A late, mid-winter morning and the sun was wakening. The sky was a soft shade of grey from dense clouds, but with dim patches of blue light gradually appearing. A light breeze blew through the quiet streets of Seoul, whistling through the shop signs and weaving between the blocks of flats. The temperature dropped well below zero and the moisture around froze into ice crystals. Crisp frost covered the gothic lampposts, dusting the dead trees and glazed the roads. Frequent flakes of snow had fallen during the long night; slowly to start with but they progressively got heavier. Now the clear city streets were hidden under clean white snow, 20 centimetres tall. It was dead, far too quiet for a week day. That was until, a middle-aged business man carefully opened the door of his house. His knee-high snow boots sunk into the snow outside and he shivered beneath his black trench coat. The click of his key locking the front door almost instantly set off the rest of the street. One by one, people began leaving their houses; Business people, families taking young children to school and students. Shopkeepers began flipping signs, sweeping snow off ‘Welcome’ mats and bowing respectfully to passers-by. School children picked up fistfuls of the white fluff, laughing as they threw it at their stressed parents who tried to hurry them along. Soon, the quiet street began to buzz with people heading in different directions and the thick snow compressed under the rush of snow boots. The weather seemed to notice the noise and bustle, which made the clouds get closer together and turn darker until they cracked. It only started with one, but then that one became two, three, four. The fragile snowflakes spiralled down into the crowd, being caught on the people below. Nobody noticed; they were too busy to care. People slowly dissolved away, hiding away in offices, schools and shops. It was empty once again, apart from the odd mother returning home and the postman, in his bright red coat and huge sack stuffed with letters slung over his back. The snow still continued, the snowflakes meeting each other gracefully on the black slush. They clustered in groups, bonding on the first object they landed on. But not all the snowflakes made it safely to earth. There was a young boy, just finished his last year at university, watching them float down from his window in one of the flats above the street. He stuck his hand out the window, trying to catch the flurries of snow. He observed the snowflakes as they landed on the pale skin of his arm, straight away melting as soon as they made contact. Sighing in disappointment, he studied the water droplets in his hand, hoping to find some sort of detail imprinted from the snowflake. The water ran down his arm and dripped off his elbow creating a small puddle on the cream carpet. How he wished he could run away that easily.