Journey 02 · South Korea
Eat First, Then Look
Six days in Seoul
Published 21 Nov 2025 · Travelled 24–30 Oct 2025
- 7 moments
- 7 days
- 39 km
- Autumn
- South Korea
- 24mm · 1/500
- 37.5826° N, 126.9830° E
- 24mm · 1/500
- 37.5826° N, 126.9830° E
- Bukchon Hanok Village
- 08:20
- 12°C, cold, clear
The hanok lanes are properly beautiful and also properly signposted, with people asking you to be quiet because families still live here. So I went quiet, and up. From the top of the lane you get the tiled roofs in the bottom third and the towers of the business district filling everything above them, which is more honest about the city than either half alone.
- 24mm · 1/125
- 37.5700° N, 126.9997° E
- Gwangjang Market
- 13:10
Rows of stalls, each one a woman at a griddle who has been at that griddle for thirty years, and a bench in front of it with your knees touching a stranger's. She pointed at the mung bean pancake, then at me, then at the stool, in that order, and that was the entire transaction.
- 24mm · 1/80
- 37.5660° N, 126.9910° E
- Euljiro
- 20:40
Pork belly first, on the grill, undisturbed. Then the kimchi goes on beside it to cook in the fat. Then, and only then, do you cut anything. I got this wrong twice and the man at the next table reached over with his own tongs and fixed it without saying anything or making eye contact.
he did not look up. it was very smooth.
04 · What my cousin wrote on a napkin
- 24mm · 1/250
- 37.5160° N, 127.0800° E
- Jamsil railway bridge
- 09:35
The Line 2 train comes out of the tunnel and goes over the river and for about forty seconds everybody in the carriage looks up. Then it goes back under and everybody looks down again. I rode it three times in a row on the last morning just for the forty seconds.
- 24mm · 1/40
- 37.5637° N, 126.9850° E
- Myeongdong
- 23:30
- 8°C, cold, dry
In the day it is a shopping street and I did not like it at all. At half past eleven the shutters come down, the signs stay on, and it becomes a corridor of coloured light with about nine people in it. Same street. Completely different city.
- Seongsu, Han River
- 19:20
- 9°C, clear, cold
- Last frame
Everybody photographs this from the parks on the south bank. I ended up on the north bank because I got off at the wrong station, which turned out to be the better mistake — you get the bridge going away from you and the whole downtown behind it, all of it doubled in the water.
- 24mm · 1/15
- 37.5440° N, 127.0400° E
The route
7 stops
Journey completed
Seven days, seven stories
- Distance walked
- 121 km
- Frames exposed
- 1900
- Meals eaten on a plastic stool
- 6
- Times told I was eating it wrong
- 3
- Hills climbed by accident
- many
- Favourite moment
- The old roofs and the glass towers in the same frame, which is the whole city
- Best food
- Bindaetteok at Gwangjang, fried in front of me by a woman who did not stop moving once
