Perhaps some people have noticed the slow greening of Seoul over the last years. There are more plants everywhere and they are being taken care of more carefully than ever before. Whereas previously flowers were planted and left to die. These days we find that they are being watered and cared for.

Across the city roof gardens are being set up on major buildings. Owners are encouraged to do so, and most every city owned building already has a roof garden. Many of the culture centers and sports centers that dot the city have quite attractive gardens that are drawing a crowd of those in the know.

But that is not all.

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Here is a rather sad group of stickers adorning a wall that offer low-playing part time jobs to those in Seoul with no other options. They suggest to us a world that we know so very little about. We pass these signs every day, rarely stopping to read them.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable changes in Seoul can be seen at the Shilla Hotel. A series of plaques have gone up around the gardens surrounding the Shilla hotel that explain its history in Chinese. The signs are remarkable not only for the details they give about the history of Seoul and of the Shilla Hotel, as well as facts about the visits of Chinese statesmen. The signs are unique in that they exist only in Chinese and there  are no English plaques accompanying them. That new practice stands in contrast to what we find at  the much older statue of the founder of Samsung Lee Byung-Chul to be found behind the Shilla Hotel which has  explanations from another age in English, Japanese and Korean.

This plaque identities on of the eight scenes of Changchung (which I had never heard of before), the “108 Steps of Buddhist liberation from troubles.”

I do not know when the plaques went up, but I do not think they are more than six months old. What I can say definitively is that Chinese have become by far the most dominant group of foreigners around the Shilla Hotel and that increasingly the tour guides at important places in Seoul are primarily speakers of Chinese. This rapid shift runs at odds with the general fascination of Koreans with the United States and the obsession with English in this country.