Jebi-ri (Swallow Village)

 

A traditional Korean house minus the traditional clay tile roof plus a sheet metal roof probably added during the New Village Movement in the 60s and 70s. No one seems to live here now.

The ubiquitous rural cultivator and passing truck.

 

Back of a truck used as storage.

Furniture outside a seemingly abandoned greenhouse farm.

I have the feeling I posted these over at my old website. But that website has disappeared so I can't check. 

Repurposed

 

The part of this abandoned traditional Korean home that once housed a precious cow or bull has been taken over by a molly and her two kittens. The braver of the kittens didn't mind me and my camera that much. The mother tolerated me once I had slow-blinked her once or twice.

Grass

 On a walk around my neighbourhood I made a number of photos and whittled them down to these two after a couple of weeks of editing. The saturated colours come from the Velvia film simulation on the X-T4, if anyone is interested. The colours look a bit garish on the camera's rear screen, but are more toned down on my iMac monitor. I used to use Velvia 50 now and then and, to my eye, the simulation looks similar. No surprise, given that the man responsible for Velvia film also worked on the digital version. 

I like the division of the frame into living plants and dead plants. 

An old house that I've photographed before. I photographed it this time because of the vines and weeds that grew up during the summer.

Hall and Door

This hallway is actually the space between two buildings at the Ojukheon residence. Why it is open on one side and closed off with a door on the other is a bit of a mystery.

4.55

4.55 is the number of gigabytes I have used out of the 15GB that Google provides me for email, photos, documents, and blog posts. Although I resize my photos before uploading them to reduce storage use, the number in the title slowly but surely increases every week. At my present rate of posting, I expect to reach my cutoff point in a year or so.

Google used to boast that you would never have to delete an email because of unlimited storage and even offered unlimited uploads of optimised JPG files. But that changed and now each account holder gets a maximum of 15GB for free.

Not that I'm complaining. Server farms are expensive to build and maintain. It's unreasonable for me to expect Google to provide an infinite cloud drive in exchange for just allowing them to tell advertisers I have an interest in cats and cameras. (Strangely enough, I rarely see feline or photography related ads when using Google services. It's always some bloody K-Pop star being much too excited about drinking a beer or some sugary-cute Korean actress flirting around a bottle of soju).

But what happens when I reach my limit? I won't be able to upload more photos unless I delete earlier ones, and that would ruin previous posts. I could pay for extra storage, but blogging is not important enough to me to justify the cost. And, unless I pay forever, photos are going to eventually get deleted anyway. Switching to another free service is a possibility, but I've done that recently and most readers didn't follow. A less disruptive method would be to post just one quality photo a week and write about it in detail.

A method that avoids the problem altogether is joining a print exchange club, but a quick search shows that existing groups are mostly for people who do their own printing at home. I get my prints done at a lab, so that option is out for me. I suppose I could start my own group, but I'm not sure I have the energy to set it up and find members. And it could become quite expensive quite quickly if there is much interest. Also, Korea Post is still not sending airmail to a number of countries. So a print exchange club would have to wait until next year or later anyway.

I have just over 10GB of time left to consider a solution. Maybe a good idea will present itself and maybe it won't. Maybe I'll become an Instagrammer, horror of horrors(1). Maybe I'll lose interest in blogging in the meantime and the problem will solve itself.

(1) There's nothing wrong with Instagram, but I don't think a phone screen is a good place for serious sharing of photography.

Wheeled Things in Alleys

 I thought about linking photos to Flickr, but it's much more convenient to insert them straight from Google Photos. I can post the photos at a smallish size but readers can see them at an enlarged size by clicking.

I've posted variations on this scene before. The expensive car in an alley formed by a jumble of buildings. It screams 'slumlord', doesn't it? There is a glass door behind the car, but I don't know what it leads to. A very narrow office? A side entrance to one of the buildings? I'm not brave enough to pull on the handle or knock.

Here's a cheaper mode of transportation with lots of cargo space. This is the sort of bicycle you'll see older men riding around town.

Some Random Photos from a Downtown Walkabout

Found in a small undeveloped space surrounded by buildings

Rental Enquiries

Not an abandoned building

Waiting for the bank to open

 

Cats and Cameras

First of all, a few cat photos. Because why not?

Next, a weird dream I had the other night. I dreamt that I went to the vet with a cat that looked like Amice but had blue fur on top with more stripes. This blue cat was hanging off my arm with all four legs, for some reason. The vet also had a camera section(!) and was selling 6x7 format camera kits in cases at different prices. The cameras looked something like Pentax 67 cameras, and each kit had different quick release plates, filters, and so on. Also, the cameras were in various conditions, with the cheapest (broken) being free and the most expensive being like new and costing nearly four million Won. Also in the animal hospital / camera store was a strange animal that was something like a cat, something like a monkey, and something like a wild pig. It had dark skin and its patchy fur was in sprouts that looked something like yellow fungus. This very friendly creature took a liking to me and hopped up on my shoulder where it stayed. The vet didn't know what kind of animal it was and didn't seem to care much. I was wondering how I could convince the missus to keep it when I woke up. I think the city is adding something to the water supply . . . .

Final Photos from Seoul

 After I finished looking around Ikseondong, I jumped in a cab and went to the neighbourhood of Itaewon. When I first came to Korea, Itaewon was a rather scummy place where people would noisily try to sell you fake luxury goods and custom suits on the main street. When the sun went down you would be accosted by prostitutes standing at the entrances to dodgy looking bars and dark alleys.

