Seoul Quotes

In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am. So what the fuck?

Long walks around Seoul while feeling the divine love for Her settled me in meditation for hours.

The sky is full of messages of love sent to Her, feelings that transform into clouds of devotion over Seoul.

I start to feel my soul’s past lives touching the earth of Seoul. It feels like home.

Setiap ada hujan, aku akan mengingatmu. Karena kamu benci hujan. Dan kamu, di tengah kebencianmu, kamu akan mengingatku - Shin Ji Woo & KIm Sun.

My girlfriend that I was in love with who broke up with me on a hospital rooftop three months ago in Seoul shows up right before my concert in New York City. Yeah, I forgot about it.

These seven strangers had come from all over the country to Seoul and become each other’s family. Inside the most commercial system of the Korean music industry, where incredible amounts of capital, human resources, marketing, and technology converge, BTS—ironically enough—found a family in each other.

I tried not to let my relief show. I’d been a passenger in Jae’s car a total of three times, and after each trip, I forced myself not to kiss the ground in thanks once I got free of the Explorer. He’d learned to drive in Seoul. Apparently, no one believed in turn signals or lanes in South Korea, because Jae drove like a drunk butterfly heading to its next fermented flower.

Beyond the snowy trees, the endless high-rises of Seoul have faded to a blurry gray shadow, but their presence hasn’t dwindled. Even in the poor visibility, there’s no denying that the city feels like the walls of a fortress, a fortress that is both protecting us and trapping us.

Walking in the dark streets of Seoul under the almost full moon. Lost for the last two hours. Finishing a loaf of bread and worried about the curfew. I have not spoken for three days and I am thinking, “Why not just settle for love? Why not just settle for love instead?

It’s April 2006. It’s a Saturday. I’m walking through a market in Seoul, Korea, having a very public screaming match with a young Chinese-Korean woman whom I have recently promoted to Asia-Pacific Regional Manager. Despite the promotion, she is not happy. I think she wants my job. Right now, I’d happily give it to her if it would shut her up and calm me down. If I’d wanted a screaming match, I could have stayed at home; no, correct that, I’ve never had a domestic dispute as loud and unpleasant as this is turning out to be.

Love is a country. It’s vast and endless and full of an unbreakable hope. Maybe this love is a love that’s worth dying for, I don’t know. All I know is that it’s worth living for, again and again.

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it.

Seoul is a city of layers and Jesse peels them back with his penetrating gaze, taking in the glitzy Western bars, the alleys sloping upward into cramped housing developments, the doorways leading to dark hallways that lead to offices and noodle shops the casual observer would never even know existed.

My father used to say there's a fine line between death and sleep, and that both are ways to escape an unendurable pain. But he never spoke of the choice you'd have to make to wake.

See this here? This is Seoul. It’s just a dot. A dot. We all of us are living in this tiny, cramped dot. You may not get to see all of it, but I want you to know: it’s a wide world out there.

He is called the Tyrant King. He is one of the top seven kings of Seoul and the king with the largest territory.” Lee Hyunsung asked this time. “What type of person is he?” “He is someone who started from Dobong-gu and built his own kingdom. He says that any beautiful or handsome man and woman will become concubines, while any ugly people will be killed or become slaves.” Jung Heewon frowned. “If Dokja-ssi is caught, you will become a slave.” “…Well, I think it will be dangerous for Heewon-ssi.” “Being a concubine is difficult… Why don’t we just go ahead and kill him?

Ian nodded. Do not question her, he told himself. Not when she is in a state like this. Still, it was a pity to attack them with such force. Especially the girl, Amy. He'd never met anyone like her. Shy. Gentle. With an exciting edge of hostility. So unlike the girls back home, who flung themselves at him so often that his chauffeurs traveled with first-aid kits. Doesn't she know better? Isn't she smart enough to stop the hunt? It was the boy and the au pair. He was a pint-sized hothead. She was a collection of piercings and piggishness. If only Amy and Dan had stayed trapped in the cave in Seoul, at least long enough to get discouraged. Why did they antagonize Mother? They don't know what it's like to live with her. "Right you are," Ian said. "They're asking for it. Heaven forbid they listen to the brains of the outfit." "And that would be–?" Isabel asked. Ian looked away. "Well, the sister, I'd say. Amy." He felt a smile inching across his face. "Ian?" His mother grabbed his wrist. "If you are having the inkling of a shadow of a thought..." "Mother!" Ian could feel the blood rushing to his face. "How could you suspect for a moment...?

