Day 5: Pink Elephant in the Room

Dear Samsung, we graciously thank you for providing to the Seoul skyline a truly bizarre and easy-to-spot building. Us Seoulites appreciate it, especially when we get turned around and can't find our way downtown. Today I highlight the Samsung Life Insurance building, one of the most easily recognizable buildings in Korea, for obvious reasons. I know little about the actual building, but at the top there is supposedly a Chinese restaurant, so I guess that's something. What I attribute to the building and what others attribute to it are probably different. For me, this is the building that acts like my North Star in case I get lost, which hardly happens these days. But when I first started exploring downtown I could always guide my way back to central meeting points thanks to this building; you can see it from most of downtown as it doesn't really hide behind other buildings. It sits on the corner of a major intersection and so everyone knows where it is. For this reason, it is often a meeting spot for people, especially gays in Korea heading over to Jongro-3ga which is to its left 2 blocks. Friday and Saturday nights you can see groups of gay boys hanging out around the building, waiting for their friends to show up. So for the many reasons and attributes we can give this building, I think the one that could stick is this: It is the gay beacon for Korea, at least for the gay community that is. Everyone else just sees it as an interesting building. But we know better.