Line 2 | Seoul Sub→urban

Archive for the ‘Line 2’ Category

Sillim Station (신림역) Line 2 – Station #230

October 28, 2012

Unusually for this project, my initial visit to Sillim was made on a Tuesday morning, and I was a bit surprised at just how much activity there was around the station. A lot of people out and about, and outside Exit 2 a soundtrack of loud K-pop streamed from speakers mounted on light poles in front of the Podo ‘Style Collection Mall.’ Outside the mall’s entrance, wheeled tables with boxes of Reeboks stacked seven high had been rolled out, and customers were poking through those and the piles of discounted jeans next to them.

In recent years there’s been a lot of development in Sillim, at least in the area immediately around the station. There’s the aforementioned Podo Mall, and the invasion of the bourgeois chain stores – Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, A Twosome Place – is complete, providing those with the means with trendy places to spend. There are a lot of new buildings, as well as older ones that have been remodeled or are in the process of being remodeled. As I walked south on Sillim-ro (신림로) I watched a half-dozen guys work on the interior of a second floor space that they were in the process of turning into a hair salon. It had windows that ran from waist height to the ceiling, though the glass hadn’t been put in yet and a pair of the workers was taking a smoke break, leaning out and watching the traffic.

Continuing in that direction, the north and south bound lanes of Sillim-ro split around the Dorim Stream (도림천), and it was at about that point that the area’s recent development petered out and the surroundings got decidedly more working class. In the distance ahead I could see simple homes terracing up the lower slopes of Gwanak Mountain (관악산), the top third of which was a cap of mostly denuded trees. It was quieter here too, and during lulls in the traffic I could catch snippets of classical music drifting up from speakers along the stream, those two things a nice bit of non-commercial development for the area.

To the east, the sidewalk outside Exit 1 humps up about five meters above the road before dropping back down and running past cafes, to-go pizza places, and the Play Girl Bar. Just past that, the Sillim Central Church (신림중앙교회) had set up some tables and chairs beneath a small tent on the sidewalk. An ajumma was handing out the standard packet of tissues with church info printed on it, and congregants were serving up cups of tea. There was also a bowl of what looked like pajeon batter waiting to be fried up in the oil that was already bubbling away in a pair of skillets, though the only people taking advantage of the things on offer were several old folks who were likely already Sillim Central members.

While just steps off Nambusunhwan-ro (남부순환로) the surroundings turned very quiet and residential – red brick apartments and pretty Gwanak backdrops – on the avenue the scene was relatively busy. Just after the church a large construction site marked the future site of a hospital, and cars were pulling in to park at a barbecue restaurant that had a sign declaring a ‘Safety Honesty Zone.’

A small curiosity: The sidewalk on the south side of Nambusunhwan-ro is trisected by parallel gray strips – the usual grooved one to aid the visually impaired and another thin strip of stone suggesting what’s supposed to be the walking section and what’s supposed to be the biking section. The latter is marked by metal plates embedded in the pavement every 20 meters, but instead of showing a picture of a regular bike, they’re imprinted with penny-farthings, the 19^th century bikes that had an enormous front wheel and a tiny rear one. No sign of anyone actually on one of these, however.

The north side of the street was similar to the south, though without bike lane plates. A couple grocery stores weren’t far from Exit 8, each with produce stacked up outside. At one of them a 50-something guy – maybe a shopper, maybe an employee – smoked a cigarette as he picked through zucchini, his sleeveless t-shirt revealing a portrait of a young boy wearing hanbok tattooed into his upper arm.

Something that’s bugged me for a while is the highly circumscribed number of places in the city where I’ve experienced Seoul’s nightlife; although I get to a lot of different parts of town in the course of this project, that’s done almost exclusively during the day, with few opportunities to see the neighborhoods after dark. When I do go out on a Friday or Saturday night it’s almost invariably to Hongdae, since I live just a few minutes’ walk from the station, as do many of my friends. Occasionally I’ll go to Sinchon or Itaewon or, even more rarely, Jongno, but even those are few and far between. And as great as it is, even Hongdae can start to feel stale after a while. Another niggling bullet point on my Seoul to-do list has been to try going out in spots that the local expat population doesn’t generally go to, to see a side of Korean nightlife that might be a bit different. So with Sillim being a big night spot and not knowing any other foreigners who’d been there, I wrangled together a group of like-minded friends to eat, drink, and be anthropological.

A proper study of an area’s nightlife must necessarily begin with the proper feed, and in Sillim that’s sundae bokkeum (순대볶음), stir fried sundae. A few dozen meters down Sillim-ro from Exit 3 is a small sign pointing to 양지순대타운 (Yangji Sundae Town), and if you turn right here and walk down Sillim-ro-59-gil (신림로59길) just a short ways you’ll get to Original Traditional Sundae Town (원조민속순대타운). Its un-missable neon sign, sticking out even in a neighborhood full of neon signs, has the name in large Hangeul letters splashed across the front, arching over a traditional hat and long-stemmed pipe.

The building holds four floors of sundae bokkeum restaurants, though we didn’t really have any choice about where we ate because as we arrived at the second floor landing we were all but grabbed by the ajumma working the door of 왕후순대곱창 (Queen Sundae and Offal). Despite the royal name, the restaurant was sparse, with orange tables and benches, and rectangular metal pans above the gas burners embedded in the middle of the tables. It was like a middle school cafeteria, only with access to fire.

We split our order between sundae in a spicy sauce (양념순대) and plain sundae (백순대), which was delivered to our table by waiters wearing lime green aprons with pictures of teddy bears on them. The sundae was fired up and stir fried with liver, intestines, cabbage, onions, green onions, tteok, jjolmyeon, and perilla, and could be consumed either wrapped up in sesame leaves or simply dipped in a delicious gochujang-based sauce. Sundae can be something of an acquired taste, and although I’ve acquired it, I’d never actually had sundae bokkeum before. It turned out that was quite an oversight, as the casual and umami-heavy dish is a perfect meal with which to start a night out.

Sillim’s nightlife is centered on the small streets and alleys outside Exits 3 and 4 that surround Sundae Town. I’ll cop to the fact that, while I was certainly aware that there were other nightlife areas in the city besides Hongdae/Sinchon, Itaewon, Jongno, and Gangnam/Cheongdam, since I never went out in any of those other areas I didn’t really imagine other people, expats or Koreans, going out in them either. Therefore, my preconceived notion was that Saturday night in Sillim would be rather ho-hum, active but not that active.

If my one Saturday night there was any sort of indication, though, Sillim gets packed. Granted there were six of us in our group, but we were turned away from the first three bars we tried to go to, for lack of open tables. (One thing that’s different about Sillim from night spots with more Western influences and crowds is that the bars here are all (or at least nearly all; we obviously didn’t go to every bar in the neighborhood) very Korean in their layout and setup for drinking, which is to say that it’s done at a table with the group you walked in with. The closest you’ll come to an open space for mingling with strangers is the occasional seat at the bar. Since sitting, drinking, and chatting with friends was what I had in mind that night, at the time the implications of this didn’t really register. The fact that I’m in a relationship put blinders on a bit too. But if you’re single and looking to meet someone in the course of a night out, it’s awfully hard to do so in a joint like that, and the necessity of sogaeting and meetings starts to become apparent.)

As if to drive home the point, the first place we were able to have a drink in, after wandering through the bar flyer-littered streets, past twenty-somethings playing crane games and hitting coin-operated punching bags, was a room bar called Gaya. This was the first time I’d ever been in, or even heard of, a room bar (not to be confused with a room salon), which is basically what its name says it is: a bar divided into small rooms where you and your friends can drink in privacy. This can be either terribly dull or pleasantly intimate, depending on your proclivities (and, perhaps, your friends). To me it felt like drinking in a train cabin. The six of us piled into our little room, three into each bench on either side of a narrow table, the waiter handed us a menu, and then slid the door closed.

