favorite place to go, but it was pretty fun.

The next day was back to Seoul and some cultural performances. I was still carrying the effed up card from Tokyo, so I really only had 256 safe MB to work with and was thus quite parsimonious about my snapping. Still, this pictured little girl was both intense and cute, and the medley of Beatles songs(!) played on traditional Korean stringed instruments (help me here BKF?) was soothing and kind of ridiculous sounding.

Finally, as we backed out of the shrine/temple park, we were amused to see the following piece of (I think) conceptual artwork. Someone has erected a scaffold around a brick building and is enclosing it in a facade of doors. Surprisingly, to me at least, it looked attractive and thoughtful.