This photo is a little deceptive in that it shows less than one quarter of the city. I took it from about the center of the city in the World Trade building and just went towards the pie-piece of the city that had the sunset.

This shot was taken close to sunset, and everything was perfect to grab some sharp colors along with the brake lights of long exposures.

Over the weekend we hung pictures up at the gallery. Everything looks pretty sharp and those of you are coming to the gallery opening should see something a bit different, perhaps. I don’t know… impossible to be objective, but I do know it is different than what is usually shown there at Halcyon.

I’ll be showing about 45 pieces. Here is a sampling of the ones at the show. You will notice the first three are exceptionally pointy.
Dark Storm over Vancouver:

Intricate:

Spires of God:

Farewell Holland:

Fourth on Lake Austin:

This is Nathaniel:

Rush Hour in Seoul:

One Night in Bangkok:

Here is Seoul at sunset - check out the U-Turn trails on the large version.

Here is an HDR shot of the COEX area of Seoul taken around dusk.

Here is an interesting atrium of an office building in Seoul.

Seoul’s traffic is just about as bad as all major Asian cities, but when looked at from this vantage, it looks almost poetic.

I am leaving Seoul after a busy week here. I stopped at the top of the World Trade Tower after work yesterday to grab this HDR shot, which turned out pretty slick and Blade-Runneresque. If you click on it, then All Sizes, you can see it larger, which looks much better.

Seoul was rather cold, but clear yesterday, so after lunch I stopped at the World Trade Tower to take this shot:

I just uploaded all my pics to Flickr and here are a few cute shots I grabbed while in Korea last week.

On the last night in Korea, we all went over to Erik’s place to play board games and eat pizza. Here are a load of pictures from the night… including some very cute ones of Priya and her kids!

Look at the name of the pastry on the right… You’ll probably have to zoom.

I grabbed this interesting shot of a Korean pharmacy. I really like how everyone is standing in attention, ready to help the customer. You don’t see that in the US.

This picture was ill-advised and poorly shot, but it serves its purpose in telling this interesting tidbit about Korean life.

Most every day, Will, Erik, and I head over to one of the many saunas around Seoul. These are very popular and cost only a few dollars for entry. They are filled with naked Korean men who all walk around, moving from one hot tub jacuzzi to another. Most I have been in feature about four tubs of various degrees, a cold dip, lots of showers, a salt room, steam rooms, and the like.

The Korean men always really check out us whiteys. I think compared to their lithe hairless bodies, they see us as evolutionary Neanderthal hairy beasts trapsing around the sauna, using our fists to further propel our hindquarters.

Anyway, the reason I took this picture was to show these 20+ red blood circles on his back. About 10-25% of the guys in these saunas have their backs filled with red circles that are all bloody and bruised. It is the result of some new hot theraputic technique where they take a few dozen glass suction cups and attach them to your back and suck until they draw blood. It’s supposed to suck out toxins or something…

You can barely make out some of the spots in the pic below. It was very difficult to grab a secret shot while there are naked men walking around… Thank god remembered to turn off the flash.

Yesterday, while rooting around Gustaf’s apartment to find some razors or Lysol for the bed, we came across his book collection. Below, you can see what Will found… curious.

Myeongdong is one of about a dozen shopping areas of Seoul that are constantly packed with people, day or night. South Koreans seem to have an insatiable desire for shopping for clothes. North Koreans seem to have an insatiable desire for shopping for fissile material. This is a key difference I have noted.

Here is a picture of a three-story Dunkin’ Donuts.

And here is a typical department store in Seoul - this one is the Lotte Department Store. There must be (seriously) over 200 this size throughout Seoul.

Chris recommended we get some dimsum at a very famous place called Din Tai Fung. It was pretty good and had a good variety of dumplings, but they were out of crab, redbean, AND sesame. How is that possible? I thought those three things just naturally replicated themselves throughout Asia like Moses’ bread.

After we were done, we saw Sweet Buns, and knew it was made for us.

There is a very weird social behavior that is happening all over Seoul, and I started to notice it last time I was here.