Xuan and I had decided to take a trip together in honor of our one-thousand-day anniversary. We ate Korean barbecue, shared a decadent cake, and then drove three and a half hours to Yosemite. I’d never heard of such an occasion. But in Seoul, where Ji-Hoon was born and raised, there was almost a monthly holiday devoted to romance. We wore similar out- fits, which Xuan said was common for couples in Asian countries. Three years was a big deal, especially when we didn’t know how many more we’d have.

»Wenn die Frühlingstage die dunklen Wintertage ablösen, fühlt es sich so an, als würden sie die Dunkelheit ebenfalls mit sich nehmen.«

What are you doing?" I twisted around to see Tai looking at me as he sipped coffee, standing behind me. "Just —looking through the chocolate," I said as casual as I could. "You never looked through them all before," Tai said suspiciously. I swallowed, struggling to find something to say. It must've shown on my face, because one of Tai's eyebrows lifted slightly.

loose doesn't mean that you are loser, win doesn't mean get every thing you want, but being strong when you get left and just give thanks that you are still hear to love people arround you

And so, the next thing I know, we are leaving the deliciousness of Seoulful Tacos behind and heading to the house of my least-favorite person in the world, with a half-Gom, a Horangi, and a Tokki, to reunite my sworn enemy with her hungry ghost halmeoni. I guess this is just my life now.

Let's meet again, Yoo Joonghyuk." The power of the demon king disappeared and at the same time, strength drained from me. [The main scenario has ended.] [Seoul Dome has been freed.] A small black hole appeared in the air behind me. My body was slowly being sucked into it. My legs, my torso, my arms...they turned into powder and were slowly being sucked in. "Kim Dokja! No! Kim Dokja!" At the last moment, he tightly held me by the neck. However, it was already too late.

Watchin' an old fight film last night Ray Mancini and Duk Koo Kim The boy from Seoul was hangin' on good But the poundin' took to him And there in the square he lay alone Without face, without crown And the angel who looked upon him She never came down You never know What day is gonna pick you, baby Out of the air Out of nowhere

I couldn't help but feel empty inside as I thought about all the moments of my life fading away like that. What was I, after all, if all the memories that made me up were gone?

It’s a clichéd line to say you would die for love. It would be more pertinent to ask yourself, would you watch the person you love die to preserve that love?

The closer I get, the further away she seems. Until I'm right next to her, and she's as far away as the stars.

Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo all mean ‘capital’ in their respective languages.

you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother's body in the ground but in the chest, or--like you-- you carry her corpse on your back.

I was over forty years old and I felt like I hadn’t been born yet. I had spent my whole life studying and reading literature, dissecting and analysing the emotions of others while feeling nothing myself. I was vulnerable, ripe, hanging low and alone, yearning with all my being to be picked for something special. I had lived my life in a steady, British drizzle. I wanted tornadoes, hurricanes, whirlwinds and earthquakes. I wanted disasters and triumphs, highs and lows, peaks and troughs; I wanted every extreme of every feeling I’d never known.

The air in Seoul smells of rain, cooking oil, garbage, pine trees, persimmon, perfume, red bean paste, hot metal, and snow. It changes by the season and the time of day and the neighborhood.

It has to do with me because it has to do with you," Young says, his voice dropping. "Jaewon-ah, we've been friends longer than we've been--." "Enemies?" I suggest weakly. "Than we've been lost.

Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure. Beijing and Seoul I saved for January.

As the rest of the modern world develops into what Seoul already has been for years—an image-laden, social-media-driven landscape, where digital representations of us can be automatically filtered to have longer lashes or poreless skin, and digital makeup can be instantly applied before we show up on our video meetings—it makes clear Korea’s looks-obsessed culture, where appearance norms inch further and further out of reach, isn’t some anomaly.

