A Mountain in South Korea

This December I made my first trip to South Korea. I'm going to combine six days into just two posts. For the first part of my trip, I was staying at Seoul National University, and I will talk about that first. SNU!

The first thing I noticed about Seoul was the air quality. After landing at the airport (GMP regional airport via Tokyo), I could smell air pollution within the building. Outside, as I caught a late bus at 11pm local time, there was a thick forest-fire/industrial quality to the air and I tried to breathe through my shirt. I managed to catch a taxi from the bus terminus to my fancy on-campus hotel; here are some views from the hotel on different days.

From my own experience, it seems that Seoul has some very bad days where I absolutely needed to wear a mask (not quite as bad as Shanghai, but close), mixed with a greater portion of days where the air is perfectly fine. Bad air can be rated 80-150 quality on aqicn.org, but the worst day was only 80 -- I guess I was smelling smoke particles larger than 2.5 microns. I watched a video about a Canadian living in Seoul and Tokyo, and the author said she got sick every month in Seoul vs quite rarely in Tokyo, blaming the air quality. I agree that Tokyo doesn't get as bad. Some in Seoul blame China and yellow dust for the pollution, but Korea also has some heavy industry & some very smelly buildings and roads, so I guess the pollution controls aren't very strict.

Anyway, that's enough about the air. It's good enough that I would consider living here, but it would be constantly on my mind.

The SNU campus is built on a mountainside, so it's very hilly. I mapped out flat routes across campus so I could get around. Here's campus, with a bird of course.

The buildings are new and there are so many of them. This is a massive university, with lots of funding. They seem to have a lot of very specialized departments. This is the lab I'm here to visit.

I can read a tiny bit of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, but I make heavy use of google translate to obtain food I can eat. My host also helps me find food. I can't eat fermented food at the moment and, as he said, "this is a BAD time for you to visit Korea". Let's just say I had a lot of bread and bibimbap.

Here's something from a museum on campus!

One day after a lot of chatting, I had a spare afternoon, so I went hiking on the mountain. There's a trail to the peak, apparently you can join it halfway through from campus but I just went to the beginning. I started late, at around 4pm. There are two peaks, and I chose the lower one (~450m elevation). It's winter here.

It's funny because this mountain has obviously been inhabited for a long time. There are all kinds of huts, wood piles, cobblestone pathways, lights, etc crisscrossing the mountainside. It feels quite old world.

I ran into some cats

and a waterwheel

and, later on, I was surprised by a pair of dogs. I saw their heads poking over the trail ahead of me, waiting; I waited too. Eventually they decided to make a large arc around me, then rejoin the trail lower down and carry on. There were no people around. To all appearances, these were two wild (formerly domesticated) dogs perfectly content to use the pathway, and stick very close to each other. They trotted practically ear to ear. It was really quite something.

It got dark quite quickly but I was determined to make it to the top.

And then I made it!

I counted steps on the way down. At about 800, I had to use my phone as a flashlight. Sometime later I reached the lower paved part of the trail, where there were streetlights, stopped to eat some bread, and went home.