I Have Pictures!

So I've been in Seoul for a couple of days.

I've not done many tourist activities, (as is my general trend when visiting capital cities) but I did manage to sneak to the top of Seoul tower.  The tower itself is relatively small:

But this graphic belies the true height (and by association, awesomeness) of the tower, because it stands on a large hill in the middle of the city.  It essentially doubles the height of the tower (at least) relative to this chart, because the tower is twice the height, and the rest of the city is in a divot.  The resulting view is, put quite simply, amazing.

I managed to wangle a night-time visit (I prefer the neon cityscape to the concrete sea, as seen during daylight hours) and managed to take a few pictures that encapsulate roughly one fiftieth of the beauty of the nighttime scenery.  I had neither the skill, nor the photographic equipment to capture a greater amount of the beauty.

 This is the tower itself.  On an interesting photographic side-note; the next group of pictures might be an interesting way to learn about the digital equivalent of film grain.  At higher ISO settings, digital cameras produce 'noise,' this noise is odd colour pixels appearing because the wrong information has been created by the sensor.  This happens at higher ISO's because the signal is amplified.  Amplification causes darker colours to appear brighter, (the sensor is actually analog) but also amplifies errors (just as in audio terms).  The effect is most noticeable in large blocks of single colours (large areas of deep, dark shadow, for example).

Anyway.

The tower isn't that tall, but the climb up there is pretty steep and long, making me suspect that it's at least as tall again, by being placed upon a great big hill.  There were old stone ruins of (presumably) an old wall that was built along the same path as the road.  It would have been the perfect place to build a castle to defend the city, and were I emporer way back when, I would definitely have placed a castle atop this hill.

I include this one primarily because of the figure flying into the tower.  There were a number of suspended flying meshwork persons around the place, running along wires in tune with the wind.  I'm not sure how they were secured, but they moved quite freely when the wind blew.  It was quite nice watching them float around.

This is probably my favourite picture of the tower itself.  Like I said before, I had neither the talent nor the equipment to take a picture that truly did justice to the surroundings, but at least with this picture you get a sense of the shape and design that ordered this building.

Aside from demonstrating another photographic ailment (or effect, if so inclined) (see: vignetting (an ailment that appears to be common with lower quality lenses (at least as far as I can tell)))

This picture also show 1/50th of the awesomenss of the view I talked about earlier.  It really is spectacular, and I would recommend anyone who visits Seoul to come and view it from this angle.  It's just plain great.

The river has dozens of bridges spanning it (just like in London) and they're all frenetically lit by cars.

I include this picture to demonstrate the hill, upon which myself and the tower exist(ed).  It's a park, and has few to no buildings on it.  The dark area is the park, and shows how much higher than the surrounding city it actually is.  Now factor in that we are looking down at the hill, and realise just how far above city level it is.  Cool right?

This picture is reasonably self-explanatory.  Each window had world cities attached, showing how far, and in which direction, each city is located.  I'm roughly (see: exactly) 8,872.64km from England.  The .64 is preposterous, but it's nice to know it'll only take a decade of walking to get back home, should it hit the fan.  I also know the exact direction I need to take, too.  Handy stuff.  Why did they write 'Paris,' in bigger letters than London?

Busan is the nearest city to my island, and is, incidentally, the second city of Korea.  I've not been there yet, but will dutifully report on here when I do.  A handy 328.12km from Seoul.

This is the most skyscraper filled shot I could find.  They're all tall buildings (tall enough to stand out against the background noise of lots of other tall buildings) and probably represent a business district.  There were a few pockets like this one, but this had the highest density, and represented everything asian cities stand for.  (Phallic misrepresentation, primarily)

Of the journey up here: I will write more once I've made it back down to Goeje.  It was a five and a half hour bus journey I've to repeat in reverse, so I don't want to reopen fresh wounds, for fear of making the journey worse for myself on the way back down.