Yesterday, after a two-day delay caused by Typhoon Muifa, I successfully departed from Incheon Airport and flew back to Shanghai. Before I get into how elated I am to be back in my fair city, I want to pay homage to the beauty of the Yonsei University campus in Seoul, where I taught world history for six weeks over the summer. Although it rained nearly every day I was there, there were a few sunny days that brought out the natural beauty of the Yonsei campus. Nestled at the base of one of the mountains to the north of the city, the campus is built on a hill. It is one of the greenest campuses that I have ever seen. The main road into the campus is lined with majestic ginkos, and the campus is surrounded by forests of pine and diverse other greenery.
Read MoreA Visit to Songdo: Yonsei's Eco-Campus of the Future
Last week my old Dartmouth classmate Michael Kim, now a professor of Korean history at Yonsei University, invited me to join him on a tour of the new Yonsei campus in Songdo. Songdo is an emerging "green city" built from scratch on a muddy stretch of reclaimed land near the Incheon airport. The foundations of the city seem to be constructed by driving concrete piles deep down into the mud and building upon them. Sound familiar? This is how Shanghai's Bund was built since the 19th century.
Read MoreArtful Construction Sites: Seoul's Digital Media City
This summer I've been living at the DMC Ville, a set of serviced apartments in the Sangam District in Seoul. We are right next to the Digital Media City, an area that has been developed recently with the specific purpose of concentrating the media companies in the city. Everywhere around us are construction sites with new buildings rising. In order to make the area look presentable while all that construction goes on, artists have been commissioned to decorate the walls built around the sites. There's some pretty funky art out there if you walk around. Here are some examples. I've posted more photos of the wall art of Sangam DMC here.
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul VI: So Long Seoul (for now)
It has been a grueling six weeks. Four hours of class per day, eight new lectures per week with only minor overlaps to previous subjects I've taught. As for weather, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of sunny days I've seen in Seoul since arriving in late June. We've had drenching downpours and even a deluge that brought the city to a standstill. But compared to what folks have been enduring in other parts of the world--namely shocking heat waves--I can't complain.
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul V: Beating the Rainy Day Blues
I'm sitting in a cafe across the street from where I currently reside, the DMC Ville. The cafe is a chain called Twosome Place and they make a decent latte and have a nice brunch set (I usually go for the eggs benedict). It's a good alternative workspace to my apartment, which is where I usually work, building the eight lectures I have to give each week.
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul IV: A "Field Trip" to the Ehwa Museum
Ehwa Women's University is located right across the road from Yonsei. On Wednesday I walked with my Premodern World History students and my TA Calvin Kim (who has been an enormous help) over the hill to the Ehwa Campus where we visited the Ehwa University Museum. They have a nice collection of Korean historical artifacts and they were hosting a comparative exhibition on Korean, Chinese, and Japanese depictions of male and female beauty.
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul III: Getting Squared with Seoul Circles,
It has been two weeks since my last confession (in a way, these blogs are a sort of confessional ritual). I wanted to write one blog a week, but to be honest for the first three weeks, other than the mountain climb I wrote about in the last entry, I have really done nothing of great interest aside from prepping for my two world history classes. But this past weekend I finally got out and enjoyed a couple of dinners with different groups of people here in Seoul. Both nights involved a lot of barbequed meat and plenty of maekju (beer) and soju (a Korean liquor somewhere between rice wine and vodka).
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul II: Climbing Seoul Mountains
Seoul is very spread out and as I said it is surrounded by mountains. They are small mountains to be sure, but they still loom impressively in the distant skyscape. This city is far more connected to nature than Shanghai. While I haven't had much opportunity to explore the urban environment apart from two supermarket department stores and the Yonsei Campus, I did take up an invitation on Saturday to climb a nearby mountain called Achasan. This was the first real cultural experience I've had here outside of the university environment.
Read MoreA Shanghailander in Seoul Part 1: Touched Down and Settling In
I'm sitting in the study room of a serviced apartment in the middle of a corporate office zone in a neigborhood called Sangam-dong. Outside it's raining, dark, and grey. I'm surrounded by nearly identical corporate buildings identified with huge numbers on them. I could be in any big city in the capitalist world. There's a Matrix-like feel to the neighborhood. But somehow it also reminds me of Fight Club. Maybe it's the corporate art sculptures next to the coffee shops.
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