iPhone photo: Gwanghwamun and a 'haetae'

On my first evening in Seoul back in June, I found myself here, in front of a 'haetae' (mythical fire-eating guardian lion/dragon/dog) beneath Gwanghwamun, the recently restored gate to Gyeongbok Palace. This double-roofed upswept structure dominates the historic main artery of the city.

The story of the haetae and the gate it guards sums up the turbulent, but resilient history of the Korean Capital:

1390's: The gate is built when Seoul becomes the capital of a new dynasty.

1590's: The  guardhouse above the stone arches is burned during the Japanese invasions. It lays in ruins until...

1867: It's rebuilt as part of the restoration of Gyeongbok Palace; the construction almost bankrupts the 'Hermit kingdom' which finally ends up becoming a protectorate and then an outright colony of Japan in 1910. Seoul is renamed 'Keijo.'

1926: The gate is dismantled and 're-mantled' nearby during the Japanese Occupation, to make way for construction of the Colonial Government General Building.

1950:  Communist troops retreat for the first time during the Korean War, the gate is destroyed again...

1963:...rebuilt, again.

1990's: the Government General Building is demolished to make way for the restoration of Gyeongbok Palace; Gwanghwamun gate will finally be restored to its original condition and location.

2010: The newly restored gate is unveiled; it has come home, after over eight decades of being 'displaced'...

Once again, the stone 'haetae' can stand guard, as it over six centuries ago when it was first placed here.

This time, may it last for a good while...



traditional symmetry, modern space: National Museum of Korea, Seoul

symmetry, color, rythym of repetition:

the ceiling of the Cheongjajeong pavilion in the garden in front of Seoul's new National Museum of Korea,

painted in the traditional style...

After walking through galleries ranging from neolithic to neo-Confucian,

a pleasure to rest one's feet in the shade of this octagonal structure--

and then lying down, looking up, a surprise to see a kaleidoscope with a pair of cranes at its center...

The pavilion is roofed with green celadon tiles:

Entry Hall of the Museum:

This museum was opened in 2005, south of the historical core of downtown Seoul, in the Yongsan district. Nearby is the Yongsan U.S. Military Garrison; within the next few years, the U.S. is scheduled to move its facilities out of the city, and Seoul has grand plans for this valuable real estate; the Museum is just the beginning...

This marble pagoda from the mid-1300's is one of the museum's centerpieces; during the Japanese Occupation, it was taken to Japan, then returned to Korea in the 1960's...

Looking south from the Museum, the reflecting pond and pavilion...beyond, some of Seoul's typical modern middle-class housing--high-rise apartments in domino-rows...aesthetically challenged, if efficient...

back from Korea...and a backyard mourning dove nest

Yes, wi-fi is ubiquitous in Korea, but during the month of June, while traveling around Korea, I never did get around to posting photos to this site.

So, here, finally, are a couple of photos:

This is one of my favorite scenes in Seoul--the six-story-tall Buddha of Bong-eun-sa temple (which dates back to the end of the 8th century), gazing out at the skyscrapers of the Gangnam district, including the 748ft/228m-tall World Trade Center Seoul Tower, built in time for the 1988 Olympics.

As recently as the 1970's and early 1980's, much of what is today Gangnam (southern Seoul) was still farmland. Perhaps no other city has undergone the transition from essentially medieval to modern so quickly. My mother lived through the Korean War, when the city was mostly flattened, and I remember my childhood visits, seeing the streets torn up for subway construction, and the endless rows of cranes and high-rise skeletons in what was still, then, countryside.

Seoul is now a city where commuters, at rush-hour, can use their smart-phones to shop for groceries, scanning bar-codes in some subway-station-displays.

The rapid change in lifestyle has created several decades of generation-gaps--each generation has grown up, literally, in a different world...but a few landmarks have remained. The tug-of-war between values--between religious and secular, Western and neo-Confucian, materialism and asceticism, progress vs. preservation, Christendom and Buddhism, filial piety vs. egotism--often not pretty, occasionally harmonious, but always vibrant.

...looking through one of the arches of Gwang-hwa-mun gate at Gyeongbok Palace,

during the recently reinstated changing-of-the-guard ceremony...

Period-dressed soldiers march on ground that until the 1990's

was dominated by the Government General building that the Japanese

had built during their colonial occupation (1910-1945).

The historical seat of Korea's Joseon dynasty has been restored

and visitors flock here several times a day for the vivid medieval pageantry.

Standing amid the architecture and sounds of the changing-of-the-guard,

you can almost forget the skyscraper-dominated sprawl of the rest of Seoul.

(More from the palace to come later.)

Locally, then:

from this morning in the backyard,

perched above the patio: 

(above photo published in the Arizona Daily Star in September, 2011)

I thought it was too late in the year for mourning doves to be nesting in the desert, but I was wrong. How these creatures have survived the neighborhood hawks and ravens so far, I don't know...

NOW showing in the desert: Saguaros in bloom...and on to Korea

May and June in the Sonoran desert: birds and blooms
(these guys are ubiquitous here, but you just gotta love their sky-blue eye-shadow, eh?)

 

Desert white-winged doves feast on the saguaro blooms during the day;
 bats pollinate them at night...



