Korea really isn't a place, it's a time. The rate of change is so fast that whatever physical place you went to in the past has probably been radically altered in the present, and will surely be lost in the future. I have come about to realize this a little too late, and thus my furious quest to document the shreds of the past came about largly to failure. The other more sucessful part of my trip was taking some pictures of future history, the bits and pieces I predict will be gone sooner then I would think. I only hope my predictions were correct. But I digress, some minor observations are in order. The first thing about Seoul that I noticed is that it is both a cleaner and dirtier place then I remember. In the distant past there were large swaths of area that were relatively poor by my US standards, and so poverty never really stuck out. Or, put another way, everybody was poor, but few were visibly destitute. On my trip I was shocked by both the shiny new sparkle to everything, from the subway stations to the buses to the streets, and by the large number of beggers and homeless I saw in my wanderings. A noticable change from last year was that I noticed people were more dishonest. There was plenty of turnstile jumping in the subway system, far more then I saw last year. And unlike last year, where I got dirty looks for sitting in the elderly/handicap seating on the trains when the cars were half empty, people were routinely occupying those once forbidden seats. Whether this was a function of true social change, or of the fact I spent far more time in the subway system this trip is a matter of speculation. The girls are not thin. However nobody is especially fat. Abercrombie&Fich is still quite populor, as it The North Face gear. In many ways, the styles and shapes of people are much like here, only a tad bit shorter and trimmer. Service was less attentive, except in electronics stores where you had to literally beat salespeople off with a stick. Last year, I recall having to wave off salespeople all the time, and even then they still followed around just in case. This time, I was pretty much ignored by all, except in the electronics malls (especially Yongsan and the cell-phone market behind Yongsan Station). Imagine walking down an empty aisle, with salespeople every 8 feet calling out to you from behind their counters. One lady in the cell-phone market, no joke, came out of her stall with a sign on a stick and stopped right in my path, demanding I pay attention to her sales pitch. Alas, I still don't speak the language, so I missed most of what she said. Again, this change may have been due more to the fact that I was traveling with women (mom, cousin) last year, and this time it was mostly myself. You cannot find the orange plastic general purpose bowl. They used to be ubiquitous. They were bright orange, about 1 liter capacity (maybe 2?), about a foot diameter , with a little lip you could use for pouring or as a thumbgrip. You would use it for everything. Washing the clothes, washing the rice/lettuce/radishes, taking a bath, washing the dog, watering the plants, pouring water out onto the sidewalk to cool off the summer heat, etc. They come in red and blue, but orange seems to have disappeared. The metal sidewalk signs in front of stores are now gone. Metal, rectangular, curved into a flat "S" when viewed from above, they would spin in the slightest breeze. Now all that remain are giant illuminated rectangular boxes that slowly rotate via electric motor. People are smiling. Actually, many a couple could stand to get a room, as I saw far too much ass-rubbing on the subways. In the far distant past, this was a big no-no. Holding hands was scandelous, and smiling at strangers was bound to get you angry confused stares. Except for the ass-rubbing in public, this is a good change I think.