The city cleaned the place up and the main drag now has Starbucks, nice hotels, expensive clothes shops, luxury apartmetns, an Apple store, and so on. But off the main drag is where the 99% live. That's where I spent my time making photos because it's a lot more interesting.

Morning purse shop.

Maybe this guy spent so much on his BMW that he could only afford to live in a back street.

Some of the back streets are starting to go fancy. No doubt driving up rent for the locals.

I'm guessing 'Yurt' is a café.

I thought this was rather funny when I saw it, but I'm not sure the garbage bags in the background stand out enough to make the photo work.

Frankie Coffee and Barbara's Kitchen. 

I sweat like a (insert obscenity here) walking up and down the hills of the neighbourhood.

Hyeseong Market. A shop that, according to their sign, sells rice, fruit, vegetables, side dishes, and cigarettes. There's probably ice cream in the cooler in front of the store.

A shop advertising general construction and repair. Not sure I'd call them.

Didn't attempt these stairs . . . .

Picture of Jesus at the bottom of a tall jumble of apartments. 

Love this Honda motorcycle. I would love to have one, but I'm not that suicidal yet.

Colour!

This halal restaurant used to be a famous bar called Polly's Kettle. They served lemon and cherry soju that tasted like Kool-Aid, and you didn't know you were plastered until you stood up and tried walking back to your hotel. So I've heard . . . . 

Foreign Food Mart. Groceries from around the world. A very interesting place to browse.

I took a taxi to the express bus terminal after I did a bit of shopping in the Foreign Food Mart. Seoul has an excellent subway system, but I stopped using it when visiting Seoul. Taxis are more expensive, but they are comfortable. And it's not like I visit Seoul every weekend or anything.

The bus home. It rained heavily near the mountains separating Gangwon Province from the west.

Seoul was pretty good, but next time I'll go when the weather is cooler and I don't sweat so much on the hills.

A Few More From Seoul

 I stayed at the IBIS Ambassador Hotel Insadong in Seoul. It's cheap enough for about any budget but nice enough that you don't have to worry about weirdos wandering the halls at night.

View from the ninth floor at night. iPhone photo, not film.

Early in the morning I went up on the roof to see the view of Ikseondong, a neighbourhood of traditional Korean houses that are being turned into trendy cafés.

A telephoto picture of the street that leads to the hotel.

The same street, but with a wider lens.

I parachuted into Ikseondong and walked around a bit. Where I come from, scones are called buns or tea buns and they aren't triangle shaped or so large. I once saw these large triangle scones described as American Scones in a department store. If anyone from The States is reading this, could you tell me if scones in the U.S. look like this?

A less trendy alley in the neighbourhood, where a restaurant is using the street as a place to store things.

More to come . . . . .

A Few From Seoul

 In late June I took an overnight trip to Seoul. I brought my Nikon F100 and the colour film I had left in the fridge. There were two rolls of Portra 400 and a roll of Fuji C200. I think I also brought a roll or two of black and white film in my bag, but I didn't get to them.

Most of the photos I made were just to remember things I ate and saw during my trip. I'm posting a few here that I think are worth sharing.

I arrived at Gangneung Bus Terminal a bit early and used my time to make a few photos of the departures area.

On the right is Namedaemun, one of the three great gates of Seoul. The original burned and so did a later gate. The latest burning was by a disgruntled man a number of years ago. As luck would have it, the government had recently done a complete survey of the gate and were thus able to reconstruct it exactly. But the gate is not the subject of this photo. It's the crowds that are going to have a big mashup in the middle of this crosswalk. There are arrows showing people to keep to the right, but whatever.

One way street. Or whatever.

Signs advertising a monkfish restaurant and a fortune teller. 

More to come . . . .

Selfie in Scooter Mirror

 While I was making this photo a woman came out of a shop across the road and asked me why I was taking a picture. I thought the scooter might be hers, so I showed her the photo I had just made. Then she complained for a couple of minutes about the scooter, which someone had left months ago. It's taking up a parking space that she could be using. I empathise with her, but a scooter is easy to move and why not call the city to have it removed?

Motel

 

Blue Truck (Flickr Test)

After a bit of experimentation and some help searches, I finally found out how to insert a photo from Flickr in a blog post. Now I no longer need to save copies of pictures for both Flickr and this blog. This will save space on my Google Drive as well.

This truck is usually parked in this place. Most city trucks are dark green, but this one is more pleasant to look at. I wonder if it's an older paint scheme. 

Hipstamatic Blue

 The sky in Korea seems to be either completely blue or completely grey. On rare days the atmosphere tries its hand at art.

Hybrid Gas System

 

Newer or central parts of the city are connected to the city's gas pipe infrastructure and the amount of LNG you use is recorded by a meter. In older or out-of-the-way parts of the city people need to have tanks of LPG delivered to their restaurants or homes. I came across what seems to be a hybrid system in the downtown area. There is a gas meter, but it's connected to two LPG tanks. Maybe the gas company makes regular deliveries without being called and notes the number on the meter to calculate the bill.

Ghost Captured on Film!

 

I had my F100 set up on a tripod to make some photos of the curtain blowing in the breeze when Amice came by to join in the fun. The photo of the curtain by itself was boring, but the ones with the cat are fun to look at.