Each bloom (about the size of the palm of your hand) opens at night...
and by the end of the next day, they're spent...



...without blooms...

...and then with:

 

Even after living here for a few years now, I always find the interiors of cactus blooms to be surreal--
sinister hands, sea anemones, tentacular, arid echoes of fantastic corals...

======================

Next week, I leave for Korea;

after eighteen years away,

I'll be spending about four weeks there,

in Seoul and also on the opposite coast, in the city of Sokcho,

at the foot of Seoraksan Mountain National Park...

No other country in history 

has modernized as rapidly as South Korea;

within one lifetime--my mother's--

from completely war-shattered

third-world ruins,

it has become the world's most Internet-connected society,

one of the world's largest computer, cellphone,

automobile and ship manufacturers;

the world's tallest building, the 2000-ft+ Burj tower in Dubai,

was built by a South Korean company, Samsung.

Crazy.

Here's one of the last photos (scanned; taken by a cheap point-and-shoot camera)

 I took the last time I was in Seoul:

...one of my last days there, in the fall of 1993--

new construction going up just behind

the grounds of Deoksugung palace,

(late XVI c.)

I can't wait to see what else is new...

With the ubiquity of wi-fi in South Korea,

 I hope to be posting while there...

'stay tuned'...

hummingbird nest...back to Central America

We had an out of town visitor this weekend--so a visit to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum was a must. The timing was right--there were six different nests in the hummingbird aviary, and here's one of them:

...another de rigueur activity to introduce desert life--an evening walk in Sabino Canyon:

The out-of-town friend lives in Guatemala, which is, incidentally, where I got my first digital camera. I began learning to use it, walking around her hilltop neighborhood to the west of Guatemala City; this sunset view of the Volcán Agua was one of the first photos I took:

Her home in Guatemala was a home-away-from-home for us during the year we lived in Central America. When we got back to León, our Nicaraguan 'hometown,' 

I had fun taking pictures of the many colonial doorways in that hot, lowland, university town:

...my favorite is this one:

I was running errands (that's my bike) and on the ride home a row of buildings caught my eye. I got off my bike, got my little camera out of my backpack to take a quick picture, and then when I turned around to continue on my way, I realized, ahh, THIS is the photo I want!

If you never stop and look, the unexpected will never grab your eye.

...with an iPhone in St. Louis

Last week, I traveled to St. Louis for a conference. With storms in the mid-west, there were cancelled flights, so the itinerary turned into an all-day-long affair: Tucson to Dallas, then Dallas to Chicago, and finally Chicago to St. Louis, arriving late at night.

Since this was a work-trip with not much free time, I didn't bring my camera...I immediately regretted that decision the following morning when I looked out my hotel window, waking up to this view:

(...stitched together on my iPhone with the Autostitch App...)

RIGHT downtown!--with the celebrated 630-ft. high  Gateway Arch on the left, and the mid-19th century Old Courthouse on the right (site of the original Dred Scott court case)...

So, I did the best I could with my cellphone camera...

The scale of the monument, and the audacity of its slender construction--just awesome!

Paris has its Eiffel Tower, Seattle its Space Needle...

and in the middle of the Continent,

St. Louis is justifiably proud of its stainless steel gesture of pure mathetmatics...

looking up the south leg:

...and then after a four-minute claustrophobic ride in a retro-futuristic round bubble of the elevator-tram--think of peas traveling up a giant leaning pod--this is the view of the Arch's shadow, eastward over the Mississippi River:

...looking westward over the downtown core, flanked on its south by the baseball stadium, and on the north by its hockey area:

 (this is stitched together from five cell-phone photos)

...and, fun with vertigo: splicing together two shots for a 'straight-down' view

between the legs of the Arch:

(Math trivia: the Arch, instead of being a true parabola, is a catenary curve.)

=======================================================

I went up to my hotel's roof-deck--had to shoot through glass--but still, a fun phone-panorama, with the Mississippi River at muddy flood-stage:

...and a view from one of downtown's many plazas:

 ...and then inside the domed atrium in the center of the Courthouse--the color scheme seemed pretty 1980's to me, for a 1850's-era building:

 (again, stitched from 5 cellphone photos,
distorted, but I still like it...)

===========================================

Pure form.

Published! ...photo used for official AATF poster...fruit of a French-speaking summer

A few summers ago, I took my wife on her first visit to Québec and Montréal. One of our favorite places was the Marché Jean-Talon, North America's largest farmer's market, located in Montréal's vibrant 'Petite Italie' neighborhood. The market's colorful displays of fresh produce just cry out to be photographed.

Ah, the berries of a northern summer:

...des fraises (strawberries), des groseilles (gooseberries), des mûres (blackberries)

des framboises (raspberries), et des bleuets (blueberries)...
et de petites tomates, aussi (and small tomatoes, too)

A while back, I submitted a few photos from that trip to the AATF (The American Association of French Teachers), which is one of the world's largest professional organizations of French language teachers. I was recently notified that one of my photos was chosen for their "National French Week" posters which will be mailed out to about 10,000 members later this year!

Below, you'll see the above photo in the lower right corner--the image got 'flipped' in the design. The director of the AATF wrote me: "The vivid red gave our student designer the inspiration for the rest of the poster, and red was a color we had not featured yet for National French Week."

Vive le français!