Her face drops, and I bite my lip, instantly regretting my words. They had promised to stay together no matter what, but since she moved to Seoul, he hasn’t been good about keeping in touch. “He must have forgotten or fallen asleep.” She

Looking at Main Street’s row of shops reminded Young of her favorite market in Seoul, its legendary produce row—spinach green, pepper red, beet purple, persimmon orange. From its description, she would’ve thought it garish, but it was the opposite

One day, aftyer my life is already over, a girls comes up to me at the back of the auditorium and says, “Are you the famous chef from Miele?” Every year that remains to me I will walk the streets of Beijing, of Seoul. I will look for a long, long time.

During the school year, I practically lived in Dongguk’s modern, glass-walled library, with its stacks of tantalizing books and its high-speed Internet access. It became my playground, my dining room, and sometimes my bedroom. I liked the library best late at night, when there were fewer students around to distract me. When I needed a break, I took a walk out to a small garden that had a bench overlooking the city. I often bought a small coffee from a vending machine for a few cents and just sat there for a while, staring into the sea of lights that was metropolitan Seoul. Sometimes I wondered how there could be so many lights in this place when, just thirty-five miles north of here, a whole country was shrouded in darkness. Even in the small hours of the morning, the city was alive with flashing signs and blinking transmission towers and busy roadways with headlights traveling along like bright cells pumping through blood vessels. Everything was so connected, and yet so remote. I would wonder: Where is my place out there? Was I a North Korean or a South Korean? Was I neither?

Standing in this spot, I couldn't help but imagine the future of Seoul myself. But the Seoul I imagine is not a flashy city bristling with skyscrapers. What I dream of is a peaceful and profound historically rich city that has been restored, at least within the city walls, to the way it was before.

When told the capital of South Korea, Seoul, was so close to the North Korean border that millions of people would likely die in the first hours of any all-out war, Trump had a bold response, "They have to move." The officials in the oval office weren't sure if he was joking. He raised his voice. "They have to move!

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

The North Korean people did not choose to be poor. They did not choose to have scores of windowless buildings and miles of barren farmland through which I had just been driven earlier that morning. North Koreans, I thought, are genetically as capable of producing what I saw from that helicopter over Seoul. Politics prevented them from doing so.

I realized that my community was built in large part from the wreckage of America’s brutal proxy wars against communism. America massacred civilians in No Gun Ri and My Lai, it poisoned fields of crops and buried mines, it left behind machine guns in the wrong hands and let houses turn to rubble. San Jose is America’s consolation prize for those who lost Saigon and Seoul.

When Korea was divided, we were still nationals of a unified Korea. It was called Choson. At separation, the Japanese government gave us permission to keep our Korean identity, but we had to choose between North and South. Many people chose the North, because of their family or because they considered the North more in line with our country’s traditions. There was no way of knowing how things would turn out. Your grandmother and I chose the South because we were from Seoul. That was the only reason. We knew nothing about any of the rest of it. Political questions meant nothing to us, the Cold War, Russia, the United States. Koreans who live in Japan have never known North and South Korea. We are all people of Choson. People from a country that no longer exists.

Before leaving the earth altogether, let us as: How does Music stand with respect to its instruments, their pitches, the scales, modes and rows, repeating themselves from octave to octave, the chords, harmonies, and tonalities, the beats, meters, and rhythms, the degrees of amplitude (pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, forte, fortissimo)? Though the majority go each day to the schools where these matters are taught, they read when time permits of Cape Canaveral, Ghana, and Seoul. And they’ve heard tell of the music synthesizer, magnetic tape. They take for granted the dials on radios and television sets. A tardy art, the art of Music. And why so slow? Is it because, once having learned a notation of pitches and durations, musicians will not give up their Greek? Children have been modern artists for years now. What is it about Music that sends not only the young but adults too as far into the past as they can conveniently go? The module? But our choices never reached around the globe, and in our laziness, when we changed over to the twelve-tone system, we just took the pitches of the previous music as though we were moving into a furnished apartment and had no time to even take the pictures off the walls. What excuse? That nowadays things are happening so quickly that we become thoughtless? Or were we clairvoyant and knew ahead of time that the need for furniture of any kind would disappear? (Whatever you place there in front of you sits established in the air.) The thing that was irrelevant to the structures we formerly made, and this was what kept us breathing, was what took place within them. Their emptiness we took for what it was – a place where anything could happen. That was one of the reasons we were able when circumstances became inviting (chances in consciousness, etc.) to go outside, where breathing is child’s play: no walls, not even the glass ones which, though we could see through them, killed the birds while they were flying.

