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For better AND for worse: What’s the price of peace in Ihwa Mural Village?
One of my favorite sites in Seoul is Ihwa Mural Village. This neighborhood of tiny steep streets adjacent to Naksan Park is decorated with lots of amusing and imaginative street art. Add to that the area’s 180 degree views of the city, and you have a tourist attraction that I will run to see. With Seoul being entirely devoid of short-term visitors, we had the place basically to ourselves. We wound our way up the tiny streets and took our time posing for silly photos. In 2010 a Korean reality-TV show was filmed in the village and created the “wings mural.” It and subsequent versions of it have attracted many…
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Food Delivery in Quarantine: The Devil is in the Details
Being confined to our small apartment in Seoul has presented a number of challenges. Not surprisingly, our primary concern before arriving was making sure we would have enough food to eat. Thus, before we arrived, we had done some online research and had a plan in place. Our Airbnb host Han kindly offered to stock our kitchen with some essentials to get us through the first couple of days. We also planned to use the Shuttle app (similar to GrubHub) for delivery from area restaurants and Gmarket.com for groceries. Upon our arrival at the apartment we found that Han indeed left us the staples that we requested as well as…
