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Sun, January 17, 2021 | 11:58

Celebrating April Fool's Day with urban exploration

It's the most wonderful time of the year. My favorite holiday, April Fool's Day. My editor warned me there will be no pranks printed in the newspaper. So instead, I'd like to share some of my most legendary urban exploration April Fool's Day jokes of years past.

Foreign Communities | 2020-03-31 17:05

[Cityscapes] 15 years investigating Korea's forbidden urban spaces

I got my start urban exploring in Korea 15 years ago next week. I'd read up on the dangers and ethics of entering abandoned buildings and consulted experienced explorers active in other countries, but this was not something that was done here. Then Paul, a Korean American punk, showed me Korea had its own abandoned buildings hiding their own secrets.

Foreign Communities | 2020-02-25 11:00

[Cityscapes] Solving riddles of Gyeongui tunnel, Hongdae's 'real' underground

The area around Hongik University in western Seoul, commonly called Hongdae, has seen major changes over the decades. But rather than originating from the arts university sitting on a mountainside overlooking the neighborhood, almost all the changes here have been driven by infrastructure development.

Foreign Communities | 2019-09-17 17:30

[Cityscapes] Spiritual feeding for Ninjalicious, patron saint of urbex

The spirit of a particularly renowned urban explorer may have found itself drawn back to Earth in 2015, on the 10th anniversary of his death. But it was drawn toward Korea, a nation distant to where Jeff Chapman had ever known. But this beckoning force, emanating from western Seoul, offered food and drink, and it seemed to be coming from inside an abandoned building, so maybe...

Foreign Communities | 2019-08-20 18:40

[Cityscapes] Caught in Suwon's abandoned amusement park

Today's purveyors of abandoned amusement parks don't know how easy they have it. You can just go to Jungnang-gu and pay 5,000 won to enter Yongma Land. Ten years ago, Korea had one famous abandoned amusement park, Okpo Land, located all the way down on Geoje Island in South Gyeongsang Province, a long trip involving a bus through Tongyeong or a ferry from Busan. So when I dis...

Foreign Communities | 2019-03-26 22:01

[Cityscapes] Saying farewell to Yongsan Pochachon…again

The Yongsan area has been home to some large-scale changes over the years, but between the construction fences and excavation pits there have been spots where human-scale communities have taken root, at least temporarily.

Foreign Communities | 2019-02-19 11:42

[Cityscapes] Celebrating Christmas in Seoul's underground river

[Cityscapes] Celebrating Christmas in Seoul's underground river

It's Christmas again, and I find myself once again somewhere deep beneath Seoul, knee-deep in benzene-polluted water, armed with fireworks and a fake beard and firing at shadows moving in the dark.

Foreign Communities | 2018-12-25 17:31

[Cityscapes] Saying farewell to Yongsan Pochachon…again

[Cityscapes] Farewell Nightmare Lab

Urban explorers are sometimes criticized for hiding the sites we visit. But there are legit reasons for withholding information from the internet. We protect sites by obscuring place names, embargoing publication of pictures until a later date, even controlling who knows offline. Now that the Nightmare Lab is gone, only a trace of wallpaper remaining, I can tell this story.

Foreign Communities | 2018-10-16 17:14

[Cityscapes] A surprise tour of Cheongnyangni's cat houses

The major holidays are an ideal time to go urban exploring in Korea. Seoul clears out twice a year as everyone goes to their hometown for Lunar New Year and Chuseok. These holidays are also when animal abandonment peaks, so I pledged to always have some cat food in my trespassing kit.

Foreign Communities | 2018-09-18 00:36

[Cityscapes] 'Exorcising' an abandoned mental hospital

The abandoned mental hospital in the movie “Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum” is a real place, but the risks of visiting it are underreported. The threat isn't ghosts, but the living - police, neighbors, even ourselves. The hospital first surfaced on my radar in early 2010 on a ghost-hunting online cafe named in English, “Masculine Pride.” Their thing was trying to stay overnight in a...

Foreign Communities | 2018-04-10 21:12

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