"Seoul is a massive metropolitan city, but for a year I got to call this little corner cafe district my home. The Hapjeong-Hongdae-Sangsu triangle is located in western side of town, sitting just above the Han River. It houses Hongdae University, known for its outstanding art program, and a maze of side streets lined with cafés, hip clothing boutiques, restaurants and bars. The area is busy 24/7 - during the day, cafés offer quiet places to study, and at night the bars become loud boisterous places for mingling. Luckily my friend and I lived in a neighborhood just outside of the triangle called Seogyo-dong. Our apartment, including the surrounding neighborhood, was stuck in Korea circa 1980, and it's side roads are lined with bundles of tangled telephone wires stretched from building to building.
From the late spring to early fall, I would run from my apartment to the Han river, where there's a paved route alongside the river for cyclists. Jogging along the Han became part of my daily regimen. Not many people jog around the streets of Seoul (perhaps a side effect of watching too many Korean dramas in which the protagonist dies in a car accident) but alongside the river, you can find Seoulites doing all kinds of exercise and recreation; cycling, jogging, swimming, windsurfing, in the fall people fly kites and in the spring people tread along the Han in duck-shaped paddleboats."
Seoul, Korea mapped by Andrew Arnold, after a year on the Fulbright scholarship in Korea.
check out his documentary on little Korean monks here