Okay so I know it's been a little while but this blogging stuff is rough. I'm so busy with school and having different adventures on the weekends that I hardly ever find myself really wanting to settle down and do this. Here I am though, four weeks later than I want to be. Yesterday I wrote on my hand that I would go home and write my blog, but I didn't I was exhausted, I went to sleep instead. I ran today and now I'm gonna do this while the adrenaline is still pumping.
This particular post concerns my trips to the two highest points in Seoul; Namsan Tower, built atop a mountain on the Northern side of the river and the 63 building, built on an Island which hugs the Southern coast of the river. Both were interesting and allowed me to make some interesting comparisons and observations. Ben and I went both times, Natalie and Allie came to Namsan, so Ben and I at least have seen all that can be seen from the best bird's eye views of the city. We went to one at night and one during the day so that gave us two different perspectives on a city so large a million different looks at a million different times couldn't begin to completely perceive it, however both buildings are in the heart of the city so I got to see the inner workings of the Second largest city in the entire world. Needless to say both were breathtaking, amazing, astonishing, stunning; there is no dearth of adjectives to describe what I saw from the top floors of these buildings so I won't refrain from using as many of them as I can but for this paragraph it will suffice to say that it was really something else.
I will start with Namsan because we went there first. Ben and Allie had just arrive that Thursday and despite wanting to go hiking Natalie and I decided that it would probably be a little nicer to not drag our jet lagged friends up a 2,000 meter mountain on their first weekend. We did decide to go to a mountain though. One we'd been wanting to go to for a little while if only for the view. North Seoul Tower or Namsan Tower or if we want to call it by its official name, CJ Seoul Tower, is a space needle-esque tower that sprouts out of the top of Namsan Mountain like a white concrete, symmetrical flower. During the day it is a light gray testament to the triumph of man over nature. A cylinder of concrete, steel, and wire rising from the highest point of a mountain forest on which nothing else has been built. After the sun sets it is a column of ethereal light, bright white against the smog filled black of the starless Seoul night, a new moon which with the help of the smog surpasses the old in the midnight sky. It is eery, awe-inspiring and ghostly all at the same time.
We walked up to it from the subway around 630. Well, we walked up to the cable car station from which we would ride the rest of the way. We were trying to catch the sunset from the tower but as we stepped onto the cable car and departed we watched the day's last glimpse of the sun pass behind a cloud, so much for that. Oh well, we'll be here for another 10 months, there will be other sunsets. The sun however still put on quite a show in the sky after it had left for the night. We made it to the top after a ride of about a minute and a half in the stuffy, smelly cables car. The ride though short was pretty cool, we got to see some of the mountain and a little of the city. The car had windows on all sides so we could look around a little bit but there were so many people that the only view you ever got was a short one or the one you had staked out the minute you got in, so I looked out the right side of the car the entire trip. It was still cool though the sky was nice and though you could only see some of the city because of the smog I still got a pretty good look.
So after almost 2 minutes we stepped out and walked the remaining 100 yards or so to the top of the mountain. There were lots of people there. It was a Saturday, but I figured come on, don't they live here? Do they really have to come and see Namsan Tower when I do? Of course they do. No seriously the fact that there were a lot of people there was not a problem. I broke my camera out and started taking pictures. The first thing that caught my eye were the flying men soaring around, sitting on air, you know doing the normal things that flying guys do. There were several wire sculptures of men suspended from cables about 20 feet off of the ground. They looked like Peter Pan sculptures almost, except probably cooler. I took a lot of pictures of them which I will post presently. Around the bottom of the tower you could also walk around and look out over the mountain. The view was pretty cool, and on the fences keeping people from stepping off into air there were little key-chains, locks and other knick-knacks you could buy and write your name on to show you were there. Most were couples things so I didn't get one, but maybe I will in the future.
The view was spectacular despite the day being somewhat overcast. Ben noted that on one side of the platform, if you stood about ten feet from the fence and looked at the people looking out it appeared as if they were on the edge of a void looking into nothing because the clouds were so uniformly dull. It was a little jarring at first but then you walked the remaining ten feet below and the city appeared below, but it still looked like there was no sky, which was strange to say the least. This was on the eastern side of the tower, on the western side the remaining sunlight had painted the sky pink, orange, purple and the view was phenomenal. The smog contributes a lot to this as the sun has more dust particles in the air to reflect off of so for once I was thankful for the poor air quality. As the color brightened and then faded away we watched the lights start to come on in the city. First came street lights in neighborhoods, then the cars began to turn on the headlights and finally the neon advertisements flickered to life just as the color drained out of the sky. It was almost dark and we decided that it would be the perfect time to take the elevator to the top of the tower.