The room bar was fun for about a pitcher, but it certainly was no good for exploring the neighborhood, so after we finished our drinks we went back out. En route to the next bar the two Koreans in our group overheard a pair of girls talking behind us and started to chuckle. When I asked them what it was about, they said that the girls were commenting on the number of 양아치 in Sillim.

For a long time, Sillim was a poor area and had a reputation for prostitution, other shady dealings, and 양아치 (yang-ahchi), a word that roughly translates to ‘thug’ or the Australian term ‘bogan’ and can refer to someone who’s actually a thug, in the literal sense, or to a guy who fancies himself one, dressing in track suits, spitting, and smoking cigarettes with the butt pinched between their thumb and first two fingers. It can also refer to what the two girls behind us had been commenting on: other girls, tackily dressed in cheap clothes and in poorly done makeup. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed this phenomenon up to that point, but my two friends assured me that Sillim was indeed filled with 양아치, and as the rest of the night turned largely into a 양아치 safari I gradually fine-tuned my 양아치 radar.

양아치 presence notwithstanding, Sillim’s not a bad place to go out, particularly if you’re looking for something different, though it does still have a slightly seedy aspect to it, especially if you go north of Nambusunhwan-ro. The areas behind the Renaissance Mall near Exit 7 and outside Exit 6 feature a few bars and restaurants that attract an older clientele and also a lot, and I mean a lot of love motels and noraebba (노래빠), noraebangs where hostess girls sing with/for you, pour drinks, and potentially more. The playground of vice is rounded out by room clubs and ‘business clubs,’ where lots of important business is conducted, to be sure. Near Exit 6, running parallel to Sillim-ro, one street was essentially nothing but love motels, more than a dozen of them, lighting up the alley like a pinball machine, a cacophony of neon vying for your amorous attention.

Continue straight on Sillim-ro from Exit 6, past the largest concentrations of motels, and you’ll come to the oddly named Culture Street That You Want to Walk (걷고싶은문화의거리), on which the only sign of culture that I noticed was a giant mask mounted as decoration on the wall outside a restaurant. Mostly there were just a lot more restaurants and a lot more neon. There were also quite a few minivans parked on the street. These, my Korean friend informed me, were used as shuttles to ferry noraebba hostesses to and from work.

Hanging out with middle-aged men around hostess bars not really being our thing, my friends and I decided to head back to the area south of the station, which after being on the north side appeared almost classy. To top it off we found a bar called 미술관, meaning ‘art gallery’ (but if you break up the characters could also mean ‘beautiful alcohol hall’), and were intrigued to discover that they even had Taedong River (대동강) beer on their menu, North Korea’s finest brew. When we tried to order, though, we were told that it currently wasn’t available due to trade restrictions. Damn Norkies. Now there’s a bunch of 양아치 if I’ve ever seen one.

Dorim Stream (도림천)

Exit 3 or 4

Original Traditional Sundae Town (원조민속순대타운)

Exit 3

Right on Sillim-ro-59-gil (신림로59길)

Sillim-dong Nightlife Area

Exit 3 and 4

Culture Street That You Want to Walk (걷고싶은문화의거리)

Exit 6

Straight on Sillim-ro (신림로)

Tags:Gwanak-gu, Line 2, nightlife, park, restaurant
Posted in Gwanak-gu, Line 2 | 1 Comment »

Ewha Womans University Station (이대역) Line 2 – Station #241

September 9, 2012

No, that’s not a typo. Nor is it Engrish. For a long time I hadn’t even noticed the anomaly in Ewha Womans University’s name; then, when I did, it rankled my English-major sensibilities. This was the university that produced South Korea’s first female Constitutional Court justice, its first female prime minister, that was one of the country’s foremost institutions of higher learning and they couldn’t get a simple plural right?

Well, turns out that it’s supposed to be that way. The university’s founder, American missionary Mary F. Scranton, to emphasize that each student was unique and worthy of respect, chose to pluralize ‘woman’ by adding an s, rather than changing the vowel, thus avoiding grouping all students under what she viewed the more collective ‘women.’ In a society that places so much emphasis on the collective, it’s an interesting acknowledgement of the importance of individuality at time in one’s life when that quality is essential. Though it still doesn’t resolve the problem of the missing possessive.

The school that would become Ewha Womans University (이화여자대학교) was founded in 1886 and a year later was christened Ewha Hakdang (이화학당), meaning ‘Pear Blossom Academy,’ by Emperor Gojong. College courses started in 1910, and after liberation from Japan Ewha was granted full-fledged status as a university. It is now the world’s largest women’s university and the alma mater of many prominent Korean women.

The university, known colloquially simply as Edae (이대), is a five-minute walk from Exit 2 or 3 down Ewha Yeo-dae-gil (이화여대길), a narrow road lined with stores catering to the Four Necessities of the Co-ed Life: snacks, coffee, accessories, and assorted cuteness.

Beginning almost immediately outside of Exit 2 is a succession of street stalls that stretches all the way to the university gate, offering sausages and saju readings, takoyaki and silver earrings, tteokbokki and other things. Practically no two are the same. Cosmetic shops and shoe stores are well represented, and there are a fair number of tech shops and places selling the sorts of things that for a brief period in one’s early twenties get shifted from the Why? to the Must Have!!!! column: puffy photo frames, checkered lamps, plastic duckies in fleece hoodies. Restaurants in the area trend toward the kinds of places that sell themselves on an air of girlish sophistication and class, where the act of going there is more the point than eating. Which is not to say that Edae girls won’t chow down on bossam and sundae, because there are those places too, the absence of squeamishness about foods not being ‘ladylike’ a trait of Korean women that I very much admire. Bakeries selling things like tarts and cakes are popular, and this may be the one place in the entire country where the slogan hung on the local branch of Mr. Pizza actually makes some sense. Edae, too, could arguably be credited as the wellspring of the country’s relatively recent coffee obsession, as it was here, on the main drag, that Korea’s first Starbucks was opened. It’s still there, but now it seems as if you can’t throw a rock in the neighborhood without hitting a café.

The side streets, particularly to the west, via Exit 1 or 2, are where you’ll find most of the area’s renowned fashion and accessories shopping. It’s not quite the mecca it was back in the day, before internet shopping and international fast fashion chains like Zara and H&M set up shop on the peninsula, but it’s still a bustling, popular place to snag the newest threads at student-friendly prices. The shops and stalls form a U around the huge apM building, their clothes running the line from freshman to senior, which is to say from fun and funky to young, job-seeking professional. Imported Americana, like Abercrombie & Fitch and Aeropostale, is popular, and when you need to put the finishing touches on an outfit the alley stalls and carts can fit you out with things like socks and stockings, the latter usually arranged on two dozen disembodied plastic legs that stick up like a plaster mold of the Rockettes at work. The amount of accessories on offer can only be described as a Frenchwoman’s nightmare.

Sprinkled among all the apparel are your basic collegiate Good Time necessaries: noraebangs, clubs, fortune tellers, and photo booths. There are love motels too, but don’t worry, parents reading this. We didn’t see your daughter go in any of those. Perhaps most exotically there are even some men’s clothing shops tucked in amongst everything, so the male study abroad students who attend Edae, as if they weren’t lucky enough already, can pick up shirts and pants here as well. Or, more likely, girls can shop for their boyfriends.

Underneath the constant blare of upbeat Korean and American pop, I noticed a fair bit of Chinese being spoken as I walked around the neighborhood. This continued when I arrived at the university proper, after passing the man selling packages of bananas from cardboard boxes by the front gate, where perhaps a handful of exchange students or prospective exchange students from across the Yellow Sea were touring the campus with parents and posing for pictures.

