About halfway up the Exit 3 escalator, I heard a loud crunch followed by a sound familiar to anyone who’s ever floored the gas pedal only to have their car’s wheels spin uselessly in the mud.  As I neared the top I could see a cloud of white smoke wafting across the sidewalk, and stepping off the escalator I saw the source: a white minivan had completely crossed the centerline near the inter ...

Apologies for the delay in posting folks! This is entirely my (Liz’s) fault as I have skipped town, actually the whole country to go on what is already proving to be an epic, albeit rainy trip around the world. I have been a little wrapped up in traveling and getting my accompanying new solo blog project started -which is loads more time consuming without a wonderful blog partner like Charli ...

No, that’s not a typo.  Nor is it Engrish.  For a long time I hadn’t even noticed the anomaly in Ewha Womans University’s name; then, when I did, it rankled my English-major sensibilities.  This was the university that produced South Korea’s first female Constitutional Court justice, its first female prime minister, that was one of the country’s foremost institutions of higher learni ...

In the little spur of Seoul that pokes up in its far northwestern corner, Gupabal is barely in the city.  If you zoom in on the station on Google Maps, what you’ll see is an area with two clumps of apartment buildings and a lot of empty white space.  Those apartment buildings feel less like part of the city than they do a bedroom community, isolated and about as suburbia as things get around ...

Between 1964 and 1989 the German chronobiologist Rütger Wever conducted a series of experiments in an underground bunker in Andechs, Germany, in which over 400 test subjects were deprived of all external time cues – variations in light, temperature, electromagnetic fields – anything that might signal to them what time of day it was or how much time had passed.  The aim of these experiments ...

As we’ve traipsed all about Seoul in the course of this project, one of the things that’s struck me most, that I was totally wrong about before we began, is how many waterways there are.  Seoul will never be confused with Bangkok or Venice, but if you walk around or simply take a good look at a map, you’ll notice all the streams that crisscross the capital, adding a fluid dimension to this ...

As we mentioned in the last post, Liz will soon be leaving Seoul, meaning that Seoul Sub→urban is in need of a new photographer! In addition to the blog, photographing for Seoul Sub→urban comes with a paid monthly column for SEOUL magazine.  We also occasionally make appearances on various radio shows, and with a Korean language book being published in the spring there’s a good chance ...

Friday the 27th, sometime between 7 and 8 p.m., Arirang radio will be broadcasting an interview Charlie recently did with host Adrien Lee for his show Catch the Wave.  They’ll talk about life in Korea, the origins of the blog, and some favorite stops — perfect material to get you amped up for an epic Friday night.  Well, no, but it might be kind of interesting.  Info on how to liste ...

For as many times as I’ve been to Sinchon Station – I live practically right down the street – I’d never actually been in the part of the neighborhood south of Sinchon-ro (신촌로), so it was there that I decided to start things.  Plus, it was the early afternoon, and things north of the station don’t really get rolling until the sun goes down.

The prevailing ethos of Yeouido is that size matters.  There may not be a single one-story building on the entire island, and crossing some of the intersections have to qualify you for some sort of mileage rewards, but nowhere is this lopsided sense of scale more pronounced than on the island’s northwest tip, which is dominated by a trio of behemoths: the National Assembly complex, the headqua ...