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[RACETRAITOR]

If you've been in Seoul long enough, you've probably seen one or two abandoned neighbourhoods. These are generally places where the residents have been forced to leave by gangsters, in the name of urban renewal.

I thought I'd share some pictures of these areas.

I had just come from a wedding with my girlfriend. We were wondering how to waste the rest of the afternoon, when both of us saw abandoned homes right outside the wedding hall.

The red spraypaint says condemned. A sign told me that it had been condemned on October 10. This was October 16.



Smashed stairway


Danger



A cat watches us from one of the homes that hasn't yet been condemned.





These are the two houses we entered, as seen from the parking lot of the wedding hall.

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Here's an apartment block in Dongdaemoon. It doesn't look particularly spectacular, or abandoned, from this angle.


How about this angle?



We found a ground floor entrance where some construction workers were busy and slipped past them. We took the stairs up a few flights to about the second top floor. Inside it was filthy, and there was fire damage everywhere. Looking out the window, we could see the bustle of Dongdaemoon Market below us. We looked into some of the apartments, which had been abandoned and more thoroughly cleaned out than the ground-floor houses on the Road of New Hope, in my other gallery.



On the way down, I spotted a sign in Korean. The only word that stuck out to me was CCTV. We buggered out of there fast. As we escaped through the back alley, a police car pulled in behind us and began to tail us. I told Paul to keep walking, and maintain the "We're clueless foreigners--we didn't know what we were doing--we were just looking for the bathroom and couldn't understand all the Korean warning signs" strategy.

The cop car got closer, and we moved politely out of its way. When the driver saw we were both foreigners, he drove past, shaking his head and chuckling to himself. The Korean police can't be bothered to deal with clueless foreigners, especially since so few of them speak English. We got lucky that time.
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Here's one near Daeheung in downtown Seoul.


This is the first home we explored. It looks like a decent enough place, but instead of carpet there's rubble, and instead of a welcome mat there's shattered glass.


Here's a traditional Korean home with one resident left. Looks pretty posh, or probably was at one point.


This used to be a child's room, now ripped open and exposed to the main road.



Interior of a smashed home. Most people left in a hurry.


With bathroom.


Going up a flight of stairs, I found these plastic flowers left behind.


They had a bathtub, rare in a Korean home.


Part of this neighbourhood wasn't abandoned yet. It seems like the destruction had started in one corner and slowly spread outward. This is one resident living on the edge of the destruction.

This translates to "Let's move out as soon as possible." Notice all the little stickers; they're children's temporary tattoos.

Take a closer look at this mattress.


This is the smashed entranceway from when we originally headed down.


Here is looking back down at the area. The street name translates to "Street of New Hope."

The flower on this roof is called the mugunghwa.


If you come across an area like this and you have some spare time, I recommend you go for a walk through it and see the cost of modernisation. Please be respectful though, as there are generally residents still around in the soon-to-be-evicted places, and you can imagine they're probably not waiting for a bright future.