Seoul has a seasonality remarkably similar to the Virginia-New York swath of the United States -- with slightly colder winters and slightly warmer summers due to a higher general humidity on the peninsula.
However, it's useful to also understand that Seoul is at almost the exact same latitude as Seville in the south of Spain -- just a couple hours by car to the coast where you can see North Africa. The last time Seville even had a covering of snow was in 1954, and the last time it snowed at all was in 2010.
Winter in Korea is beautiful, it gets cold enough for lakes and rivers to freeze over, and the mountainsides, nearly ever present display even the smallest dusting of snow as a lovely blanket intermixed with wintered trees. It doesn't get so brutally cold that it's painful to be outside, so it generally makes it enjoyable.
The cities can be a challenge, the hilly landscape makes everything slippery. The construction of buildings is often done without any central heating and the ground levels of mixed-use and commercial buildings are often entirely unheated. I've stepped into more than one public restroom where the floor was entirely covered in a sheet of frozen ice as the cleaning staff did their duties, and the result of their work was temporarily memorialized in the cold air.
Being a soup heavy culture, there are few joys better than walking off the street into a 칼국수 noodle shop and sitting down with a giant bowl of steaming soup. Temporarily warmed from the inside out, you are ready to adventure back to your daily tasks in the city.
The expectation is that heating is supplied by individual tenants of a building, however they chose to provide (or not provide) it. The building itself functions as a public commons area with the same lack of accommodation as a sidewalk.
Bathrooms exist in a kind of weird grey-space where it's better to centralize the plumbing for all tenants to save space and money, but provide almost no other amenity than lights.
Having traveled all over the world, the relationship different cultures have with the distinctions between "inside" and "outside" a structure can be quite fascinating.
In the Eastern parts of the U.S., north to south, inside is strictly segregated from the outside due to various climate issues. But in the Western states like California, many semi-public venues like restaurants are open to the outside.
Western Europe tries to maintain a inside-is-outside like the Western U.S., with lots of cafes and open store and restaurant fronts. And they tend to withdraw inside in colder weather.
In places like Southeast Asia, Central America, or the Carribean, there may not even be a real "inside" with most places being not much more than rain cover or a simulation of windows with no glass.
South Korea seems to exist somewhere in this continuum with the first floor and common spaces of many buildings being a sort of "outside" while the shops and restaurants may be either "outside" and open to the elements or "inside" and warm and cozy depending on the season.
Public and semi-public restrooms seem to be universally "outside" even if they are in 4 walls with a roof.
It was so odd when I visited in 1998 that there were many tv commercials for carpeting and yet hardly anyone had carpets. Heated floors are so great, but great for sound absorption. Everyone just learns to live with lots of noise like in the city itself.
Carpets never did take off. Today most Koreans view carpets with suspicion and with a kind of grossness for what they might inhabit. Rugs on the other hand can be washed and beaten to properly clean.
In 20 years of bi-yearly trips to South Korea, I've never seen a wall-to-wall carpeted indoor space. Even the Blue House, where you wear shoes inside, is rugs IIR.
Busan is also very nice in winter. Although it's cold, humidity is low and most days are sunny. In summer, though, I prefer to be just about anywhere else.
This doesn't seem newsworthy outside Korea. We see a lot of headlines like this - are they indicative of climate change?
There are twelve months in the year and at least four directions to report weather extremes (hottest, coldest, wettest, driest - there's also windiest and snowiest but let's lump them in with the other extremes). That's 50 chances per year for any given area to have its "most X month on record". Reliable weather records go back 100 years, give or take, so any place should experience its "most extreme month on record" approximately every two years.
There are 50 cities as big as 0.75 Seouls [0] or bigger. So worldwide, "megacity has 100-year weather event" comes up every two weeks.
Expand the number of weather axes, relax the definition of a megacity, or realise that many of these places only have 50 years of good record-keeping...pretty soon you can have this headline every two days.
I'm not trying to downplay climate change. I'm just saying you won't find it in these headlines. If you look at the number of places with the most extreme year on record, or model average air or sea temperatures over time, you can find more compelling evidence there.
Note that if the climate at a place isn't changing we'd expect new records for a given thing to become less frequent over time. For example suppose you had something where it follows a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 5. I generated 10 million random numbers with that distribution and noted whenever I got a new record high.
The intervals between records were 1, 1, 2, 1, 5, 36, 219, 999, 2558, 21780, 397, 50360, 73288, 200951, 652234, 954240, 547715, 3783984, and 1641056.
This is both completely true and completely nonsense in the context.
If the numbers are independent, no matter what the distribution, the odds of the nth measurement being a record setter is 1/n. And as above, if you've measured 100 Novembers, the odds of the 100th being the record wettest are 1/100.
(Air current around the poles contains the coldest air at the poles, this is destabilised by warmer overall temperatures leading to that cold air escaping and bringing cold snaps to random areas further from the poles.)
However, it's useful to also understand that Seoul is at almost the exact same latitude as Seville in the south of Spain -- just a couple hours by car to the coast where you can see North Africa. The last time Seville even had a covering of snow was in 1954, and the last time it snowed at all was in 2010.
Winter in Korea is beautiful, it gets cold enough for lakes and rivers to freeze over, and the mountainsides, nearly ever present display even the smallest dusting of snow as a lovely blanket intermixed with wintered trees. It doesn't get so brutally cold that it's painful to be outside, so it generally makes it enjoyable.
The cities can be a challenge, the hilly landscape makes everything slippery. The construction of buildings is often done without any central heating and the ground levels of mixed-use and commercial buildings are often entirely unheated. I've stepped into more than one public restroom where the floor was entirely covered in a sheet of frozen ice as the cleaning staff did their duties, and the result of their work was temporarily memorialized in the cold air.
Being a soup heavy culture, there are few joys better than walking off the street into a 칼국수 noodle shop and sitting down with a giant bowl of steaming soup. Temporarily warmed from the inside out, you are ready to adventure back to your daily tasks in the city.
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