Ghost Apts Jangsan and Sajik

Banyo dong, ghost apts under the shadow of Jangsan.

We go up the streets at the foothills of Jangsan in the night. Circling its enormous base, trying to find temples lit by lantern. We drive through orange lit alleys and sleeping houses. Few old people and uniformed students walking the streets. Our motorcycle can’t take us some hilly streets so we dismount and hike up . We go to the upper most levels and find apartments surrounded by quiet night forests and dead ends. We go down. We discover a line of unlit lanterns and it guides us through more dark ascensions. Shadowy cats cross the inclined mountain streets. A dark wooden temple on a corner guarding the entrance to the forest. We continue our drive. We find a road that runs up and parallel to a great white wall. Cars parked by the side of the road. At the top there a no lights except from the villages and the city fragments below. A dark green lump of a mountain, like a bell top that’s been carpeted by lichens extends out of the city. We look around these small apartments and they remind me of whited sepulchers from necropoleis in dreams. Sacked columbarium walls.  Windows black and uninviting to the living. Nobody resides in them anymore. Entrails of structure strewn across the yards of burned grass. A playground. Figures contorted against the night. Swings and swiveling contraptions that tonight appear like childhood nightmare dokebis. She says let’s go and she’s startled by my torch light as it begins to inspect the dead playground and uncovers shadows. We leave. We find a park at the edge of Banyo dong. An old man trains his little dog like a drill sergeant.  Two girls talk and look on as the dog runs and sits and dies on command.

DSC_8267

Uninhabited apartments in a city made of lightemittingdiods.  At night in Sajik the peace of these apartments’ shadows settle in the eyes like unlit forests in a city of fluorescence. A gap in the alluring lights. There’s fleeting life in them like in the body of an animal that once was loved and cared for and now lays in agony and soon will be dead and then dust. And these white apartments are to become rubble and be recycled into something new.  On each of those windows a dim aura of deep melancholy of somebody’s lost childhood, joyous married life or mere loneliness.

DSC_6424

DSC_6421