march 2023
I shot everything above on 35mm in South Korea. I did other things in the month of March, but nothing as defining as 2 weeks in and around Seoul - one for work and one for play.
I have wanted to visit South Korea for a long time, lured both by a year of working on a programme supporting underserved South Korean social entrepreneurs, and years of entanglement in the long tendrils of its national cultural output. Was Seoul as hilly as Korean TV and cinema would have me believe? Are the spas as rigorous and the soju as deadly? Are the men really as well groomed? (The answer to all of these: sort of.)
Memories of South Korea in my diary.
I really loved Seoul. A genuinely late-night city, a hodgepodge of the old and the wildly modern, unbeatable food and inhabitants that work hard and play very hard. I did work activities like events at Paju Book City and meetings across the river in Gangnam; tourist activities like going to the sheep cafe and the palaces, a late-night urban ghost tour under the first of the streelamp-lit cherry blossom, a 5am wake-up call to descend into the infiltration tunnels of the De-Militarized Zone and make eye contact with North Korean guards through binoculars. But having a bit more time there also meant getting a sense of how liveable the city is. Studying in the many beautiful cafes that seem to be built for appreciation over Instagram, an evening in the salt sauna in a mother-and-son-run traditional spa, late-night pork BBQ in Euraji, and the ubiquitous Hongdae photobooths.
Most of my time in Seoul was spent balanced between joy and overwhelm. It reminded me how rarely I travel somewhere so different from my everyday, even if the ubiquity of Korean music, literature and film in my life had tricked me into surprise at the culture shock (and the brutal jet-lag). I am hugely lucky to travel a lot - but not so far and for so long. It reminded me how out of the habit of experiencing genuine newness I have become, and how hungry I am for all of it at an age which feels like a precipice before smaller and more strictly structured lives.
Books I read in March.
Non-Korean experiences I enjoyed this month were watching the two green parakeets that spend their days flirting on the roof opposite my desk at home, spring coming to Hackney (and leaving again), and the perfect meal of schnitzel, honey and walnut cake and sweet plum vodka for my mum’s 70th.
march favourites
book Deep Down by Imogen West-Knights, and not just because it had my author portait in the back film Troll, which I watched on my last night in Seoul with a selection of Korean McDonalds delicacies art an incredible data nightlife data project by young artist collectives at the Korean Museum of Contemporary Art; like if Forensic Architecture concerned itself with clubbing podcast Death in Ice Valley, one of several investigative deep dives I clenched my teeth through on long-haul flights theatre After The Act at New Diorama, featuring a show-stopping Thatcher wig newsletter Rebecca May Johnnson’s dinner document, tremendous tender writing about the experience of eating