This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional. Armies and corporations cannot function without intelligent agents, but they don’t need consciousness and subjective experiences. The conscious experiences of a flesh-and-blood taxi driver are infinitely richer than those of a self-driving car, which feels absolutely nothing. The taxi driver can enjoy music while navigating the busy streets of Seoul. His mind may expand in awe as he looks up at the stars and contemplates the mysteries of the universe. His eyes may fill with tears of joy when he sees his baby girl taking her very first step. But the system doesn’t need all that from a taxi driver. All it really wants is to bring passengers from point A to point B as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. And the autonomous car will soon be able to do that far better than a human driver, even though it cannot enjoy music or be awestruck by the magic of existence.

During Carter’s visit to Seoul in 1979, President Park angered him by delivering what Carter called in his journal “an abusive harangue” about how even that tiny reduction in forces—just 0.5 percent of the six hundred thousand South Korean troops already defending the country—would jeopardize his national security. Carter ignored Park’s rudeness because he had what he considered a higher purpose: saving his soul. On the last day of his visit, after official business was completed, he talked to the South Korean president about becoming a Christian. Like Gierek in Poland, Park never fully embraced Christianity, but Carter’s unusual decision to raise the matter strengthened religious freedom in South Korea.

I smiled as I stood by the curb. 4:20 in the morning. But you know what? I wanted to go somewhere, but not home. Only one place I could think of: Itaewon. Like destiny, an orange cab slowed down in front of me. I climbed in and yelled, "Hey Mister, Itaewon Fire Station." Had the streetlamps and neon signs always been this spectacularly bright? Why was Seoul so beautiful all of a sudden? Everything that was once nothing seemed special and amazing somehow. And wouldn't you know it, the taxi fare still was more than 10,000 won, even when the surcharge period was over. Only 20,000 won left on this card, how was I going to get home later? Eh, whatever. I'd survive. The traffic began getting bad at Hannam-dong. I hopped out in front of the CJ Building and ran the rest of the way to G—.

They came from peasant backgrounds, had hated the Japanese colonization of Korea, and believed that the Americans and their proxies in Seoul were agents of the past, not enablers of the future; the Americans were now the allies of the Japanese, as well as the old Korean ruling class, and thus this was a continuation of the struggle that had forced them to leave their native soil years earlier. The leadership of the South Korean Army was in their minds a reflection of those Koreans who had fought alongside the Japanese, and in the upper-level ranks this was often true. The North Koreans troops had trained hard and were extremely well disciplined and motivated. They camouflaged themselves exceptionally well, stayed off the roads, and often moved over the harsh terrain by foot, as the Americans did not. Like the Chinese Communists who had trained them and with whom they had fought, they tended to avoid all-

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

It was also absolutely clear that complicit in all this were the IAAF and the IOC, to the extent that they were aware of the problem and they did nothing about it. If they had wanted to do something about it, they would have done out-of-competition testing. Their in-competition testing was a complete waste of time.’ Few would disagree. But it raises an obvious question: why was the biggest fish of them all caught in Seoul?

North Koreans took up the aesthetics of China. Culturally and visually, the nation seemed to have grown to resemble China. And this made me wonder: If North Koreans were to see Seoul today, would it look American to their eyes? Sixty-some years ago, the superpowers had artificially divided Korea, and this Chinese Korea was the legacy of that division.

June 25, 1950, Kim Il-sung’s troops stormed across the border with Soviet-supplied tanks. They quickly captured Seoul and swept southward until all that was left of South Korea was a pocket around the southeastern coastal city of Pusan. The daring amphibious landing at Incheon of forty thousand U.S. troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in September reversed the Communist gains. Besides the United States and South Korea, troops of fifteen nations joined a U.N. coalition—among them Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. They recaptured Seoul and headed north to Pyongyang and beyond. As they approached the Yalu River, however, Chinese Communist forces entered the war and pushed them back. Two more years of fighting produced only frustration and stalemate. By the time an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, nearly three million people were dead and the peninsula lay in ruins.

