Day 205: Vertical Limits

Another lazy post-bar day! Maeve, Michael and I slept in til almost noon and then Michael made us some delicious French Toast for breakfast. He even had some real maple syrup from Canada! YUM! The three of us just hung out for a while being Chatty Cathy's and then finally got moving in mid-afternoon.

Maeve went off to do some shopping and Michael and I decided to go and see a movie. We went and saw 'Mean Girls' (yes, the second time for me) in this really cool movie theatre in Apgujeong. Apgujeong is the ritzy 'Beverly Hills' area of Seoul. Lots of posh people and high end over-priced shopping. The movie theatre was so cool because it was a completely vertical theatre. There were 15 theatres at this complex but it was built in a sheer black glass tower. Each theatre was *stacked on top* of the other reaching high into the sky. Ours was #14, almost at the top, and the view from up there was amazing! In the men's bathroom they had these giant round porthole windows so that you could enjoy the view of sprawling Seoul as you peed. Way cool!

Seoul is a crowded city with a lack of available land and very high real estate prices. The city is constantly growing and building new stuff (Seoul is under *permanent* construction) and the only place left to go is up. Because of this, you see vertical stuff all the time. Vertical movie theatres, vertical restaurants, vertical stores, vertical shopping malls, vertical fast food joints (there's a four-story Burger King here!) and vertical motels. Anything that back home would be spread out horizontally is stacked up narrowly on top of itself here in Seoul.

The coolest are the vertical parking lots. Yes, you heard me correctly! Picture a large windowless building (quite ugly actually) ranging in height from five to over fifteen stories, but inside this tower are stacks upon stacks of cars. Now this is not a parkade, and you cannot drive up into the different levels. So how on Earth do the cars get up there? How it works is that you drive up to the front of the vertical parking lot, and the service man there gives you a designated number, or parking space code. He then drives your car into a small ELEVATOR that then proceeds to lift your car up to whatever level in the tower is available and parks is up in some small tiny near-inaccessible corner of this steel pinnacle. It's the strangest thing ever, but hey I guess it does free up land space and you'll NEVER have to worry about your car being vandalized or stolen while locked up in one of these things!

Despite the fact that there are a lot of high rise structures in Seoul (the entire city is virtually all high-rise residential blocks), there aren't any *REALLY* tall buildings here. With the exception of one or two towers, none of the skyscapers here are taller than anything that's found in Vancouver (around 40 stories or less is the average downtown office tower here.) Other than 63 Building on Yeouido Island in the Han River, Seoul doesn't really have any landmark towers. Unlike most other Asian cities, which are undergoing a frantic competition to see who can build the tallest skyscraper in the city/world (Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur are especially notorious for this, while Taipei just recently completed Taipei 101 - now officially the tallest building in the world) Seoul has kept its skyline quite low and fairly tame. I haven't been given a positive reason for this but apparently it was mainly out of fear of creating a super tall building that could become a target if North Korea ever decided to attack.

I guess having a hostile enemy only a few kilometres north of your capital, with a leader that at one time vowed to turn Seoul into "a sea of fire" would be inspiration enough not to create a really obvious attack target in the form of a super-high, super-vulnerable skyscaper! I wonder if the recent warming of negotiations between the two Koreas will release this fear, and result in the future contruction of those ridiculously high skyscrapers that almost every other major Asian city is known for?