Christmas in Seoul
In a post last month about expats and lost holidays, I wrote that Christmas in Seoul was generally not very festive and that decorations were only put up in a few areas. The last few years I guess have seen an increase in the number of decorations around the city. This year, I saw them in several places, as early as a couple of weeks before the big day.
So on Christmas day my wife and I took a 10 minute bus ride from our house to an area in central Seoul. Years ago there was a stream than ran through there. It was covered over in the late 60s or early 70s in the name of progress. When I first came to Korea, I heard a lot of stories about the stream, but all I saw was a street at ground level split down the middle by a very long overpass (more like an elevated street) to a nearby mountain.
A couple of years ago, the former Mayor of Seoul initiated some beautification projects. One of them was the destruction of that ugly overpass and the restoration of the stream. Since the stream is now essentially underground, they built a pumping system to force the water above ground level into a man-made canal. The stream runs for a few miles, lined with walkways, stepping stones, bridges, trees, paintings and sculptures, before emptying into the Han River.
As it turned out, what I had taken as elaborate Christmas decorations along a section of the stream was actually part of a “Light Festival”. I don’t know the details, only that the lights were designed by an Italian. The lights were up for a couple of weeks, but on Christmas Day my wife and I were surprised to learn that the two blocks covered by the lights were closed to automobile traffic. The place was crowded with people. We had hoped to have dinner at an Outback location overlooking the stream, but there was a two-hour wait. No worries though. We managed to get a seat at the bar of an Outback restaurant a couple of blocks away (which is actually two doors down from yet another Outback location on the same street).
On the way to the other Outback, we snapped up several pictures of the decorations.
This one is a shot near the entrance to the stream, just below where it is pumped from the ground, taken from a bridge:
The stream is below street level. All of the decorations were at street level. The next three are from different points along the street:
It was really quite beautiful. There was a similar structure a couple of blocks away in front of the Seoul City Hall. Many buildings in the area had their own decorations, some simple, others quite elaborate. I’ll post some pics of those later.