Hanawon, located about forty miles south of Seoul, means “House of Unity.” The campus of redbrick buildings and green lawns surrounded by security fences was built in 1999 by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, a cabinet-level agency created to prepare for the day when North and South would somehow be reunited. Its programs are designed to help defectors transition into a modern society—something that will have to happen on a massive scale if North Korea’s 25 million people are ever allowed to join the twenty-first century. The Republic of Korea has evolved separately from the Hermit Kingdom for more than six decades, and even the language is different now. In a way, Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travelers from the Korea of the 1950s and ’60s who grew up in a world without ATMs, shopping malls, credit cards, or the Internet. South Koreans use a lot of unfamiliar slang,

Separation haunts the affected long after the actual incident. It is a perpetual act of violation. You know that the missing are there, just a few hours away, but you cannot see them or write to them or call them. It could be your mother trapped on the other side of the border. It could be your lover whom you will long for the rest of your life. It could be your child whom you cannot get to, although he calls out your name and cries himself to sleep every night. From Seoul, Pyongyang looms like a shadow, about 120 miles away, so close but impossible to touch. Decades of such longing sicken a nation. The loss is remembered, and remembered, like an illness, a heartbreak from which there is no healing, and you are left to wonder what happened to the life you were supposed to have together. For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering.

Thirty years earlier, Mina Lee steps off a plane to take a chance on a new life in America. Stacking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing she expects is to fall in love. But that moment will have shattering consequences for Mina, and everything she left behind in Seoul.

Joo Sung-ha, a North Korean defector from Chongjin who became a journalist in Seoul, told me he believed that Kim Jong-il had tacitly agreed to let women work privately to relieve the pressure on families. “If the ajummas [married women] hadn’t been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution,” he said.

By 1989, North Korea was developing a reprocessing plant at Yongbyon to produce weapons-grade plutonium from the fuel rods of its nuclear reactors, and by the early 1990s the CIA was assessing that it had enough for one or two nuclear bombs. “Kim Jong-il didn’t care if he bankrupted the rest of the country. He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power,” Kim Dok-hong, a high-ranking defector from Pyongyang, told me in an interview in Seoul in 2006.

Under Kim Jong-il’s direction, the Korean Feature Film Studio on the outskirts of Pyongyang was expanded to a 10-million-square-foot lot. It churned out forty movies per year. The films were mostly dramas with the same themes: The path to happiness was self-sacrifice and suppression of the individual for the good of the collective. Capitalism was pure degradation. When I toured the studio lot in 2005, I saw a mock-up of what was supposed to be a typical street in Seoul, lined with run-down storefronts and girly bars.

As the Japanese emperor read his statement over the radio, across the globe in Washington, D.C., two young army officers huddled over a National Geographic Society map, wondering what to do about Korea. Nobody in Washington knew much about this obscure Japanese colony. While elaborate plans had been drawn up for the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, Korea was an afterthought. The Japanese had ruled for thirty-five years, and with their abrupt withdrawal there would be a dangerous power vacuum. The United States was concerned that the Soviet Union might seize Korea as a staging ground on the way to the bigger prize of Japan. Despite the World War II alliance, distrust of the Soviet Union was growing in Washington. Soviet troops had already entered Korea from the north the week before Japan’s surrender and were poised to keep going. The Americans sought to appease the Soviets by giving them the northern half of Korea to administer in what was supposed to be a temporary trusteeship. The officers, one of whom was Dean Rusk, later to become secretary of state, wanted to keep the capital, Seoul, in the U.S. sector. So the two army officers looked for a convenient way to divide the peninsula. They slapped a line across the map at the 38th parallel.

For example, until 1972 Seoul (not Pyongyang!) was constitutionally the capital of the DPRK. Concurrently, the ROK government still appoints governors to the provinces of North Korea. Incidentally, the joint offices of these five governors are located not far from the university where this book was being written—and these offices are bustling with bureaucratic activity every time I visit.

