Last year a family friend spent a week here in Seoul on business. The second time we met, just before he was due to leave, he looked at me in a pleasantly bewildered manner and sighed: "This city has beaten me. It's a beast."
For those unaccustomed to epically large Asian cities, this is a common sentiment. The traffic, the noise, the over-crowding, the energy, the sheer size of a city which has twice the population of Ireland, can be a bit much for a newcomer from the west.
I live on the southern outskirts of the Korean capital in an area which was, until recently, semi-rural in character. Even today, one can still find the occasional paddy field sitting incongruously amid the tower blocks, as if a few farmers haven't got the memo that the beast has arrived, eager to gobble up more land. By some estimates, Seoul grows by one million people every three years and it is here, in the southern suburbs, where much of that growth occurs.
My walk to work takes me through a massive development of unfinished, twenty-storey tower blocks. Businesses are starting to open up in this area and as ever, the twenty-four hour convenience stores are the first to arrive. LG 25, 7 Eleven and Family Mart are the shock troops of Korean capitalism.
Stopping in to one on my way to work, I can smell the fresh paint. Stepping out again, I see a sign being winched up to the building next door. Sand is piled on the footpath and the road is cluttered with trucks carrying windows, soon to be hoisted skywards. An eight foot inflatable pint glass advertises the fact that a bar will open up any day now.
It is opening day around the corner at Paris Baguette, a chain of French style bakeries. Bad techno music blares out from a sound system, while a man on stilts standing beside an inflatable archway, makes balloon animals for a passing family. What all this has to do with croissants is lost on me.
I carry on, through the building site and on to Gu Seong, one of the "older" areas around here. The main road is a tribute to 1970s architecture. Soon though, the central thoroughfare will pay homage to 21st century building style instead. As I approach, a JCB claws away at one of the many buildings which have been ear-marked for destruction. Perhaps a third of Gu Seong's main street is currently being torn down.
As I turn the corner, there is a small seafood restaurant. The menu is swimming in tanks outside. Fish, squid and other creatures from the deep glumly await their fate. Occasionally on my way home in the evening, I see one of the waiters chasing a crab down the street. Sometimes, the crustaceans won't go quietly.
The entreprenurial spirit is everywhere. Men stand beside flat-bed trucks selling fruit all day and all night. Shopkeepers place their wares outside, treating the footpath as an extension of their store. There is a tiny stall selling seafood. The sign shows a grinning cartoon fish urging you to eat his brethren.
Children are spilling out of the primary school, jumping on to yellow mini-buses to whisk them off to hak wons; private schools for math, piano, tae kwon do, and (this is where I come in) English. As ever, the little ones seem happy, not at all resentful of a workload which would drive their western counterparts to mutiny.
Off in the distance, I can see one of the last glimpses of the old way of life. Amongst the tower blocks sits a little warren of old brick bungalows. The simplest of them are made of stone with corrugated iron rooves. I give the area another year before it too falls to "the grey, unyielding concrete".
I go into my building, perhaps the ugliest in all of Korea. Another day of work for me, another day of work for the beast...