Word: seoul
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...Seoul is, of course, a city perpetually on alert, many of whose citizens believe themselves at war. Antitank walls line the highway leading out of town to the DMZ, just 35 miles away, and air-raid drills bring the city to a halt on the 15th of each month. Soldiers are everywhere (museums even offer specially priced "soldier" tickets). Yet for all that, the city is much calmer than the choreographed, telegenic demonstrations suggest. For most of the area's residents, the convulsions of the "demo-crazy" students are as remote as South Bronx gangland warfare to a businessman...
...Seoul, in short, is a city of "verys," a place of extremes that demands and enforces toughness. In winter it is bitingly cold, with winds blowing down from Siberia; in summer, so hot that some choose to sleep in the streets. Simply negotiating the city is a task that is not for the faint of body. To cross busy roads, pedestrians must clamber up overpasses or, more frequently, descend into underground mazes that seethe with shops and exits. Thus a walk down three city blocks can become a ten-minute expedition that involves 92 steps down and 88 steps...
That kind of surface -- like the banks of vending machines, the glossy coffee shops, the state-of-the-art museum tickets -- gives Seoul at times the look of a rough-and-ready version of Japan. But everything is hotter here; the summers are warmer, the people more hot-blooded, and the local food has a garlicky tang far removed from the cool elegance of sushi. Korean pride is no less full of flavor. One of the most elegant museums in the city, approached through solemn wooden gates, is devoted not to Buddhist statuary, or to modern painting, or even...
...Parts of Seoul, inevitably, feel like suburbs of America. The streets of Itaewon, not far from the Yongsan garrison, are decorated in the U.S. Army- surplus style common to base cities around the world: country-and-western bars called Bonanza and Tennessee, the Las Vegas disco, a spit-and-polish row of Pizza Hut, Pizza Inn and Shakey's. And where there are servicemen, of course, there are service-industry women: in certain hands, Seoul's rowdiness can turn to raunchiness. The body trade flourishes in the G.I. bars of Itaewon, and the city's ubiquitous barbershops have little...
...Natalia Lisovskaya took that event at the Soviet bloc's boycott-inspired Friendship Games with a throw almost 5 ft. longer. Barred by politics in 1984 from a chance at world sport's most enduring honor, Lisovskaya began training at Moscow's Brothers Znamensky Sports School for Seoul...