The border between North and South Korea is narrow, and the distance from Pyongyang to Seoul is barely 120 miles. Yet the two countries are as far away from each other as any in the world.

You’re Korean, Hara. Even though you grew up in America. Even though you speak English and not Korean. Even though you feel like you’re different when you open your mouth. You are Korean where it counts. Here.” He draws a finger across the blue veins in my wrist. “The same blood that flows in me flows in you. My ancestors are your ancestors. Where you were raised and who you were raised by doesn’t change that. If anything, your experience makes you all the more Korean because what is a Korean but someone who has experienced loss and still survived?

Endocrine profiling was not an authorized IOC anti-doping tool at the time. What's more, endocrine profiling had never before been used to confirm a positive doping result. Johnson was singled out as the lone athlete out of more than eight thousand in Seoul to be subjected to the test. As Charlie Francis would later muse, if Donike's test was so reliable, why wasn't it used on every Olympic athlete? And if it was not reliable, why use it only on Johnson?

Everyone was jealous of his three children, his eldest a teacher, his second attending university in Seoul, and his youngest, a son.

I realize that I am becoming less conscious of the impression I have on others. I don’t care much if people recognize me or not on the streets of Seoul; I visit public baths with a light heart, and I hum and occasionally sing to myself while taking walks. I have become quite good at declining requests for lectures or papers if I have too much on my plate, and I no longer wonder what other people think of me.

Come and see what the world looks like from the Lotte World Tower, Seoul, South Korea.

The Monstera adansonnii had yellowed; the spider plant was a dismal mop; her golden pothos was crispy. He took one down and poked the dirt, hard and unforgiving. “Don’t worry about that!” she said. “Get some rest—” “It’s okay it’s okay—tell me more!” They babbled over the sound of the faucet as he watered first the pothos, then everything else in the kitchen sink. “Thank you,” she said. “Where are your towels?” Her place wasn’t big but he took his time, picking up each mug and opening all the drawers she let him. He wanted three-dimensionality after a lifetime of seeing her through photos and videos. After hours of catching up, Tim was falling asleep on Valerie’s sofa when Mother called from Seoul. He fought the jetlag to sit up so that Valerie could squeeze in beside him. “Ah!” Mother shrieked. “Valerie!” “Umma!” Valerie cried. Valerie gushed about everything the way she used to when she was a girl. Growing up, Tim had clasped the landline and then Mother’s computer and then her cellphone the two times a year they called.

Noryangjin is a wholesale market where you can choose live fish and seafood from the tanks of different vendors and have them sent up to be prepared in a number of cooking styles at restaurants upstairs. My mother and I were with her two sisters, Nami and Eunmi, and they had picked out pounds of abalone, scallops, sea cucumber, amberjack, octopus, and king crab to eat raw and boiled in spicy soups. Upstairs, our table filled immediately with banchan dotting around the butane burner for our stew. The first dish to arrive was sannakji---live long-armed octopus. A plate full of gray-and-white tentacles wriggled before me, freshly severed from their head, every suction cup still pulsing.

On our final night in Seoul, Nami and Emo Boo took us to Samwon Garden, a fancy barbecue spot in Apgujeong, a neighborhood my mom once described as the Beverly Hills of Seoul. We entered through the beautiful courtyard garden, its two man-made waterfalls flowing under rustic stone bridges and feeding the koi pond. Inside the dining room were heavy stone-top tables, each equipped with a hardwood charcoal grill. Nami slipped the waitress twenty thousand won, and our table quickly filled with the most exquisite banchan. Sweet pumpkin salad, gelatinous mung-bean jelly topped with sesame seeds and scallions, steamed egg custard, delicate bowls of nabak kimchi, wilted cabbage and radish in salty, rose-colored water. We finished the meal with naengmyeon, cold noodles you could order bibim, mixed with gochujang, or mul, served in a cold beef broth.

