The Deserted City of Seoul

This is the first time I have opted to stay in Seoul during a break. As many of you may now, we are currently in the midst of the Chinese New Year. I am glad that none of my plans panned. Reason being, that experiencing the same city that is usually bustling be nothing more than a ghost town is something I definitely wanted to experiencing before this sojourn came to an end.

It has been hard at times, even, to find places to eat. Another predicament, although I view as a sweet turn of fate, is the fact that my cell phone has run out of credit, and it is even impossible to recharge cell phone minutes while Korea welcomes the year of the rat. It has been quite refreshing to be cut off, while at the same time feeling relatively alone in one of the cities with the densest populations. It has also shed some light, although very meager, to a project I hope to undertake this summer. Recently, I have been reading a lot of wilderness literature, everything from Gurdjief's final work to Thoreau's Walden to Into the Wild by Krakauer. All of these have sparked a keen interesting, in precisely that, the wild. I have been hiking on the weekends and doing calisthenics to get in shape for the wild. Korea has some wonderful mountains. I am also very excited for Thailand in a couple of weeks. There will be a lot of nature and climbing. The superficiality and hopeless consumer society of Korea is beginning to grow very very old for me. The mountains are sufficiently redeeming though.

Need to get to sleep, going to Everland tomorrow, Korea's largest amusement park. Time permitting, I will title my next entry: The four types of people at Sogang, should be pretty hilarious, until then.