You Can’t Go Home Again...

During my previous eight weeks in Seoul, I stayed with my parents in their rented single-family house on a road filled with fancy homes that was up a hill parallel to the main street.This big store was definitely not what used to greeted us as we came down to go shopping.

I was excited when I found the first of the two sets of stairs leading up to their old street. We used to laugh that the stairs changed for each of my visits—sometimes becoming more even and sometimes becoming an utter mess.

I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I got to the top of the second set of stairs and realized that while the left side of the street looked as I recalled with a variety of walls surrounding mansions, the right side of the street was completely transformed with no houses in sight. Where once stood the large two-story house that my parents rented was now a six-story apartment building with Psalm 122:3 across the front: Wealth and riches are in his house and his righteousness endures forever. 

Two doors down I spotted this funky elevator used to squeeze yet a few more cars into the compact lot.

On another road parallel to the main street was the restaurant district, filled mainly with international cuisine catering to tourists, which I also didn’t recall from the past.

Mixed in was this mask display...

....and sock display.

Although Korea has become very high tech in the last 25 years, some areas of Seoul are still lagging behind.