And Edae is a good place for being an exchange student posing for pictures. Its campus is one of the prettiest in Korea (which partly goes hand in hand with being one of the oldest), populated with many handsome gray stone buildings, ivy climbing up their sides. The first of these such buildings that a visitor notices is the Welch-Ryang Auditorium (대강당), directly up a long flight of stairs and looming over the entrance plaza. Another notable building is Pfeiffer Hall (본관, or just ‘main hall’ in Korean, sparing everyone the trauma of those multiple f’s), a dignified four-story structure with peaked gables and a copper green roof. Just to the left is a statue of Dr. Helen Kim, Korea’s first woman to receive a doctorate. She later went on to become the school’s first Korean president. Pfeiffer Hall is the anchor of the upper campus, an especially pretty section of more stone buildings, a hanok, and many trees – a veritable oasis from the busyness below.

Connecting the main plaza to the upper campus is the university’s most distinguishing feature: an elegant gash in the earth called the Ewha Campus Complex. Designed by the renowned French architect Dominique Perrault, the ECC looks a bit like the half excavated carcass of a crash-landed alien cargo ship. From the main plaza, a wide, gentle slope descends between walls of glass and steel ribs before leveling out and then ascending again, this time more abruptly, up a long flight of steps to Pfeiffer Hall. It’s a beautiful structure, both in the day and at night, and gives one the pleasingly bipolar feeling of being simultaneously underground and outside.

Its ingenuity extends inside as well, as the design lets plentiful natural light into rooms that would otherwise be in a basement or taking up valuable real estate elsewhere, the shops, classrooms, study rooms, reading rooms, lounges, and cafes that occupy the ECC being the beneficiaries. Even if you’re not an Edae student or are indifferent to architecture, there’s still an excellent reason to stop by the ECC, and that’s Arthouse Momo (아트하우스 모모), a two-screen cinema that’s one of the best places in the city to catch independent and foreign films. For those who pine for a ‘purer’ cinema experience, one where androgynous workers dressed in black check your tickets and there’s no snack bar, this is it. (You can, naturally, grab a latte at the adjacent café, though.)

Leaving campus I hung a right once outside the gates and followed an advertisement bus promoting a new idol group called NU’EST as it rolled toward Sinchon Station. Not to be confused with the subway station, this is Sinchon Railway Station (국철신촌역), where you can catch an actual train train. This, however, was not the reason I came, nor was the enormous new station/shopping complex. Tucked below, simultaneously sticking out and easy to miss, like a Model T parked in the lot of a new car dealership, is the original Sinchon Station (신촌역), Seoul’s oldest rail station.

Pale yellow with wooden window frames and doors and a green tile roof, looking more like a cottage than train depot, this used to be the first stop on the Seoul Station to Pyongyang line. In operation since 1920, it’s miraculously avoided the wrecking ball, though unfortunately for me it was undergoing renovations when I visited. I was still able to check out the exterior, however, and to peek in through the windows where I could make out an old schedule board posting trains bound for Munsan (문산), Dorasan (도라산), and Imjingang (임진강).

Like in some other neighborhoods we’ve been to, opposite sides of the same street can have wildly different characters, and that’s certainly true of Edae. North of the station, the girl to guy ratio hovers in the 3:1 range and virtually every single business is targeted at the 18-30-year-old female demographic. South of Sinchon-ro (신촌로), however, one finds themselves in a run-of-the-mill neighborhood that’s perhaps a bit on the scruffy side. Brick apartment buildings, corner stores, and small churches fill up streets whose hilliness hints at the more pronounced inclinations in nearby Aeogae and Chungjeongno. Even here a few concrete staircases built into the streets were necessary.

Daeheung-ro (대홍로), south from Exit 5 or 6, was a fairly busy street, lined with supermarkets, real estate offices, and tteok shops, and up past a dirt lot where piles of tree branches sat in front of old homes I could make out the buildings of Sogang University (서강대학교) atop a hill to the southeast. Off the avenue, the side streets showed signs of aging: paint peeled from walls and gates, and a loose exhaust pipe fan let off a high-pitched squeal whenever the wind spun its blades. A good proportion of the denizens walking through those side streets were elderly, and I assumed it was a group of them who had set up the little improvised salon of four green plastic chairs and two stuffed pleather ones that occupied the bit of space next to a green clothing donation bin.

The last main feature of the Edae neighborhood, and one we talked about when we went to Ahyeon Station, is Wedding Town, the stretch of Sinchon-ro between the two stations that is lined almost exclusively with wedding dress shops. A hundred meters or so from Exit 4 or 5, dozens of shops provide gowns for soon to be brides that range from glitzy numbers studded with rhinestones to more simple pieces. In addition to stores selling Western-style dresses many also sell hanbok, but even these range from traditional cuts to more modern interpretations.

Ewha Womans University (이화여자대학교)

Exit 2 or 3

Straight on Ewha Yeo-dae-gil (이화여대길)

Arthouse Momo (아트하우스모모)

Exit 2 or 3

Inside the Ewha Campus Complex, Door 3

Sinchon Station (신촌역)

Exit 1

Straight on Sinchon-ro (신촌로), right on Sinchon-yeok-ro (신촌역로)

Wedding Town

Exit 4 or 5

East on Sinchon-ro (신촌로)

Tags:art, history, Line 2, Mapo-gu, nightlife, school, Seodaemun-gu, shopping, transportation
Posted in Line 2, Mapo-gu, Seodaemun-gu | 6 Comments »

Samseong Station (삼성역) Line 2 – Station #219

August 26, 2012

Between 1964 and 1989 the German chronobiologist Rütger Wever conducted a series of experiments in an underground bunker in Andechs, Germany, in which over 400 test subjects were deprived of all external time cues – variations in light, temperature, electromagnetic fields – anything that might signal to them what time of day it was or how much time had passed. The aim of these experiments, and others like them, was to determine the body’s natural sleep cycle if all outside influences that typically determine sleeping and waking hours, both natural and artificial, were removed. What Wever found was that without external cues, humans’ circadian rhythms tend to drift away from the 24-hour day and adopt a cycle closer to 25 hours, meaning that within a couple weeks whatever subjects normally did during the day they’d then do at night, and vice versa.

Were Wever alive today, he might perform follow-up research where the same time cues are withheld but subjects are provided with shops, restaurants, theaters, and, just for good measure, a kimchi museum, to examine the physiological response in such a situation. Would subjects, presented with so many stimuli, extend their circadian rhythms beyond 25 hours? Would it still count as dinner and a movie if dates occurred at 10 a.m.? Would the subjects ever leave? These questions, and many more, could be answered at Coex.

Sprawling below several large Gangnam city blocks, Coex Mall (connected to the station between Exits 5 and 6) is the largest underground mall in Asia, at 85,000 square meters. And if you avoid the area near the main entrance and the food court with its large skylight, through which you can see the enormous Trade Tower rising, it’s entirely possible to immerse yourself in a near-Weverian bunker where light and temperature are constants and the only relevancy that time of day bears is whether you pay standard or matinee price for your movie ticket. In that way, Coex functions as something of an über-mall: a commercial environment where nothing outside it can be perceived to exist, and the only reality is the one of consumption, of shopping bags in one hand, ice cream cone in the other.

Coex does close at night so you can’t put your own circadian rhythm to the test, but merely entering the mall does seem to have some sort of effect on the body. Personally, any semblance of my normally reliable sense of direction completely disappears when I’m there. I’ve been to Coex Mall dozens of times, and yet every time I go I get utterly turned around. This is apparently not an uncommon problem, as there are plentiful touchscreen guides, and assistants at information desks speak into microphones when they answer questions as, presumably, most of the other people within earshot don’t know where they are either.

Although it’s underground, two things: The first is that it never feels claustrophobic. The innumerable lights, bouncing off all of the mall’s polished surfaces, make the low ceilings feel not quite so low. The second is that the mall is still a mall, which is to say that you probably already know what you can find there. Megabox and Uniqlo care not whether they are aboveground or below. A couple features do, however, differentiate Coex from its supra-terranean peers.

