For breakfast, I went to the Sukbong Toast place. You can see what kind of food they serve by clicking the second area in the orange menu bar at the top of the page. I wanted to order the Sukbong Toast special, but I couldn’t find it on the Korean menu at first. The problem is that their company name is Romanized wrong; the correct Romanization is “Seokbong.” I tried to go to the donut place, but it was closed, and wasn’t going to open for another hour.
After breakfast, I decided to go to the convention and exhibition center, COEX, to see how long it would take by subway and how easy it would be to find the place where LinuxWorld would be. It took about 40 minutes by subway, and if you walk outside rather than through the COEX mall, it’s much quicker. From the outside, you see a lot of interesting architecture and statuary.
On the third floor, some people were setting up exotic metal sculptures. I asked what the occasion was; they said that Monday is Environment Day and this was part of the display.
After COEX, I headed to Seoul Grand Park, which is the new home to the National Museum of Contemporary Art. The park is absolutely huge, and after walking about 20 minutes I got to the museum. It has a sculpture garden to rival that of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
The sculpture at the left is incredibly clever; the mouth moves up and down, and there’s a loudspeaker inside the mouth, so you hear the sculpture “singing” to you.
The museum interior is also quite nice. I lucked out; they had just opened a new exhibit about 100 years of contemporary art in Korea, and it was the first Sunday of the month, so admission was free. The most wonderful thing I saw was a piece called “Sarubia Coffee House,” which was a movie projected onto a plaster sculpture of a mirror and a small table. The film showed a fish tank, and the mirror showed people walking back and forth, and their shadows cast on the wall as they approached the mirror. This sounds horribly boring, but it had all sorts of surprises; every once in a while a shadow would cross the fish tank, you’d hear a sound like water draining, and the fish tank would be empty. Sorry, no pictures of it; they don’t allow photography in the museum.
As I left the museum to return to the subway station, I got some pictures of the park. The park also contains an amusement park called Seoul Land. You couldn’t get me inside there on a bet.
I went to the Yongsan electronics market to find a mousepad. When I was there seven years ago, there was a walkway to a place with lots of old buildings selling all kinds of junk. Now there was a sterile multi-story mall, again with almost-deserted multiple floors of people selling the same stuff. I discovered that if you go to the back of the subway station, you will find the walkway, and sure enough, there were the old buildings, crowded with shoppers, buying all sorts of junk.
I went back to the Dongdaemun station to walk back to the hotel. I had seen this river walk several times, and decided to get pictures of it. Yes, I did cross over the river on the stones. How could I resist?
The national high school baseball tournament is taking place at Dongdaemun Stadium, so the hotel has a couple of teams staying here. They were doing laundry last night, so I had to wait until 10 PM to find an open washer and dryer. It appears that some of these kids have never used a laundromat before. Two of the dryers had detergent in the lint filter area.
The first one is inside COEX, the others from subway stations.