We visited Gwangjang Market in one of Seoul's oldest neighborhoods, squeezing past crowds of people threading through its covered alleys, a natural maze spontaneously joined and splintered over a century of accretion. We passed busy ajummas in aprons and rubber kitchen gloves tossing knife-cut noodles in colossal, bubbling pots for kalguksu, grabbing fistfuls of colorful namul from overbrimming bowls for bibimbap, standing over gurgling pools of hot oil, armed with metal spatulas in either hand, flipping the crispy sides of stone-milled soybean pancakes. Metal containers full of jeotgal, salt-fermented seafood banchan, affectionally known as rice thieves, because their intense, salty flavor cries out for starchy, neutral balance; raw, pregnant crabs, floating belly up in soy sauce to show off the unctuous roe protruding out from beneath their shells; millions of minuscule peach-colored krill used for making kimchi or finishing hot soup with rice; and my family's favorite, crimson sacks of pollack roe smothered in gochugaru, myeongnanjeot.

Once, when I was a kid, I had impressed my mother, intuitively dipping a whole raw pepper into ssamjang paste at a barbecue restaurant in Seoul. The bitterness and spice of the vegetable perfectly married with the savory, salty taste of the sauce, itself made from fermented peppers and soybeans. It was a poetic combination, to reunite something in its raw form with its twice-dead cousin. "This is a very old taste," my mother had said.

I loved my little grandmother Hwang with her wooden leg. She never got upset with me, even when I cried and pestered her to carry me on her back like a horse. She was a wonderful storyteller; I would sit with her for hours as she told me about her childhood in the South. ... Most of her stories were from the time of Chosun, when there was no North or South Korea, only one country, one people. She told me we had the same culture and shared the same traditions as the South. She also told me a little bit about the time she visited Seoul, although even saying the name was forbidden in North Korea. You just didn't mention such an evil place. I knew it existed only from propaganda, newspaper articles describing anti-imperialist demonstrations by its oppressed masses. But somehow my grandmother planted deep inside me a curiosity about this place she had loved. She told me, "Come to my grave someday, and tell me that the North and South are reunited.

The music is beautiful, elegant, slow, and powerful. As I play, my breathing seems to follow the melody, rising and falling, and rising again. It’s as if I replay the emotions of the week in the ebb and flow of the song, the excitement of being in Seoul, of making new friends, of getting to know my grandmother, the distance between my mother and me, the what-ifs about my future and music school, everything that Jaewoo makes me feel: anticipation, frustration, joy, and something else, something more.

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We presume ourselves to be free, but in reality, we passionately exploit ourselves til we collapse.

There were so many DJs in Seoul that I wondered if there ought to be some regulating association that handed out licenses in order to ensure quality spins.

Several years ago I was in Seoul, South Korea. The police had blocked traffic so that we could have a walking meditation in the city. When the time came to lead the walking meditation, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't walk, because hundreds of journalists and people with cameras were closing in. There was no path to walk. So I told the Buddha, "Dear Buddha, I give up, you walk for me." The Buddha came right away. He walked and people made a path for the Buddha to walk.

the president made sense once you stopped viewing him as a human being and began to see him as “a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine.” Like deep-learning systems, Trump was working blindly through trial and error, keeping a record of what moves worked in the past and using them to optimize his strategy, much like AlphaGo, the AI system that swept the Go championship in Seoul. The reason that we found him so baffling was that we continually tried to anthropomorphize him, attributing intention and ideology to his decisions, as though they stemmed from a coherent agenda. AI systems are so wildly successful because they aren’t burdened with any of these rational or moral concerns—they don’t have to think about what is socially acceptable or take into account downstream consequences. They have one goal—

Increased English FM Broadcasting In 2008, the KCC issued permits to English FM broadcasting stations in 3 regions (Seoul, Busan, and Gwangju). In 2010, the KCC

service quality in Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon, Chungcheong, Jeolla, Gyeongsang, Gangwon and Jeju. Trial quality assessment was also

2009, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (herein after referred to as the ICANN) held a meeting in Seoul.

service (Songpa, Seoul); verification of the efficiency of a climate information collection system based on intelligent object com

