April, 1971: Camp Howze and the Finance Office
	March, 1971: Evenings at the Officers' Club
	Return to the Index for 1971

One of my favorite weekend activities is to hop on a kimchi bus and let it take me down to Seoul's North Gate, or even a little further into the city. Getting off, and with my little map in my back pocket, I'll wander through the city, or up onto the hillsides, eventually working my way down towards Yongsan Post. There, I will have some dinner at the Yongsan Officers' Mess. I can hang around there for a while before catching the scheduled bus that leaves at 9:30PM and heads north, stopping and most of the larger installations- including Camp Howze. I could take the kimchi bus, as my friend Dr. Kim once wrote out some Korean I could show at a bus stop to get on the right bus and off at the right place, but the Army bus is more reliable and more convenient.

It would have been interesting if I had carried a detailed map of Seoul on my wanderings through the city and had marked on it the locations where I walked. But street signs weren't always visible, and I would have to have spent a lot of time marking my twists and turns on the map. So while it would have been interesting to show you all just where I got off the bus and just where the street scene at left might have been photographed, I am unable to. But this view of some women in Seoul, on this cold day in March, trying to make some money with their little sales tables was a typical one. I really don't know who these women were, or how much of a living they could make by selling what fruit they could find. Rarely, though, does a picture of such seeming poverty and desperation make itself available. These kind of scenes, though, are in the minority. Korea is changing, and scenes like this are disappearing. More often than not, pedestrians are well-dressed, and most commerce is carried on in little shops.

NOTE from 2021:
The narrative above was written to my family and enclosed with my slides when I sent them home. When I sent my film to Kodak, I had them send the slides back to me in Korea so I could weed out the spoiled pictures and then write a narrative to accompany the slides when I sent them home to my family. I told my Dad to get out the slide projector and read through the narratives as he looked at the slides, and that's exactly what he and my Mom did.

As I may already have said, I have been working my way backward from the present in creating this online photo album. As I have done so, I have always sought to supplement the pictures with maps, aerial views, and other Internet-available content to help you understand the context of the pictures. Many times this has, I think, lent a depth to the pictures that would be entirely missing in a traditional photo album, or even on an online site like Flickr, or Google Photos, or even Facebook.

The further back I have come, though, the harder it has been to find maps and aerial views that match up to my pictures. On the earlier pages this year for my trip to Japan, much of Tokyo, and certainly most of the Golden Course and Nikko, had not changed so much that I couldn't locate things for you. Even though the Sanno Hotel is long gone, there were enough Internet references to it to enable me to locate it on the map for you.

Again, I have no idea where the little street in the picture at right is, but it was just one of many that I walked up and down as I wandered through the part of Seoul north of the river. One really unusual thing about the Korean cityscape is the ease with which restaurants are set up and taken down. Along about mealtimes, these street eateries spring up. All it takes is a charcoal-fueled cooker and a supply of rice cakes or meat. The boiling kettles contain noodle soup, and the small things in the center are flavored rice cakes. I really can't explain why there should be whole pig's heads sitting on the shelf, and I admit that the whole thing looked extremely unappetizing, but the Koreans really eat it up, no pun intended. I did too, on a few occasions, and suffered no ill-effects.

Continuing my comments from 2021, even today, I can't place these pictures. I think that Seoul is much different than Tokyo; I think that it was just on the cusp of dramatic change when I was here- change so dramatic that in 20 years or so one would not recognize the place. Certainly now, fifty years on, the city bears absolutely no resemblance to what it was, and very, very few of the structures or streets that appear in my photos even have references online today. Sure, landmarks like the Chosun Hotel or the Gyeongbokgung Palace are still there, and on the pages where you see these locations in my pictures, I can show you how they look now.

But for so many of my weekend excursions- like this one- there is very little I can do to pinpoint locations. About all I can do is to simply copy the narrative that I wrote at the time about the pictures, narrative that I actually wrote so my family would understand what they were looking at when they received my slides in the mail. I am fortunate that I had the presence of mind to ask my father to retain all the material I wrote and sent along with the slides. In the 1990s, I typed it all into my first PC, so it was in digital form when I got the idea for this online album. It has been been the foundation for all the narrative that you have read so far, and will continue to read as this online album moves through the years.

So once again I apologize for not being able to pinpoint locations for pictures like the ones on this page, but it is simply not possible, given the changes to South Korea, and particularly to its urban areas, over the past half-century. As an aside, I am amused to tell you that for the last 20 years, the three cars I have owned have all been made by Hyundai- a name I first heard while I was in Korea in 1970!

A Street Restaurant in Seoul This is the setup, with the rice cakes and the exposed cooker at the lower right. What the girl was cooking looked to me like extremely fat spaghetti in some kind of sauce, with maybe a trace of meat. Although it was undoubtedly not up to American sanitary standards, it did, nevertheless, smell delicious.

A Street Corner Restaurant Selling an Egg Dish On the corner of the alley sat an old woman, cooking eggs into some sort of omelet. She was extremely reluctant for me to take her picture, and as I snapped the shot she ran out of the picture. Note the American ration carton.

After wandering through the side streets for a while, I headed more towards Yongsan, which is actually in a more open, less congested, part of the city. Here, the streets were wider and the stores and shops larger.

A Typical Shopping Street in Seoul I especially enjoyed walking through Seoul, enjoying the varied life of the city, sampling the food where advisable, looking over the wares for sale, and watching the people.

A Street Vendor With the same ease that restaurants are set up, street shops are set up too. This man was selling clothing, obviously, hawking his wares like an old-time barker. He was very pleased that I took his picture; possibly he thought it would appear in the next issue of Modern Merchandising.

Oddly enough, I never seemed to come across any other Americans on my walks (although, considering how big Seoul is, is maybe not that surprising). But this led me to think that most Army folks were not really much concerned with trying to get to know the daily life of Koreans, unless there was something like a palace or a museum that we might have been told should not be missed.

This was a typical afternoon visit to the city; not my first and certainly not my last.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	April, 1971: Camp Howze and the Finance Office
	March, 1971: Evenings at the Officers' Club
	Return to the Index for 1971