The quirkier of these is the Pulmuone Kimchi Field Museum (김치박물관), located on level B2 and covering ingredients, equipment, methods, variations, and everything else you ever wanted to know about kimchi but were too afraid to ask.

Near the entrance are examples of ancient historical tracts that expound on the production and benefits of kimchi, and an explanation that sukggakdugi is a good way of honoring and showing respect for the elderly because its tender flesh is easy on weak teeth. Over seven dozen varieties of kimchi are explained, and many are presented in plastic mock-ups of the type frequently seen in restaurant display cases. You can examine a variety of earthenware storage pots and, if so inclined, have your photo taken pretending to be fed kkakdugi by a hanbok wearing ajumma.

At the far end of the small museum, kimchi’s health benefits are explained, and a display of fermented food from around the world attempts to put kimchi in some sort of smelly global context, though you might call into question Pulmuone’s research after seeing the drawing of an Italian girl standing before the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Coliseum holding a tray of coffee, pizza, and a big plate of pickles. How this myth took hold here I have yet to figure out. Attention people of Korea: Italians do not eat pickles with pizza. In fact, in the four months I lived in Italy I don’t remember seeing any Italians eating any pickles ever. Nor do pizza and coffee go together, but that’s another story. Moving on.

For hardcore kimchiphiles, there’s a library in the museum, stocked with books, newspapers, and theses about the food, and apparently the museum publishes its own series, which includes research on food culture, both domestic and foreign. Prefer your kimchi on a plate as opposed to a book? A small tasting room offers up samples of several different varieties.

Arguably Coex’s best feature, the mall is home to Korea’s largest aquarium, Coex Aquarium (코엑스 아쿠아리움). The stats: 14,350 square meters; approximately 3,000 tons of water; 40,000 animals representing 650 unique species. These include not just tropical fish, sharks, and rays, but also bats, lizards, otters, penguins, and even a pair of squirrel monkeys.

The facility takes you through displays of environments that are de rigueur for aquariums – the Amazon, a mangrove, the deep ocean – but also has a pair of very Korean features that set it apart. The first, and the first area visitors walk through, is Korean in the literal sense, showcasing the peninsula’s marine environments, particularly the country’s riverine ecosystems. Especially interesting to my mind was the display showing the tiny fish that live in the water of flooded rice paddies.

The second feature, Korean in its eagerness to make things goofy and cute, is the Fish’s Wonderland section where small fish swim in tanks that occupy, among others, a Coke machine, a toilet, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. One tank is shaped like a harp and is fitted with sensors, so every time a fish crosses a ‘string’ a note is played.

Of course, the aquarium is popular with families and watching the reactions of kids can be as entertaining as watching the fish. At the piranha tank I looked on as a dad explained what the fish do to his three young kids who listened, wide-eyed. Dad then proceeded to suggest a rock-paper-scissors game; loser had to jump in the tank. Perhaps not thinking through the consequences fully, they eagerly agreed. When dad came out the loser and began looking around for a way into the tank his little girl let out a concerned shriek, before pops announced that, wouldn’t you know it, there was no door.

I’m a bit of an aquarium junkie – I’ll take an aquarium over a zoo any day – and Coex has a good one, but if there’s one knock on it it’s that some of the enclosures are pitifully small. The squirrel monkeys were limited to a cylindrical plexiglass cage that really wasn’t big enough, and for several minutes the aquarium’s beaver swam back and forth in its enclosure’s bit of water, a small strip that was maybe only twice its body length.

Big as the mall is, it’s only one part of the greater Coex complex. The development was initially limited to an exhibition center, finished in 1979, but has expanded to today include hotels, office towers, a department store, a serviced residence, and a casino. Undoubtedly the most prestigious part of the complex is the convention center, which in recent years has hosted, among other major events, a G-20 summit and the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit. Coex’s newest addition is the Coex Artium, a glass-walled building (so much for the experiment) adjacent to the mall’s main entrance that features a theater where musicals are staged.

Succinctly encapsulating the perpetual tension between tradition and modernity in Seoul, just across the street from Coex’s north side is the ancient Bongeun Temple (봉은사). To reach it, simply go out Exit 6, walk past the flock of national flags outside of the convention center on Yeongdong-daero (영동대로) to the intersection with Bongeunsa-ro (봉은사로). You’ll see it ahead on your left.

Taking foresight to extremes, Bongeunsa beat the Gangnam real estate boom by nearly half a millennium. The temple was founded by the Venerable Yeonhoe (연회국사가) in 794, and moved to its current location in 1562, before the area got trendy. Bongeunsa became the head temple of the Seon (선 or Zen) sect of Buddhism during the Joseon Dynasty, when the religion was under suppression by the Confucian government, and played an important role in the religion’s perseverance and revival, largely under the stewardship of the Venerable Bowu (보우스님). During the later Joseon Period, the Venerable Younggi (영기스님) enshrined 81 volumes of the Avatamsaka Sutra, carved on woodblock, in the Panjeon (판전 or Tripitaka Hall), which he had built to preserve and store scriptures.

Today Bongeunsa is comprised of over a dozen buildings, most of which are reconstructions following a 1939 fire and damage suffered during the Korean War. Fortunately, the Panjeon is not one of these. Bongeunsa also contains National Treasure No. 321, an incense burner, and several Seoul Tangible Cultural Properties.

My favorite of these can be found at the entrance, just past the stone elephants and inside the Jinyeomun (진여문 or ‘Gate of Suchness’): the Statues of the Four Celestial Kings (사천왕). These four wooden carvings depict the kings who, from the four cardinal directions, protect the Buddha’s teachings. Typically the members of this quartet are depicted as a fearsome foursome, but Bongeunsa’s stocky guardians, carved in 1746, look rather goofy, as they might be depicted in a cartoon retelling of the tradition. They form a good cop – bad cop dichotomy with the menacing door guards painted on the gate’s enormous doors.

Paper lanterns for the upcoming Buddha’s birthday celebrations had been strung up over the main path, and in the pond to my left were staked two more, these in the shape of fish. A group of stelae were to my right.

The main path leads to the Beopwang-ru (법왕루 or ‘Dharma King Pavilion’), which houses the Buddha and is used for morning ceremonies. It also houses 3,300 miniature statues of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, though more interesting to me was the fact that there was actually an ATM inside. It struck me as a bit of a grotesquerie at first, but as likely as not it was put in as a concession to the customers participating in Bongeunsa’s temple stay program, and perhaps to the temple staff as well, the latter being hard at work in offices in the Beopwang-ru, which looked just like any other office, save for the pictures of shaven, robed monks on the walls.

Between the Beopwang-ru and the Daewoong-jeon was a roofed courtyard where people lit joss sticks in front of a stone pagoda flanked by stone lanterns and two 15-foot paintings. Hanging from the courtyard’s roof were hundreds of red lanterns with green bottoms, looking like the fruits on an inverted tomato vine. The Daewoong-jeon (대웅전 or ‘Main Buddha Hall’) is the temple’s spiritual heart, where you’ll find the wooden statues of the Sakyamuni Trinity, dating from 1651 – squat characters with almost no necks, like the stevedores of the Buddhist world. A couple dozen people were praying and meditating inside the hall, and from the roof beams a pair of dragon heads poked out discreetly to gaze at the trio. Hundreds of tiny lights were set into the walls around the altar, and their light helped illuminate an impressive pair of 19^th century paintings.

‘Contrast’ is perhaps not strong enough a word to describe Bongeunsa versus its surroundings. While the traffic and commerce of Gangnam carries on just steps away, the faithful or the merely stressed can retreat to the temple’s peaceful grounds, filled with the chirping of birds, beautiful wooden buildings, trees, shrubs, and dozens and dozens of bushes of azaleas in white, red, pink, and purple. One of the most peaceful spots on the grounds is the Great Statue of Maitreya Buddha (미륵대불), a 23-meter representation of the future Buddha that gazes out over the complex and the tops of skyscrapers. A large maroon stone slab is set before it for people to pray on, and a handful were doing so when I came by, including one woman, devout and resourceful, who had propped open an umbrella on the ground next to her to keep the sun off when she was prostrating.