In 2010, trial subscriber networks of a gigacapacity were established in Daejeon, Bucheon and select areas in Seoul to provide

past year, reflecting not just the city’s strong economy but also the impossibility of building on its edges. The insistence on big minimum lot sizes in some American suburbs and rural areas has much the same effect. Cities that try to prevent growth through green belts often end up weakening themselves, as Seoul has done. A wiser policy would be to plan for huge expansion. Acquire strips of land for roads and railways, and chunks for parks, before the city sprawls into them. New York’s 19th-century governors decided where Central Park was going to go long before the city reached it. New York went on to develop in a way that they could not have imagined, but the park is still there. This is not the dirigisme of the new-town planner—that confident soul who believes he knows where people will want to live and work, and how they will get from one

The G20 Communications Exhibition was held from November 5-13, 2010 to accompany the G20 Summit Meeting in Seoul. The

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told one of the authors in Seoul, South Korea, a de cade ago that he has always followed one piece of advice that his MIT professors had given him: “Never touch the money system.” Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008.

Vote on the registration and registration change of two organizations using broadcasting channels (City of Seoul and one other organization) Voting Approval of the retransmission of foreign broadcasting programs (by Fashion TV HD)

Today’s explorers migrate to the cities that are most likely to maximize innovation and entrepreneurial talents and skill. Wherever the most talented choose to migrate is where the next economic empires will rise. That’s why San Francisco, Seoul, and Singapore have become such colossal engines of job creation.

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has ordered people who share the name of leader Kim Jong Un to change their names, South Korea's state-run KBS television reported on Wednesday.

Uber, which raised $1.2 billion this month at a valuation of $40 billion, said in August it had sought a legal opinion and that its Seoul service obeys the law. Opposition to its operations is down to outdated regulations that precede smartphone and wireless technology, Allen Penn, the company’s head of Asia, told reporters at the time. Paid transportation with unregistered vehicles is “clearly illegal activity,” South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said later that month. The maximum penalty for Uber’s alleged legal violation is a two-year prison sentence or a fine of nearly $20,000, Yonhap News reported Wednesday.

Korea was my Zion. I had read too many British novels about wretched children finding out they were actually of noble birth and I was expecting to be salaamed upon arriving at the Seoul airport.

Nuclear weapons have only been used twice, both times in the war against Japan. In each case it was used by the United States during World War II. The first was used on August 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and the second was dropped three days later over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two bombs resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter million people! Recently I have heard it said that since we have the second largest arsenal of nuclear bombs, we should use them to teach North Korea a lesson and reduce tensions. Perhaps we are the ones that need to learn a lesson, so let me start by saying that since these first two bombs that have been used in anger, over two thousand tests have been conducted and that it was Russia that tested the largest bomb ever detonated. On 30 October 1961, Russia which was then the Soviet Union, detonated what was called the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons which is more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Are we and our leaders insane? It is only the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of which we are a member that can reduce the spread and possible the use of nuclear weapons. Now with North Korea being a player, its effectiveness has been questioned and we are on the brink of engaging in a contest that threatens to kill 2,000,000 people in the first day. Many of these people are American military personnel and their families stationed in in Seoul, South Korea. Following any initiative on our part, including the taunts we are making, all bets will be off and there is the possibility that other countries will see the United States as the enemy that has to be stopped!

Nếu không có chiến tranh, mình chắc giống Hàn Quốc hiện nay, Sài Gòn sẽ là Seoul, ba tụi bay còn sống, mày sẽ có chồng có con, còn tao là bà nội trợ nghỉ hưu, chứ đâu phải thợ làm móng

PV became the first Indian prime minister to travel to the Republic of Korea. In Seoul, he urged Korean chaebol to invest in India in a big way. In 1991, there was no major Korean brand available in the Indian market. A decade later, Samsung and Hyundai had become household names across

Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul. In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon

Ten thousand people were baptized in the Han river in Seoul, Korea. Imagine! 10,000 people giving their lives to Christ at one time! I will never forget it! ----I felt that the constant prayers of the Korean people had made the difference. I think we in the west should take prayer more seriously.

Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) In the meantime, in 2013, the ACRC also focused on foreign press reports. It actively encouraged foreign press reports by providing the member reporters of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club with its press releases in English and other materials such as the themes, presen-