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Note #19: The campus (2008.6.5)

Tomorrow morning, Hyunjin and I will be making our way to Gangneung, on the east coast of Korea. A few years back, the Gangneung Danoje Festival was proclaimed a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. I was part (a very small part) of the team that prepared the application materials, and since then the good people at Gangneung City Hall have invited us to the festival each year. Unfortunately, Dano (the fifth day of the fifth month on the lunar calendar) generally falls at a pretty busy time of year, so up until now we had never been able to make it. This year, however, one of the rituals falls on a holiday (tomorrow), so we finally get to go. On Saturday a paper on the protection of cultural heritage will be presented, followed by a banquet.

I hope to have some photographs and some interesting text to go along with those photographs, but until then, I will leave you with a mash-up of photos I took the other day. What you see below is only part of that mash-up—click on the photo to see the whole thing.

As you can see, I wasn’t trying for a seamless panorama here. In fact, I just stuck my head out the window of my building (my office, which I share with a few other professors, is on the top floor) and took a few pictures with no thought given to the settings at all. The seams are clearly visible, and it gets more and more skewed the further left you go (I used the second photo from the right as my standard), but at least it provides a good view of the campus.

In fact, you can see almost the entire campus in this collage. The only buildings you can’t see are the publishing office, the graduate school building, my building (obviously), and the professors’ research building (that one is mostly hidden behind other buildings). As for the buildings you can see, the new administration building is the most prominent—it’s the tall one in the second photo from the right with the banner hanging down the front (the banner reads: “When you meet HUFS, the world comes into view”). In front of the new administration building is the old administration building—the section on the left is wrapped in green cloth ostensibly because it will eventually be torn down. To the right of the new administration building, behind the green area, is the humanities building. Moving clockwise we then have the audio-visual education center and the foreign language study and evaluation center (not sure if that’s the official title in English).

On the other side of the new administration building are two buildings close together. The one to the right, with the faux pediment that mimics the pediment on the lower half of the new administration building, is the law school. To the left of that is a building with a banner hanging down the side—that’s where I’m sitting at this very moment, typing up this note. You can’t actually see our apartment in this photo, because it faces away from campus (thankfully, otherwise it would be a lot noisier). The short, wide, white building to the left of that, right on the seam between the photos, is the social sciences building. Further to the left, on the other side of that gap is the library, and to the left of that is the professors’ hall. Between those last two buildings you actually can see a bit of the professors’ research building.

And that’s all there is to the campus. The publishing building and graduate school are to the left of my building, but I couldn’t get a photo of them because they sit parallel with my building (the buildings to the right are at a slight angle, so it was possible to capture them). The campus is tiny and somewhat cramped—even the website (requires IE) says: “The Seoul campus of HUFS cannot be described as either beautiful or spacious.” I thought that was amusing. It goes on to say, of course, that “it is nevertheless highly convenient and efficiently designed so that all the buildings are within a short walking distance of each other.” This is true—it takes me four minutes to walk from my apartment to my office. On the other hand, though, it’s really noisy. Since everything is clustered together, there is no distinction between work and play spaces. But I suppose there’s only so much you can do with such a limited space.

Well, that’s all for today. It’s not much, but I wanted to try out that photo idea and give my loyal readers a look at where I live and work. I’ve got a few hours of driving to do tomorrow morning, so I should probably wrap this up.

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