Girls all over the city obsessively take pictures of themselves with their phones, look at the picture, than do it again and again and again. Erik even said that a few days ago he saw four girls at Starbucks sitting together, but none of them were talking - they were just taking pictures of themselves.

I think this is just something that happens in first world nations where people are wealthy enough not to work and there is NOTHING to do in the city during the day that is fun. All there is “to do” is to look good. Also, since Koreans are some of the closest people to cyborgs with their natural extension of technology, it’s like they are in some sort of robotic maintenance mode with their cameras.

Here is one I snapped of a girl taking a picture of herself while we were at Cafe Great in Appujeoung.

We walked into a nice, high-end department store called “Avatar” in Myeongdong to duck out of the freezing weather, and in the bedding/home decor area, we found this unusual display strewn across the bed. The one with the black “dots” smelled mildly of kimchi.

Well, there was a little bit of snow. Behind me you can see the B&B coffee where we have been having most of our meetings. Yesterday we were meeting with my friend from Bear Stearns in Hong Kong and he brought along a couple of guys from Cenergie that are building fuel cells. They had some first hand inside information on carbon trading in China, so it was it was interesting to hear about some of those business models based on virtual gaseous commodity trading.

Here are some of the movies that were featured in the in-flight magazine. How did these get green-lighted?

There are a ton of super-nice coffee shops all over Seoul. People go in there and just hang out in very comfy chairs and couches. Will and I went over yesterday evening after work and we spent some time reading our George RR Martin and playing some Advance Wars on the DS.

Here are some pics. That one of Will is kinda weird.

Every morning at Dunkin Donuts, Will and I eye this concoction, coyly called the “Glutinous Stick” with suspicion that borders on purchase. We have yet to buy and taste this epicurian delight, but there is always tomorrow.

While we were stuck in customs in Korea, we spotted this tall guy with this crazy jacket. You probably have to zoom to see it, but it is this black velvet jacket with a really weird stitching of two tigers on the back growling at the world. He was also wearing black, pin-striped pants, which made the whole get-up even more strange.

Not too far from our Sims Starter Apartment ™ we went to the local Starbucks. It’s just like the American Starbucks, except it is 100% more Korean. They have a lot of “green tea” versions of the same drinks, but also some of the basic stuff.

Strangely, this picture was taken inside Dunkin Donuts next door right before Will hit the table with his laptop bag and spilled my drink all over creation. We caused quite the ruckus as we were immediately surrounded by tiny Korean cleaning robots that were actually girls that worked there.

I had the infinite pleasure of sitting by this guy on the plane for 14 hours.

As we began our trip to Korea, we stopped off in San Francisco to switch planes. Upon checking in, we were told to go to a little holding area because Will is on the “Terrorist Watch List”. Security came riding over on a bike through the airport and started doing a thorough search.

I told Will it DID NOT HELP that he was wearing his Woven Muslim Prayer Cap. I did manage to snap this picture while we were in holding.

They eventually let us go. We think it is because his last name is “Kelly”, and it sounds like he might have done some past work for the IRA… but we can’t think of any IRA bombings since 20 years ago at a Harrod’s in London. I cautioned Will not to say anything bad about London until we were safely at the gate.

I am trying to get my ducks in a row and prepare for the trip to Korea next week. It’s always a long flight and I feel pressured to line up a myriad of entertainment options for the plane. I think I’ll be taking the new George R.R. Martin book along and some new games for the PSP. It will be a fairly short trip - I will then fly straight from Seoul to Montana… Well, not straight - it is a 15 leg trip via Southwest airlines.

Here are a few pics from recent trips to Korea:

In my picture dump to Flickr, I found this old one that I took in a mall in Korea. I think that over time you just get used to seeing crazy signs and window displays there, and weird things like this start to look normal. Now that I have been back in the states for a while, now I realize how dang weird this is.

I spent the week in Korea and I ate way too much Kimchi! There are a ton of different kinds of kimchi, sort of like cheese in France… except kimchi is about 1,000 times as spicy as a wheel Frumbuchentien.

Kimchi is cabbage that is placed into a vat and soaked in something hotter than burning magma for years until it is pulled out and consumed, thereby immediately sublimating any mouth that has the unfortunate happenstance of consuming it.