Back to the movies again!

Coming out of lockdown again, and getting back to the movies again, no danger of dangerous overcrowding in this cinema.

I was at Roseville, watching 'Eiffel'. It's a very watchable film. It's about Gustave Eiffel, his amazing tower, and his somewhat sad and sorry relationship with the love of his life (a woman, not a tower). That part might be all fiction. Not sure.

Re the tower, it was built for the 1889 Paris World's Fair, and a proposal had been submitted for a 200m tower, so as to beat the 169m Washington Monument. Eiffel decided to go for 300m instead, which is still a very respectable tower height to this day.

Austria's Open-Air Museum

We spent several hours exploring Austria's Freilichtmuseum (Open-Air Museum) at Stübing, near Graz, and it wasn't long enough. You'd really need a whole day to do it justice, or even two or three days.

It's a collection of about a hundred traditional rural houses, brought from all corners of the country, and resurrected in one valley. You stroll around, and learn lots about traditional rural lifestyles.

It was a bit dark and gloomy inside some of the dwellings. That's how life was before electricity, of course.

But the bright floral displays would have helped to compensate. Modern day Austria is still a bright, pretty, floral sort of place too.











And I rather liked all the water wheels, powering flour mills and sawmills.

Seoul - a city with soul (and rather a lot of concrete too)

I spent a few days recently in South Korea, mainly confined to Seoul, and once I'd found my footing in the snow and ice that covered the footpaths, I found that it was indeed a great place to explore.

On the snow and ice thing, I suppose I should have expected it, but as I'd not seen any for the past few years, it somehow came as a shock anyway. When I initially emerged in the city out of the metro tunnel, I thought I was sliding on a layer of sugar that must have come from a sack that had fallen off a truck. Honestly. Only it was everywhere.

One of the things that grab you about the place is the contrast between the old and the new. There are some very imaginative and modern buildings around, and a fabulously efficient clean, modern, convenient public transport system. There are also beautiful and perfectly restored royal palaces and 'hanok' traditional village suburbs (though not many). There's the best educated, most wired up and online population in the world, and there are very traditional Asian style market places.

I attempted to follow Lonely Planet's recommended 'archi-tour' of the Gangnam district. I bagged the GT Tower East and the Tangent building (headquarters of the Himma company), plus several other fine specimens. After photographing the slinky and curvaceous former edifice, a security guard came out and told me: 'No photo'. No reason could be elicited, but I put my camera away and he seemed happy. Fancy being shy about this beautiful creation. I wonder whether they want to stop me copying it somewhere or to stop me flying an aeroplane into it. I should add that by and large, I found Koreans to be incredibly co-operative, helpful, and friendly people.

The concrete doesn't all end up in fine creations like those though. From the top of Seoul's TV tower you can peer out on a vast megalopolis of between 10 and 25 million people (depending how you define the city limits - cities are like this). You become aware that an awful lot of them live in 'suburbs' of dozens, maybe sometimes hundreds, of identical tower blocks. That's a lot of concrete, and maybe not such a soulful lifestyle?