Just east of the statue is the compound’s oldest building, the Pan-jeon (판전 or Tripitaka Hall), where 3,438 sutra tablets are held. Unfortunately it was closed and I couldn’t get a look at these.

Simply walking around Bongeunsa is therapeutic, but for those wanting a fuller experience, visitors can participate in either a two-day, one-night Temple Stay (50,000 won), which includes a tea ceremony, Buddhist rosary making, and meditation, or in a two-hour Temple Life program (20,000 won) and go on a temple tour, meditate, and make a lotus lantern. Details and registration info are available on the temple’s website.

Of course, if they don’t make directly for Coex Mall, the scene that greets visitors to Samseong is much less sedate. The station is at the intersection of Yeongdong-daero and Teheran-ro (테헤란로), and the two boulevards are lined with soaring glass and steel towers, none more noticeable than the aforementioned Trade Tower with its indented middle sections. But small touches like the pansy-filled flower boxes mounted perfectly at nose-height on the light poles make things feel not quite so Spartan. It helps too if you get to see a taxi driver in a bad comb over jump roping on the sidewalk while waiting for a fare, as I did.

After going out Exit 7 and passing by the KEPCO headquarters I swung right on Bongeunsa-ro, and away from the main drags it could be surprisingly quiet. After one cluster of traffic passed I heard the ticking of a ping pong ball being hit back and forth coming from inside one of the buildings.

Just a couple blocks east of the station is the Tahn Stream (탄천), which is most easily reached by going straight from Exit 1 and down the stairs underneath the flyway. We’d come across the Tahn at Jangji Station as well, where it was reasonably pleasant, but in this area it’s really not. Wide and not particularly pretty, its only feature here is the walking and biking paths running alongside. It’s loomed over by bridges and elevated highways, and both banks are essentially parking lots, filled up with private vehicles and lots and lots of tour buses, presumably waiting to pick up their groups when their visit to Coex is done. You can see into the upper deck of nearby Jamsil Stadium – a game was going on and the mustard yellow seats were about half full – which is kind of neat, but if you’re looking to enjoy one of Seoul’s many streams you’d be better off going elsewhere.

After checking out the stream I went south from Exit 3 to visit Kring, an architecturally stunning ‘creative culture space’ housing a cinema, galleries, and event space. Kring means ‘circle’ in Dutch, and the building’s façade looks like ripples in a pond, or sound waves emanating from inside. I’d last visited the previous year when the Creators Project came through Seoul, but unfortunately Kring is now afgewerkt, which Google Translate tells me is Dutch for ‘finished.’ A sign on the front door said that it had been closed since December 31 of last year and was awaiting a buyer. When Liz passed by a couple weeks later it appeared that it had been snapped up by Prugio, possibly to be turned into showroom space.

Occasionally in the course of exploring we’ll stumble across something small and beautiful and totally unexpected and perhaps a little bit amazing, and this is one of the project’s biggest pleasures. After being disappointed at Kring, I was walking around the back streets of Daechi-dong (대치동) when I stumbled across a tiny park containing an incredible Gingko Tree and the Yeongsandan Monument (은행나무와 영산단 기념비). It can be reached by continuing past Kring from Exit 3, turning right on Dogok-ro (도곡로), and right again on Dogok-ro-87-gil (도곡로87길).

The gingko just might be the best tree in all of Seoul: 530 years old, 20 meters tall, and 4.8 meters in circumference. About six feet up from the base knotty limbs are grouped compactly together, and these extend upward into a vast, lush canopy, bathing almost the entire park in shade. Underneath it, a man was sitting on a bench reading one book, three others stacked by his side. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d chosen that spot to settle in for a long read; besides being cool and pleasant, the great tree lent the spot a certain dignity, and I imagined Joseon scholars doing similarly hundreds of years ago, preparing for the civil service exams.

In fact, the gingko tree does bear some historical significance. The neighborhood used to be the site of Hanti Village (한티마을 or Big Hill Village), and it was here that inhabitants would come to pray for the village’s prosperity, culminating in a yearly village ceremony on July 1^st of the Lunar Calendar. I have no idea how old they are, but in front of the tree there is still a small granite altar and stele. There’s no longer much need to entreat for Daechi-dong’s prosperity, but a few hours, or even a few minutes, spent contemplating the towering green canopy and enjoying the rare pleasure of something both ancient and natural, in a city that often seems to value neither, must surely be something close to prayer.

Coex Mall

Linked to station between Exits 5 and 6

www.coexmall.com

Pulmuone Kimchi Field Museum (김치박물관)

B2 Floor of Coex Mall

Hours | Tues – Sun 10:00 – 18:00; Closed Mondays, January 1, Lunar New Year’s, Chuseok, Christmas

Admission | Adults – 3,000 won, Youth – 2,000, Kids 4 and under – free

02) 6002-6456

www.kimchimuseum.or.kr

Coex Aquarium (코엑스 아쿠아리움)

Main floor of Coex Mall

Hours | 10:00 – 20:00 every day, last entry at 19:00

Admission | Adults – 17,500 won, Youth – 14,500, Children – 11,000

02) 6002-6200

www.coexaqua.com

Bongeun Temple (봉은사)

Exit 6

Straight on Yeongdong-daero (영동대로), left on Bongeunsa-ro (봉은사로)

02) 3218-4826 (Korean), 02) 3218-4895 (English)

www.bongeunsa.org

Temple Stays and Temple Life programs are available. See website for details.

Tahn Stream (탄천)

Exit 1

Straight on Teheran-ro (테헤란로)

Gingko Tree and Yeongsandan Monument (은행나무와 영산단 기념비)

Exit 3

Straight on Yeongdong-daero (영동대로), right on Dogok-ro (도곡로), right on Dogok-ro-87-gil (도곡로87길)

Tags:Gangnam-gu, history, Line 2, monument, museum, park, shopping, temple
Posted in Gangnam-gu, Line 2 | 3 Comments »

Yongdu Station (용두역) Line 2 – Station #211-3

August 19, 2012

As we’ve traipsed all about Seoul in the course of this project, one of the things that’s struck me most, that I was totally wrong about before we began, is how many waterways there are. Seoul will never be confused with Bangkok or Venice, but if you walk around or simply take a good look at a map, you’ll notice all the streams that crisscross the capital, adding a fluid dimension to this solid city.

Apart from the obvious, the Han, the one that springs most readily to mind is the Cheonggye Stream (청계천), a narrow ribbon that, to a remarkable degree, seems to run not just through the city’s northern half, but through her modern history, serving as a barometer of what Seoul was and what it’s wanted to be. Once a pristine creek, the destitution of the postwar years turned it into an open-air sewer, as the refuse and excretions of a burlap and tin population seeped into the waters from the scrap and shamble shacks piled up along its banks. Breakneck modernization and neckbreak dictatorships brought eviction notices and orders to drain the water and erect a flyway, as livelihoods and livability were sacrificed for the need to build a country, no questions asked. By the mid-2000s, thanks to past sacrifices, no one could doubt that Korea had made it, and when the country finally took its foot off the gas and looked around it realized that the way forward meant undoing some of the past. Authoritarian governments had been replaced with democracy, popular culture continued to wax like an ever-inflating moon, green and design were ubiquitous buzzwords, and the very same man, Lee Myung-Bak, who filled it in ordered that the highway be dismantled and the Cheonggye-cheon restored. And what the city has now is a waterway whose characteristics couldn’t be more modern Korean: an artificially engineered version of something natural, a second chance that came about through trial and error and sheer force of will, and that, in spite of everything it’s been through, has become one of the best, most loved things about the city.

