Perhaps this wasn’t the most tasteful thing to do by the DMZ. Couldn’t resist.

End of the road – Vancouver out the window on my way back to Los Angeles.

Sometimes this happens to neighborhoods as well. Walking through the eastern part of central Seoul, around Sinseol Dong, you find a lot of small industrial looking workshops, and old two and three story residential buildings that are being torn down to make way for the giant apartment blocks you see throughout the rest of the city. These neighborhoods are eerily quiet, strewn with the debris of what looks like a hasty and unhappy departure. Things that might have been tucked away in a junk drawer are strewn randomly in the street. There’s a strange smell, like a storage closet that’s been closed for too long was just opened. Graffiti on the wall echoes the anger of residents who moved, or were moved, from the places they called home. The scrawled messages cursing the police charge the atmosphere despite the stillness; a silent, futile shout that makes me think of the huge gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, that exists so blatantly in Korea.

Below are photos from around the parts of Sinseol-dong I’m referring to, as well as a few photos of redevelopment around other parts of Seoul.