The ride was short and the elevator was decorated with small lights embedded in the black ceiling in walls that were an attempt at stars. The attempt was a good one, it looked like someone had dipped a paintbrush in starlight and whipped bright paint drops all over the inside of the elevator, I appreciated it a lot. It was very high tech and for me typified Seoul and the architecture I had seen so far. We made to the third floor of the tower, which is as high as you can go unless you're going to the absurdly overpriced restaurants occupying the fourth and fifth floors and stepped out into an observatory wrapped around the frame of the building. Large windows reaching from the floor to the ceiling gave us a spectacular view of the city, now entirely lit by electricity. There was no moon that night so the sky itself was pitch black and instead of the stars shining above us, the city glittered below us. It seemed as if the two had switched places. I for one was dumbstruck. The buildings and roads looked as if they were on fire. They glowed blue, orange, green and red alternately as the neon signs, the streetlights, and the turn signals of the cars changed. The towering skyscrapers shone bright but the roads winding through them bordered on blinding. If the city is a living thing than the streets are the veins and the buildings are the organs. The light runs through the city streets and flows up the sides of the building like blood flowing through the body, underground water through roots into trees. This was an interesting thought because it forces you to realize that in all this light, technology and splendor, the driving force behind all of it, the lifeblood if you will, are the people perched at the wheel behind those headlights, or laughing with their friends in a cab. The water giving life to it all are the janitors cleaning the every floor of every office buildings, the man working late into the night on the 47th story of the 63 building. The city truly is a living breathing thing and the breath is the people turning on there porch lights to fend off the blackness of the light. It really is something to see, I mean we’ve conquered it, the world is ours, the night holds no power over us anymore. We can live at night just as we do during the day and we can glow like the sun, the sun! We’ve taking bombed out rice paddies and in fifty years turned it into a thriving epicenter of humanity, a testament to our race, and a being of it’s own. I've never looked at a city like I did that night and if you can’t tell all ready I rejoiced in it to say the least.
We stayed at the top for about an hour going to different windows and seeing different sparkling metropolitan panoramas stretching out beneath us in all directions. As much as triumphant as it was it was pretty scary as well. The city went on forever, you couldn't see the end of it. From the highest point of Seoul the fringe of the city was beyond the horizon in all directions. There were mountains interrupting the complete and total dominance of man's industry on the landscape but you knew that even behind these looming dark earthen pyramids there was more.
There's a computer game, maybe developed in Korea but I'm not sure, that I believe is called just the blob. In this game you control a rolling ball of sticky goo that compounds itself as it rolls over things like trash, plants, animals, cars, people and eventually buildings, cities, oceans until you can't roll over anything else and the goo becomes its own planet. This metaphor isn't as well thought out as my next one but bear with me. It occurred to me at Namsan Tower that humanity is like that. We go out into the unknown and mold, bend or break that which we find to suit our own needs then we pack it into our existence and make it a part of our civilization. As a race we are constantly digesting the things we encounter in such a way that they become part of us. Trees have become first buildings, then chairs, tables, flooring, paper, and a variety of other things that can no longer be described as trees. Animals have become shadows of themselves in domestication, stone has become statues, stairways, skyscrapers, paper weights, has been adapted for the benefit of people and everything else humanity has encountered has followed suit. It's a beautiful thing our capacity to do this but if you think about it through the scope of the blob game it becomes a little more sinister.
The blob consumes all, to the point where there is nothing left to consume, and the odd thing about the game is that this is the goal, to exhaust everything, to be master over all, to become so large and all encompassing that everything is contained within you. What then? I imagine the blob will sit sulking on a hollowed out shell of a planet with nothing to do, no one to keep it company and nothing else to eat. The enormity of the city made me frightened of that day, of the day when the blob that we are has rolled over everything. The day I look out from Namsan and know there really is nothing else out there but what I can see, that the beauty, grandeur and ingenuity I saw that night and was so awed by is normal, is everywhere. It scares me to imagine that I could climb hill after hill and encounter only bright lights interwoven with roads over and over again.
That being said while the view was frightening it was enormously beautiful. It was beautiful in the way that a volcano is beautiful. The city center erupts with light as I believe I've said before and out from that center flows the glowing magma of constant traffic bright against the few dark areas left in the city. The roads flow ever outward, as unstoppable as molten rock, lighting everything in their path. Homes are engulfed in the flames the roads carry as are buildings, streetlights. The road is as insatiable as lava too, they just keep going and have spread the light of the city to places I could no longer see from where I stood at it’s zenith. The roads, just as lava does on islands, bring new life to the rest of the world. While Lava comes first with fire, brimstone and death, from the minerals it deposits as it burns develops a soil richer than any found on earth. The roads are the same, they deposit us, everywhere to the fulfillment of our enterprises, the beginnings of new ones, and the continuing progress we make.
Our time at the top was coming to a close. We had to go to our coworker Ben’s housewarming party and so after a few more glimpses of the city we walked back to the elevator and took it down to the tower’s base. The bottom had changed a lot since we had gone up. As the city had lit up and come to life so too had the base of Namsan Tower. The flying men were lit up as was the tower which now rose like a white marble column. It glowed, and we stared for a while took a picture, turned our backs and left. The trip had been a sensory overload for me and I was happy to go to Ben’s for a few drinks afterwards. The tower had been thought provoking but after all that rumination I had to go have beer, the cheese we had at Ben’s was delicious too. We rolled on to the club afterwards, picking up more and more as we left.
Next up: the 63 building.
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