On Seoul (fractured impressions while being away from earthquake-hit Tokyo)

...It feels surprisingly different to find oneself in a city where everything is connected by buses - numbers are here to remember, not colors or names. The outside panorama is in front of one's eyes at each moment, not the advertisements on the walls of underground tunnels. It's raining heavily. Sitting on one of the front seats of the bus gives a marvelous perspective - gray, wet, spacious, misty, chilly, eclectic Seoul, a neverending line of multistoried apartment complexes, brownish branches of naked trees... A city like this can well erase one's memory of the colors' diversity, but keep a lonely urge for brightness deep inside one's heart. Will I survive its gravity?

Intro

The title of this blog is that of a tale by a Russian 19th century writer Nikolai Leskov, where one's life is seen as a journey and one's journey is seen as a life. Originally born in the European part of Russia but having come to Japan at the age of 19, I am now preparing to move further - to South Korea, and I find myself at the very stage of reconsidering what the notion of home really is. When moving from one place to another, do we do it in search of something or to escape from oneselves? How long does it really take to feel at home somewhere and what is it that drives us away from these warmed nests? I hope to be able to explore these and other questions in my blog postings by describing old and new experiences in each of the places I stayed at, those that passed by almost unnoticed as well as those that left deep traces in my soul.