Trying to find out where the dongs are

This morning I carried on trying to add metadata to some images from when we arrived in Korea. I had a photo of a building, but didn't know what the building was, so I tried to find out. The building did have some hangul at the top of it. Using the Korean phrasebook I managed to work out that the first two hangul said samsŏng, but I couldn't work out the romanisation of the next character, it looked like ongoae, but I didn't think this could be right since each hangul character is one sylable.

Googling for samsung or samsŏng and seoul, I got plenty of results, but nothing that seemed to be related to the building my photo was of.

So I found this guide on how to be able to type in Korean on Windows Vista and the key mappings for typing in Korean on an english keyboard. When I tried it out, it wouldn't let me type what the third character on the sign looked like - o ㅗ followed by ng ㅇ in a single charater, so obviously that couldn't have been what the sign said. So instead I tried h ㅎ, which looks a bit like an ㅗ above an ㅇ, which is what the character on the sign looked like it had.

This worked okay, and when I'd finished typing up the sign (삼성화재) and put it into google, the results I got were for Samsung Fire, which apparently is a large insurance company in South Korea. Looking at their website though, the photo of their headquarters was not the same as the building I'd taken a photo of.

There was a photo of the building on Google Earth, but that didn't say what the building was. So I found someone on Xiha life who's from Korea, and on their profile it said they could speak English. I uploaded the photo to my xiha life page, then sent them a message to see if they could id it for me.

I tried to find out what my next photo was of (well, actually where it was taken). I had geocoded the image, but although I had roads ticked in Google Earth, it wasn't displaying the name of the road where the photo was taken. So I put the co-ordinates into google earth, which showed the road name in Korean. Unfortunately the labels in things in Google Maps aren't copyable text, so I had to slowly write out what the label on the road said.

When I'd got the road name, I put it into Google, which came up with a Korean Wikipedia article on Namdaemunno. I wanted to check this was correct, as the last character looked like it started with an r, not an n. So I tried to transcribe the Hangul to latin script, and found that it said Namdaemunro. Putting this into google, it seemed it should be Namdaemun-ro.

Then in Google Earth, I noticed a point that said Namdaemnunno 2 (i) ga on the road in question. Looking up Namdaemunno on the english wikipedia, it said

Namdaemunno is a major thoroughfare in the central districts of Seoul, South Korea and a two-way road consisting of 8 lanes. With a 2 km length and a 40∼50m width, Namdaemunno originates at Bosingak in Jongno-gu and terminates at Seoul Station in Jung-gu. [1]

So it seems that the road is called Namdaemunno.

Next I spent ages trying to work out what the latin transcription of 서울특별시 (Seoul Special City) is. After much googling and work, I think it is 'Seoul Teukbyeolsi', though this only has 8,400 results on google. The main problem I'm having is that I don't know where the spaces in Korean should come, and also the Korean phrasebook I've got is based on the McCune Reischauer system instead of the current Korean Romanisation system that was introduced in Korea in 2000.

The rest of the day I spent trying to find a map of the dongs (neighbourhoods) in the Jung-gu district of Seoul, and what dong our hotel was in. But despite spending most of the afternoon and evening on this, I couldn't find either. Google Earth does have markers with the dong names on them, but there's no way to know where one dong starts and another dong ends.

I also geo-coded some images that weren't already geo-coded, then found that actually they had been geo-coded. The geo-data for the images had been saved into a .xmp sidecar file for some cheesun instead of into the NEF. And also for some cheesun, Adobe Bridge wasn't picking up the geo data from the XMP sidecars, and it wouldn't pick it up even after I'd embedded the XMP in the NEFs.

The weather was overcast (and cold - the snow didn't melt much) all day.

Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Breaded Ham Sandwich; 2x Clementines; Slice of Flapjack; Fake Wagon Wheel; Cup o' Tea; Piece of Sainsbury's Truffle Chocolate.
Dinner: Spaghetti; Carbonara or sumat similar sauce; Bacon; Mixed Veg; Ground Black Pepper. Pudding was Jamaica Giner Cake with Golden Syrup and Custard. Coffee; Piece of Sainsbury's Caramel Chocolate.