We landed in Seoul still running on thirteen hours of airplane time and went straight to a neighborhood where the houses are older than the country’s current name. We were staying inside Bukchon Hanok Village, which closes to visitors at 5pm and becomes a residential neighborhood again. Because we had a piece of paper from our Airbnb proving we actually lived there, we got to see the village empty and quiet at night — glass-walled hanok windows lit up, nobody else around.
The next morning, still jet-lagged, we walked into Gyeongbokgung Palace, which has been standing since the 1300s and looks like someone repainted it yesterday. That’s the part that actually stopped me — not just the woodwork, which is its own kind of astonishing, but the color. Every beam and eave is painted in this deliberate, saturated pattern that somebody has been maintaining, on purpose, for six hundred years. I shot the same building from four angles because the detail kept changing on me.
New arrivals
Close enough. This pack of 10 vintage-style postcards showcases the grand gates of Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul’s most iconic royal landmark, paired with a very reasonable substitute for actually being there: “I’m not in Seoul, but I have listened to K-Pop.”
It was also, by ten in the morning, brutally hot. Hot enough that we abandoned the palace for a while and hid in an air-conditioned New York-themed taco shop two blocks away, ate lunch under a neon sign that had nothing to do with Korea, and went back out once we could feel our hands again. That’s most of travel, if I’m honest — the thing you came for, and the thing you didn’t plan for that ends up in the story anyway.
A few days later, we did something heavier.
We got picked up before sunrise for the DMZ tour — the demilitarized zone between South Korea and North Korea, still one of the most heavily fortified borders on earth. The first stop is a rest station near where trains used to arrive from the North, before the border closed for good. That’s where the guide starts telling you what this place actually is, underneath the checkpoint and the gift shop: families split apart in a single day, some of whom got brief, supervised chances to see each other again decades later. Some never did. People who were young children when they were separated grew up not knowing their own birthdays, because no one was left to tell them. There was a real television program built around this — people would go on air and say what little they remembered, a birth date, a region, a fragment of a memory, hoping someone watching would recognize them.
We walked through one of the old infiltration tunnels North Korea dug under the border decades ago — low enough that both of us hit our heads on the ceiling more than once, hard hats and all. At the observatory, you can see across into North Korea through a viewing window. You are not allowed to take a picture in that direction. People are watching to make sure you don’t. At one point, dust kicked up on the other side of the border and it sounded, unmistakably, like gunfire. Our guide didn’t even look up. “Totally normal,” she said. Okay. If you say so.
I take pictures for a living. I’ve stood in a lot of places specifically because they’re beautiful, or strange, or worth the flight. The DMZ isn’t any of those things, and it’s one of the only places I’ve ever visited where not being allowed to take a picture felt like exactly the right rule. It’s not a tourist attraction. It’s a wound, still open, that happens to have a gift shop and a viewing platform built next to it. I think it’s actually a somber, kind of boring experience, and I mean that as the highest compliment — it should not be entertaining. It’s not two countries squaring off in the abstract. It’s kids who got separated from their parents on a specific, ordinary day, and never saw them again, for reasons that had nothing to do with them.
We went back to Seoul that evening in pouring rain, bought an umbrella that broke before we even got it fully open, and ate our way through a street food market, standing under an awning while everyone else did the same thing. It felt, honestly, like the right way to come back from a day like that: loud, ordinary, alive.
Both of those days are Seoul. The palace and the border. The bakery with the glass walls and the tunnel with the low ceiling. That’s the whole reason this collection exists — not the postcard version of a place, the actual one, kept exactly as complicated as it really was.
Prints and postcards from Seoul are part of The Postcards Collection.
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