I learned the obviously un-PC term "Jewish lightning" fairly recently from the TV show "The Bear," and the name popped into my head and wouldn't leave during a recent explore. There's been a lot said online about the use of the term, but no alternative terms were suggested, so I came up with this one, seen above.

Haebangchon is a former refugee village created after Korea's liberation from Japan, which housed people pouring into the capital city from mostly North Korea but also other areas. They lived in a stretch of land not too far from where I live today, and also occupied a military garrison that had once been used by the Japanese and later inherited by the Americans.

After the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, the Americans reclaimed the base (which is still technically in their possession today, though 95% abandoned), and cleared out 95% of the refugees, many of whom resettled uphill of the garrison.

In more recent decades, the area has become one of the more foreign communities of the country, due mostly to its proximity to the US garrison, but also because landowners in the surrounding area are more used to renting to foreign residents, who might be new in the country, who might not have high savings for a jeonse deposit, but who also have high monthly incomes. It's an important part of Korea's growing multiculturalism, but also one that's under threat due to redevelopment and gentrification.

An academic friend who I consider part of the local UE community put out a request for people to map out neighbourhoods of Korea and do a derivee, and I did this one. I was entirely prepared to do this, but learned more along the way.

1. The tall fencing on the right side of the road is one of the sites where they're digging a deep-underground bullet train network. I've explored the tunnel a few times over the last couple years. It wont serve this community well, as no stations will be near here. Incidentally, down the road is a tunnel to downtown Seoul, and that area used to serve as a firing range for the US military.




2. This picture was taken about half a kilometer backward from the previous photo, from on top of an overpass. You can see Namsan, the mountain in the middle of Seoul. The lights on its shoulder up ahead are Haebangchon. To the left where it's darker is the former US garrison.




3. On the way into Haebangchon is this low-key landmark area. On the left you can see parts of a base gate that are all closed now. You can also see the infamous kimchi pots stacked along the side of the road. Also there you can see some wheatpastings, including heads of Trump and Kim Jong-un which appeared overnight on the same day they had their first summit back in 2018. I managed to find out who did those and interviewed him.




4. This building is in the LDB due to its extreme situation. The previous building owner had sold it to the new one, and also said that the expat bars on the ground floor and in the basement had already closed, and anything left behind was abandoned. That was a lie. The situation is I think still in the courts. After about a year, this glitzy new building was revealed.




5. I poked my head in and saw they had ripped out the floor to make a staircase down to the basement. Also the tent back there holds a computer that seems to just be on all the time. I'm pretty sure you couldn't just leave a computer in a construction site unattended in North America. Though it would also probably be harder to steal entire businesses from foreigners in North America.


5.5. A closer look at the tent, where you can see the computer, taken over an hour later around 9:30pm.



6. This building completed eviction around a year ago, and has resulted in many UE adventures for me since then. We're all kind of surprised it's still standing.




7. This used to house a pretty good Italian pizza place on the ground floor, and a flop motel on the second floor (it doesn't even deserve the title of love motel).




8. I went over the hill onto the other side, and took notice of this sign on a building I've noticed was abandoned since at last year. It seems to be saying all that area will be redeveloped into condos. By the way, all the green parts aren't forest or anything -- they're US military property that is mostly abandoned now.




9. Behind the curtain there, I looked in and saw a dark, damaged interior.




10. Before I investigated that, I hiked uphill where I found this old house, clearly a sign of the area's refugee community origins.




11. As are these stairs and bricks, though the grating suggests a drainage system that probably is a more recent introduction.




12. Here's that ruined house from above. I didn't get any closer because the house on the left was still active, and I could hear someone watching TV inside.




13. Alright, back to this building. I made entry, and saw that it did seem to be burned out by a fire.




14. Looking at this picture, it appears the fire spread up to the ceiling in this corner. Maybe someone lit a fire on the books in the previous corner, maybe to erase evidence, but the fire spread across the room, over a couch, to this corner where it started to burn upwards.




15. Or I don't know how fires work that well, maybe it was started in that corner and jumped over to the books?




16. The books are still there after a long time, so maybe they weren't important?




17. I went up a floor and found a fair amount of stuff left behind.




18. Up on the roof, I had a pretty good view of the area. I live somewhere directly in that direction.




19. This is looking the other direction. I discovered that that taller white building in the distance officially doesn't exist.




20. As I was leaving the burnt-out apartment, I heard a scooter pull up outside, and by the sounds I heard, the driver hadn't left. After a few minutes I figured it wasn't someone responding to the threat of my intrusion, so I went out, only to find this scooter, key still in the ignition. Probably just a delivery guy. As I exited the site, a foreigner walking by saw me, and I smiled as un-creepily as possible, which seemed to scare him.




21. Later I found the front gate of the ghost apartment. "Army Apartment, No Outsiders."




22. Later, I got onto the roof of a building under construction, and got this view. Everything to the left of that fence is part of the US garrison.




23. Same with that parking lot down there.




24. Last stop of the voyage, I got onto the roof of an apartment with a pretty good lookout of the area. I'd been up here before but this was my first time at night. US garrison on the upper left, Haebangchon (or "Liberation Village") in the middle, and Namsan, a mountain in the middle of Seoul, on the right.




25. From up here, I noted the bright lights of this section of the area, lit up like Las Vegas, as I thought at the time. This is one of the central areas of the foreign community of Korea. It is fairly residential, and just around the corner from the notorious Itaewon area that suffered a horrific disaster a couple Halloweens ago. You can kind of see how the land here is also slanted. And see those highrise buildings in the distance on the sort of left? All that is development on the far side of the garrison, places where speculative real estate investment sprang up much faster than over here.




27. If it makes any sense, here's a hand-drawn map I created as part of my friend's assignment to show the area.