We’ve been all up and down the length of the Cheonggye in the course of this project, but to get to know the stream and its history there probably isn’t a better place than the stretch near Yongdu Station. Here you’ll find aspects of both the highly designed western end and the more natural eastern end, as well as a stream-related exhibition and the Cheong Gye Cheon Museum (청계천문화관).

The Cheonggye Stream (청계천) is just a short walk south from either Exit 4 or 5, part of it situated below a flyover that curves around high above. Walking paths and bunches of reeds line either bank, and for anyone whose only experience with the stream is the touristy end near City Hall, its unfussiness and the extent to which it’s localized at this point may come as a bit of a shock. Just to the west the even smaller Jeongneung Stream (정릉천) empties into the Cheonggye, forming an apparently popular meeting spot for the local duck population. I counted at least six.

Cross to the stream’s south bank, and just a few steps to your right is the Cheonggye Stream Shack (청계천판잣집), a model of the wooden shacks that the area’s poor lived in in the 1960s and 70s. The first thing you’ll likely notice, and there’s no point trying to pretend otherwise, is that the Shack does not capture the squalor of the actual river shacks at all. The real stream neighborhoods, as any photograph will attest, were little better than refugee camps, comparable to any slums you’d see in contemporary Lagos or Mumbai. Instead it’s a purely Rockwellian version that will leave you not gaping at the awfulness of postwar Korean life and awestruck by the country’s progress, but, as I was, dreaming about throwing out your phone and laptop and moving into one of these rustically romantic huts with nothing but a typewriter and fully stocked library.

That said, the shack is still a fun, interesting, and, yes, even educational place to visit. Composed of unvarnished wooden boards, it’s the only place I know of in Seoul where you’re able to walk through a recreation of this part of the city’s history, and the attention to detail is impressive. Old movie posters (바보 (The Idiot) and 저 하늘에도 슬픔이 (There’s Sadness Also in the Sky)) advertise the era’s silver screen offerings, wooden carts are propped up against the wall underneath old-fashioned, hand-painted wooden shop signs, and there’s even a government notice (on aged yellow paper) tacked up encouraging citizens to eat other grains and more flour due to a rice shortage.

The shack condenses a charcoal briquette store, comic book shop, grocery, public water works, and school room into a rather small space, which left me with the feeling that I was walking through a Fisher Price play set come to life, and the heavy coating of nostalgia and myriad knickknacks on show put the finishing touches on the feeling that the step back in time was not so much to the Seoul of forty years ago, but to some alternative version of my own childhood.

Inside you can indulge the feeling. There are old-fashioned school uniforms you can put on if you want to sel-ca yourself as a ‘60s school kid (in the days before you could sel-ca), and dated equipment and toys. It’s tempting, but the sign that says ‘Please don’t take stuff,’ reminds you better. These items are found in the 전시-체험관 (Display Experience Center), the first room you step into, followed by the 공부방 (study room), where a low study desk with books and pencils is accompanied by tin bowls and pots on a heater. A stack of newspapers sits at the base of one wall, photos of Park Chung-hee (박정희) and Kim Il-sung (김일성) gracing page one.

In the 구멍가게 (corner shop) some things provided a rare sense of continuity – Samyang ramen, OB beer – but most reinforced the wide gap between then and now – Crown beer, wooden toy guns, chintzy plastic toys that today’s kids wouldn’t know what to do with. The next room, the 만화방 (comics shop), had shelves lined with faded copies of old comics and, on a table, several women’s magazines for mothers to peruse while Junior checked out his favorite superhero’s exploits. The last room is the 추억의 교실 (Memory Classroom) where some old bags and textbooks sat around (some not old enough to fit with the rest of the things in the Shack) along with award certificates, lunchboxes, and class photos.

A stone’s toss west of the Shack is a point in the stream billed the ‘Wall of Propose’ (청혼의벽), a rather tacky little spot ostensibly targeted at couples that’s best avoided, particularly if you have any inclination of actually proposing. There’s a big metal heart sculpture on the wall, hearts on the bridge, heart-shaped seats by the stream, and three hearts saying ‘Love in Seoul’ attached to the bridge’s central pillar.

On the south bank a park bench has been transformed into an impossibly cheesy gold carriage where couples can get their photos taken, provided that an obliging passerby can keep his gag reflex in check long enough to click the shutter. Meanwhile, on the north side of the stream you’ll also find a lock wall where you could take part in the by now rather clichéd ritual of attaching a padlock together with your partner to signify your unbreakable bond. The one here was rather sparsely used, making it seem a bit forlorn. I did like, however, the couple that had chosen to express their love in the form of industrial size locks bearing the Cass beer logo.

Across the street from the Shack you can fully immerse yourself in the stream’s history at the Cheong Gye Cheon Museum (청계천문화관), easily recognizable by the long glass wall imitating the stream’s watercourse that runs the length of its façade. Also on the building’s exterior are two enormous panoramic photos that show the capital city in 1929 and 2009, the encircling mountains being just about the only thing convincing you it’s the same city.

The first part of the museum focuses on the postwar Cheonggyecheon, particularly the restoration project that began in 2003, and if it comes off a mite bit pleased with itself it’s not without good reason. Restoration required two years, the removal of 5.4 kilometers of covering road and 5.9 of expressway, 16.8 kilometers of sewer maintenance, and the construction of 22 bridges, resulting in 10.9 kilometers of waterway being excavated. Yes, that’s 39 kilometers of work that could have been avoided, but let’s not get too cynical; the end result is pretty marvelous. Displays chart the stream’s degradation, covering, and restoration before moving on to a section that highlights the Cheonggye’s flora and fauna.

Downstairs holds what I found to be the most interesting part of the museum, an informative look at the stream’s history and its relation to the city and its people, from the time that Seoul was founded (as Hanyang (한양)) to its temporary elimination. Maps from the 17^th to 19^th centuries are on display, along with models of the five major bridges that crossed the water during the Joseon Dynasty. The issue of how to use the stream has been a perpetual dilemma, stretching from when Joseon monarchs declared, much to the objection of feng shui experts who feared it would damage the city’s chi, that an increasing population necessitated it be made available for waste disposal, to the postwar years when factories that re-dyed military supplies and uniforms for civilian use set up shop on its banks, curdling its waters into a sludge of dark gray muck.

Although it’s the neighborhood’s dominant feature, the Cheonggye Stream isn’t all the neighborhood holds, nor is it even the only stream in the area. As I mentioned before, you can also find the lower reaches of the Jeongneung Stream (정릉천) and the Jeongneung Stream Levee Park (정릉천제방공원) here, a short walk past the new 20-story apartment towers outside Exit 1.

This little stream was still and half-frozen when I visited, a scrim of ice on its surface in some places, the water more like slush in others, and here too were a couple of ducks paddling about in a section where there was still open water. Stepping stones ran across the stream and bike and walking paths ran alongside, all in the partial shadow of an overhead flyover. Never very wide, the further north I walked the less water there was and the more sandbars appeared, until it was just a thin ribbon as I neared Jegi-dong Station (제기동역). It was around there, underneath a bridge, where I watched an old man climb down the banks and, in a very generous interpretation, engage with the stream in a way that recalled its more humble past. To put it more bluntly, he urinated in it. Stay classy, ajeosshi, stay classy.

Lastly, if you come out Exit 4 en route to the Cheonggye, you’ll find yourself in the triangular plot that is Yongdu Park (용두공원), a compact but very pleasant little oasis between major roads. There’s an outdoor stage and a pair of fountains linked by a stone channel, though these were both turned off for the winter. Stone pillars inscribed with poems flanked a walkway, and in a whimsical touch there was a wall of ceramic tiles with children’s handprints and convex mirrors like halved pinballs jutting out, offering a skewed reflection of the surroundings. A trio of old men were making use of the exercise equipment, while nearby a much younger version had somehow found the space to play a bit of baseball. It struck me as mildly ironic, this scene: the old men, who had grown up when the neighborhood was little more than an improvised slum, utilizing the benefits of a modern society wealthy enough to spend money on things like public exercise equipment, and the young kids, who have known nothing but prosperity, fashioning their entertainment out of nothing more than a bat and ball and some improvised space.

