Bereket's Home

This photo was taken on top of a closed market building.

I looked inside one of the apartments and saw this little deck.

As we were leaving I posed him for this photo.

On a real estate office.

He saw this building and was overwhelmed with nostalgia.

We continued higher up into the area.

The alleys were sealed off by fences. The spaces between buildings, not so much.

Walking around behind the fences, he was surprised at what he was seeing.

This is his first private home he lived in after arriving in Korea.

You can see the very moldy kitchen. The bedroom was worse. Those were the only two rooms.

To take this photo I moved back a couple steps. This is where he used to shower, right in the threshold entryway to the building. You can see a hook for the shower hose on the left side of that concrete block.

And outside, there's the toilet.

We found these things that looked sort of like grapes growing in the yard. I put one in my mouth and bit down. It was sour, but good sour. I spat it out. Still alive.

He was interested in photographing them.

One last look.

I was lining up this shot of a gate to another home, and he walked into the shot.

We got up on a roof.

Looking out across Noryangjin.

Nope, nobody inside. Maybe someone lived in there, but as a guest room for the unit downstairs. No washroom.

As we made our way uphill, we had to walk through some pretty thick vegetation. I went first, wacking away at any possible spiderwebs.

Those spiky chestnuts.

This building had offered housing for newly arrived refugees.

He stayed here on initial arrival.

He lived here temporarily with a lot of other refugees.

The interior wasn't as grim as that other place, where he would have moved after living here.

I saw someone moving around outside before realising I was looking at a mirror pointing at him.

Another view across the area.

And a Virgin Mary.

Click for full size.

Climbing up a tight spiral staircase.

Another panoramic view.

That big tree on the left grew in the yard of the refugee temporary shelter. It was impressive to see it from up here.

Tree in focus.

Bereket in focus.

We could see the buildings of Yeouido in the distance.

There's a school.

Looking down over the neighbourhood. It's hard to tell where the redevelopment zone ends.

Check out that one place covered in vegetation.

He led me down some of the alleys he'd walked hundreds of times in the past.

A cat feeding shelter near one of the exits.

I liked the architecture of this building.

Not so much.

An interesting entryway into a compound.

Another bulding that cut quite a figure.

Discarded scooter.

Further down this way, the land was demolished. We decided not to go that way.

On the right, we could see this wide open area that had already been demolished. Bdereket's second private home in Korea had been down there. He moved out relatively recently into another apartment nearby.

You can see the entry gate into this zone, which includes a length of the road which he remembered from before, when it was surrounded by homes.

This is inside the building behind him in the previous photo.

I found persimmons growing.

And some sort of dates.

I gave him one and he photographed it.

A building with flowers.

A closer look at the flowers.

Heading back uphill.

We found a trampoline.

Couldn't help but take a shot like this.

I glared at this wondering if it was Greek or something.

A view down a narrow alley.

From a better vantage.

At one point we ascended to this building, and were looking out the barred windows down there. Then we turned around and went back downhill, looking for a way up. If we'd gone up one floor more, we would have been in a parking garage that would have dumped us out in this alley.

We took a new exit uphill. The one thing I have to say is that it involved skirting around a brick tower. When I grabbed it, I discovered it was loose, and would not support a human's weight. Had I been slightly less careful, I would have fallen down a 2-meter chasm and had a big block of bricks land on top of me.

A park uphill.

I asked Bereket for this photo.

Apparently the square down there is a fountain. It's clearly not on right now.

We wandered back downhill through this park.

There's 63 in the distance.

And there it is from the road.

Flowers along the road illuminated by my lights.

He took me to an Ethiopian restaurant.

This is the food I got. It was not vegetarian so I tried to photograph it separately from him.

This is his soup which was vegetarian.

My food, on a porous Ethiopian bread substance.