I flew into Seoul yesterday morning on a flight with a disproportionate number of Canadian military guys. Not sure where they were going.
The new international airport, Incheon, is an hour out of Seoul in the coolest landscape — innumerable tiny mountains highly vegetated with flat-as-a-board brown ground all imbetween them, all flanked by the ocean. Took the airport bus into Seoul, and passed through such a desolate apocalyptic landscape. Actually, the outskirts of Seoul look a lot more sci-fi than Tokyo. The city of Tokyo’s endless, but it’s also unimaginably flat, so if you’re stationary you can’t get a sense of its size — only when you’re on a train for hours, and you still can’t escape the seemingly endless blocks of 4-8 story buildings packed together and train stations that look exactly alike do you you get overwhelmed by Tokyo. In contrast, Korea’s got mountains everywhere, so the city’s constantly broken up. At the base of a certain mountain, there’s huge outcrops of very tall, identically un-designed apartment buildings that seem to exist in the middle of nowhere. Whereas, Japan has the perennial earthquake problems, and thus doesn’t have many tall buildings. The riverfront and bayside around Seoul seems to be desolate and barren. Endless construction sites and dirt and overhead freeways and smog. It’s a lot to take in after the slowness of Vancouver.