Cheonggye Stream (청계천)

Exit 4 or 5

South on Gosanja-ro (고산자로)

Cheonggye Stream Shack (청계천판잣집)

Exit 5

South on Gosanja-ro (고산자로), right after crossing the stream

Hours Tue – Thu, Sun 10:00 – 19:00, Fri – Sat 10:00 – 20:00, Closed Mondays

02) 2290-6807

www.cheonggyecheon.or.kr

‘Wall of Propose’ (청혼의벽)

Exit 5

South on Gosanja-ro (고산자로), right after crossing the stream

propose.sisul.or.kr

Cheong Gye Cheon Museum (청계천문화관)

Exit 5

South on Gosanja-ro (고산자로)

Hours March – October: Tue – Fri 9:00 – 21:00, Sat – Sun, Holidays 9:00 – 19:00; November – February: Tue – Fri 9:00 – 21:00, Sat – Sun 9:00 – 18:00; Closed Mondays and New Year’s Day

02) 2286-3410

www.cgcm.go.kr

Jeongneung Stream (정릉천) and Jeongneung Stream Levee Park (정릉천제방공원)

Exit 1

Yongdu Park (용두공원)

Exit 4

Tags:Dongdaemun-gu, history, Line 2, monument, museum, park
Posted in Dongdaemun-gu, Line 2 | 4 Comments »

Sinchon Station (신촌역) Line 2 – Station #240

July 15, 2012

For as many times as I’ve been to Sinchon Station – I live practically right down the street – I’d never actually been in the part of the neighborhood south of Sinchon-ro (신촌로), so it was there that I decided to start things. Plus, it was the early afternoon, and things north of the station don’t really get rolling until the sun goes down.

Similar to at Ewha Station, there’s a noticeable difference to the two sides. On Sinchon-ro outside Exit 5 there were several students out and about, some grabbing mandu from a street stall, others watching puppies wrestle in a pet store window. Past them the street was a mix of businesses: clothing shops, a wine store, and a place called the International Wig Dept. Store, where, among more conventional hairpieces you could also pick up a wig in the style of a bald man, a la Dr. Phil.

The back streets were an expected collection of red brick apartment buildings and an elementary school where an old guy was getting in some exercise, walking laps around the perimeter of the dirt athletics field. At the back of the neighborhood, concrete stairways led up the hill that Sogang University is on; at least a couple of these had been painted in colorful designs at some time in the past, but they were now faded and chipped and I couldn’t make out just what their designs were.

Speaking of Sogang, it’s easy to get there from Sinchon Station too; a five-minute walk down Baekbeom-ro (백범로) from Exit 6, past some cafes with outdoor terraces where students were enjoying the spring weather, and you’ll arrive at the college’s front gate.

The proximity of that second school probably does a lot to explain the difference between Ewha and Sinchon Stations’ b-side neighborhoods, so to speak. While south of Ewha things are very residential and occasionally even a bit on the decrepit side, south of Sinchon the residential is mixed with student life and plenty of local business, from vegetable stalls to office towers, resulting in a much more vibrant neighborhood. From Exit 7, I strolled down Sogang-ro (서강로), past mothers pushing strollers and businessmen in suits, and past a clutch of love motels meeting university students’ needs between Sogang-ro and Baekbeom-ro. In front of a newish apartment tower a truck was parked, its bed loaded down with flowers for sale, and nearby ajummas picked through a small rack of clothes on the sidewalk.

On both sides of Sogang-ro, perhaps a couple hundred meters from the station, large construction areas cut a path east and west, looking to be where a park above the extension of the Jungang line will run. I turned west down the side street just in front, Sinchon-ro-12-gil (신촌로12길) where a couple seniors had modest shops selling assorted greens, and, just beyond, a few old homes with tiled roofs sat padlocked and waiting to be torn down.

Only a few steps further on, though, and the vibe changed completely, the university influence clearly having breathed some life back into the neighborhood. There were quirky cafes, a few izakayas, clothing boutiques, and, on a side street, a small stall selling knit doilies, brightly colored and clearly of the vegan African dance major-crafted variety, not the Days of Our Lives-watching one. Next to the doilies on Wausan-ro-32-gil (와우산로32길) there’s also a bakery called 김진환 제과점 (Kim Jin-hwan Bakery), which a friend informed me is a rather famous little bakery. All it does are loaves of white bread, which left me a bit nonplussed – Just how famous can a white bread bakery be? – but in the few minutes I was in the area at least five different groups of people entered, inquiring about buying a loaf, only to suffer the same fate that my friend and I just had: being informed that they were closed for the day. Anyone tried their bread and can attest to how good it is?

The bakery and everything else on that funky little street can also be accessed by walking straight out of Exit 8, where the far end of the alley comes out. If you go that way you’ll pass a strip of pojangmachas just outside the exit, followed by stores selling clothes and phones on one side of the sidewalk, staircases between buildings leading down tiny alleys to the backstreets. On the other side of the sidewalk is a strip of tarps set on the ground, each one covered with vegetables. Behind them, perched on milk crates, ajummas sell produce to other ajummas.

When people think of Sinchon they of course think of the opposite side of Sinchon-ro, however, but before we get to the Yonsei campus and the area between it and the station, I’m going to take a quick detour to a bit of an oddity that I never would have expected to encounter in Seoul, much less just blocks from my apartment.

I live between Hongdae and Sinchon, and one night, taking a back road home for the first time, I noticed the gilded figure of an angel blowing a trumpet, perched atop a thin column and glowing against the otherwise black sky. A Google map search revealed that this was where the Seoul Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (예수그리스도 후기성도교회 서울성전) was located.

Like chewing gum and Spam, Mormonism was brought to Korea by American G.I.s, though the first Korean to join the church, Kim Ho Jik, actually did so, in 1951, while attending Cornell University. It wasn’t until 31 years later, however, that a temple was finally opened. The first Mormon temple built on mainland Asia, it is the 37^th overall.

Despite it being maybe four blocks from my place, I’d never bothered to actually go check the temple out, exactly the kind of neighborhood oversight this whole project was meant to address. After a five-minute walk from Exit 1 I turned right on Sinchon-ro-7-gil (신촌로7길), just before the Moto café, and after a block the temple was on my left. As I walked in a short, stocky Korean man in his fifties came out to inquire as to why I was there, and when I told him I just came to have a look around he said OK, but not to go inside the temple.

The complex occupies a small plot of land, about half of which is taken up by the temple itself, a handsome granite building with a black tile roof that’s a nod to traditional Korean architecture. The building is surrounded by slender gray and white pillars and landscaping that looks like an engineered bioreserve for the pairs of babe-cheeked young men fulfilling their missionary duties that I occasionally see wandering around my neighborhood. It’s immaculate, bordering on fetishistic, almost spooky, and was being attended to by a half dozen workers when I stopped by. The bushes are all perfectly trimmed, the beds of pansies are blemish-free, and in front of the temple entrance there is a mesmerizing, undulating hedge whose rises and falls look like waves on a lake.

Few places in Seoul can compete with the area just north of Exits 2 and 3 for sheer happening-ness, particularly after the sun goes down. Surrounded as it is by some of the most prestigious bastions of higher learning in all of Korea, it naturally follows that Sinchon is a place where you can get really, really drunk. A huge assortment of bars occupy the streets and alleys running off Yeonsei-ro (연세로), some in basements, some on ninth floors, and interspersed with these are an equal number of restaurants, many of which are, let’s be frank, basically just bars with red meat.

