(UPDATE 201105: Join Seoul Village on FACEBOOK and TWITTER (@theseoulvillage)!)
See also "About you, about me, about us"
Seoul and Korea are ever-changing places. Every day, whole areas vanish, people move, new towns rise and memories fall. I often browse a map and check for a maeul (village) that may be threatened by "real estaticians". Sometimes I have time to feel the place, meet a few sad smiles, take a few sad pictures. Sometimes it is just too late.
The city does have to improve, to get rid of its last slums provided people are well taken care of. But Seoul is not used to keeping track of its past yet. People have been used to discard old stuff for decades and even houses are disposable items, to be replaced every 20 years or so.
Seoul Village is a virtual place to remember Seoul. Not as it was, not as it ought to be, but as it is being.
This is neither a cityguide nor an encyclopedia but a nonsensical pile of useless thoughts on all kinds of subjects, depending on the mood (see list of posts). I'll also try to drop a line or a memory every know and then.
Otherwise, I write fiction*, and I spill too many embarrassing "blogules" over the web**... even if some of them end up on more serious media in France, Korea, or the US***, about topics I fancy (culture, politics, urbanism, economy, innovation...). I'm often asked why I didn't chose to be a journalist or a scholar - the answer is I that I often wallow in subjectivity and fiction, and I don't want to sacrifice all other topics for one in particular...
I'm French, but that's not contagious. I'm also an author and a conceptor. In previous lives, I majored in business (ESSEC), worked on Korean-French trade at the French Embassy in Seoul, survived three start-ups before joining a multi-billion euro go-far, thrived in strategy and innovation, and enjoyed every bit of it. My love of Seoul goes beyond writing or blogging about the city : as a member of the Seoul Global Center Business Advisory Committee, I welcome all suggestions to make this great place an even better one.
And remember : I'm not a native speaker, neither in Korean nor in English. And I'm afraid even my French is questionable.
Stephane
* there's not much to write about except love, life, and death. As I'm writing these lines, I'm lucky enough to be alive and in love, so I mostly write about death (see "dragedies"). "La Ligue des Oublies", my chronicles on the other history of soccer, are also available on Amazon. NEW: you can download the free ebook of 'Guisin-dong' (in English)
** half a dozen, unevenly tended blogs including: Weapons of Mass Disinformation blogs (in some sort of English and French), innovation blog (mot-bile), soccer blog (in French: footlog)... Yes, I do suffer from hypergraphia.
*** Mentions, interviews, articles, opeds: Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Le Figaro, Rue89, Asia Times, Korea Herald, Korea JoongAng Ilbo...
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Includes :
- a few places where food matters
- remarks about the attempted anschluss of Dokdo by Japan, and the attempted Hanschluss of Korea by China.
- Korea's 16 regions and major cities
- random views on culture, food, or even politics
PS : meet some of my visitors from South Korea, as well as from all other countries - you can also check my personal portal at www.stephanemot.com. You may also connect with me on LinkedIn or Facebook (thank you for jotting down some clues if you do so). Feel free to suggest "new" places, to leave a comment, or correct a mistake.
about browsing maps of everchanging Seoul... I dropped these lines on "research makes me alive" (Hello Korea!) :
ReplyDeleteI like your sentence : "I look for streets that aren’t straight".
And not only because I share the same way of explaining how I like to browse Seoul maps : this sentence almost sounds like part of Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. Somehow, what we're all looking for is an ancient, mythical Seoul that keeps eluding us.
Maybe we are forever moving on because Seoul itself keeps moving on.