Of course, there’s far more than just eating and drinking to the neighborhood. Sing at a noraebang, watch a movie at a DVD bang, or head to a multibang and do both, as well as play Wii or board games. Naturally, you can shop, whether it’s in one of the many stores or just browsing the offerings at the dozens of sidewalk tables that go up – everything from socks to accessories to cell phone cases. With the bit of spare change left over you could test your strength at one of the street-side punching bags or your aim by tossing darts at a board of inflated balloons. Stuffed animals for winners. Or simply cut to the chase and make for one of the love motels that loiter discreetly on the quiet back streets near Exits 3 and 4.

Like N Seoul Tower or the Cheonggyecheon, Sinchon is a great place to show up at around dusk, to watch the neighborhood transform from its more subdued daylight hues to the neon-bathed fairground it becomes after the sun goes down. As day changes to night the signs turn on, carnival games get set up, and glowing totems of pressurized air inflate outside of restaurants to advertise the dining pleasures awaiting you, if only you’ll step inside. More enticing, however, are the smells of chicken, pork, and squid that fill the air, mingling with the fainter traces of cigarette smoke and beer and whatever is cooking at the nearest street stall: mandu, odeng, hoddeok. The nocturnal piñata that is Sinchon dispenses as many aural treats as it does olfactory ones. There’s the sizzle of meat on grills, the boisterous shouts of students in various stages of inebriation, and the shimmering dissonance of a half-dozen different K-pop songs pouring out of the surrounding shops at any one time.

There’s a bit less variety to Sinchon nightlife than what you’ll find down the road in Hongdae – no clubs, for example, and less variety in restaurants and bars – but one advantage it has is its compactness. In Sinchon you could eat tteokbokki, take a few cuts in a batting cage, do a tequila shot, and win a can of peanuts from a crane game in the time it would take to walk from one favorite Hongdae bar to another.

At the far end of the Yonsei-ro Midway is the reason for all that commotion: Yonsei University (연세대학교), which you can reach by walking to the end of the road from Exit 3 and taking the pedestrian tunnel that runs under the rail tracks.

After you do so you’ll no doubt notice the enormous gray stone, glass, and steel canyon that is Severance Hospital (세브란스병원), the university affiliated hospital and one of the best in the country.

The modern university can be traced back to Severance’s ancestor, Gwanghyewon, a hospital established by the American missionary Dr. H.N. Allen at King Gojong’s behest in 1885. The name was soon changed to Jejungwon and a medical school was established, before changing again, this time to honor L.H. Severance, who donated money in 1904 to reconstruct the facilities. Shortly after, H.G. Underwood founded Chosen Christian College at a Seoul YMCA in 1915. This too soon underwent a name change, to Yonhi College, in 1917, which after World War II would become the country’s first co-ed university. In 1957 Yonhi and Severance merged to form Yonsei University.

Yonsei’s is one of the few Korean campuses I’ve seen (Korea University and, to a lesser extent, Edae being others) that, coming as I do from a milieu of central quads and stately brick buildings with names like Old Main, manages to feel like a campus to me. Many colleges in Korea are relatively young, and their grounds are cramped and filled with buildings that seem more suited to waiting on a government bureaucrat – who should have been back from lunch two hours ago – to review your small business application than to contemplating Hume or the repercussions of the Boxer Rebellion on contemporary China’s attitudes toward its ethnic minorities. Not the universities’ fault; I just like a little ambiance with my tuition.

Yonsei, pleasantly, provides that. Along the central artery leading away from the main gate were beds of pansies, and at its far end, just before the main hall, huge azalea bushes were starting their deep lilac bloom. Halfway between, I passed a granite tower with the Yonsei eagle perched atop, the year 1885 inscribed at its base, where there was also a black stone etched with Isaiah 40:31 in Korean and Hebrew. A few dozen meters to the left, basketball courts were packed with pick-up games.

That main hall, formally known as Underwood Hall, sits at the middle of a U-shaped triumvirate of ivy-covered semi-Gothic buildings with Tudor-style arched entrances that form the campus’ focal point. Dating from 1924, the hall is Historic Site No. 276, and originally served as a lecture hall and the literature building (문학관). It’s not, however, the oldest of the three. That distinction goes to the west building, Stimson Hall (Historic Site No. 275, 1920), named after C.M. Stimson who donated $25,000 for its construction. To the east is Appenzeller Hall (277, 1924), named for H.G. Appenzeller, an American missionary, and originally a lecture hall for natural sciences (이학관).

These three buildings form a horseshoe around a courtyard where well-tended triangular hedges surround flower bushes, and, at the very center, there stands a statue of Horace Grant Underwood (1859-1916), the university’s founder, dwarfed slightly by the buildings around him. Mustachioed, he spreads his arms out before him, perpetually welcoming students, though the expression on his face suggests that he might be beseeching them just a little bit too.

Immediately behind Underwood Hall is another U-shaped trio of stone buildings, also surrounding a small courtyard with triangular hedges. This may be the most idyllic spot on campus, completely surrounded as it is by stately old buildings and cut off from any views of greater Seoul that could intrude on your tweed-jacketed, tortoise shell-rimmed daydreams.

The campus’ upper reaches are an antidote for whatever academic stress students might be suffering, dotted as they are with tranquil park areas, copses of trees, dirt walking paths, and a creek that, for the time-being at least, was nearly dried out. This is also where you’ll find the President’s Residence (충장공관), an elegant stone house with an expansive lawn that is just crying out for a barbecue and a few rounds of lawn bowling.

When I was visiting Edae not long ago, walking around its upper campus I noticed something poking above the treetops to the west that gave me a real ‘What the…?’ moment: an enormous white satellite dish, much bigger than the kind used for television, that nevertheless I had somehow not seen before. It seemed to be somewhere on or near the Yonsei campus.

Sure enough, once at Yonsei, I spotted it again, and after passing the President’s Residence I found a path up to it, where it sat atop the crest of a hill, gigantic and pointed at the western sky. As I’d ventured to guess, it was an astronomical radio observatory, belonging, as the sign read, to the ‘Korean VLBI Network, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute’ (한국우주전파관측망).

I walked up to its base and looked up. As big as it had looked from a distance, it was even bigger up close, maybe the biggest manmade thing that was not a building that I’d ever stood next to. It sounds a bit silly, but I tried to guess how many bowls of tchigae it could hold in its basin, to try to place its size in terms of something I could comprehend. 10,000? 100,000? Who knew? There was a low hum coming from the machinery inside, and as I stared at it I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw the dish move ever so slightly.

Despite being an arts and letters person and not a math and science one at all, I’ve always been something of an astronomy nerd, fascinated by the unfathomable destruction and creation in the cosmos and by the brain-melting complexities of questions regarding dark energy and the curvature of space, and I think this is due to my sense that astronomy is as much about philosophy – our quest to understand where we come from and why we’re here – as it is about science. So I took a seat on the bench underneath the dish and just sat and contemplated it a while, the way a devotee might gaze at the Kaaba. It had a peculiar physical immediacy: its incredible mass, the laboratory-ivory color of spaceships and escape pods. But there was something surreal about it too: the evocative noises I could hear coming from inside, the fact that even at that moment the machine was channeling invisible signals that I could never comprehend from places I could never be. I sat there for a long time just staring at the machine, thinking that if I was patient enough I’d witness something, that I’d be rewarded with a glimpse of the unknowable processes going on inside, that something would happen.

And then it did. Just as I was about to get up and leave I heard a whirring sound, louder than before, and I looked up to see the dish tilting downward, from a 45-degree angle to perhaps ten degrees, and doing it so quickly that I almost felt worried that the entire thing would unhinge and come crashing down right in front of me. When it reached ten degrees it stopped. Nothing happened for a good 30 seconds and then, just as suddenly as the first time, it began moving again, this time tilting back up four, five, six times, a few degrees at a time until it came to rest around 70 degrees. Was it tracking something? Keeping its gears loose? Playing? It was as if a building had suddenly come alive, shifted to a more comfortable position, and then returned to its naturally lifeless state.

The dish did not move any more, but I continued to sit on the bench for several minutes and stare at it, my face in an open-mouthed smile, rather stupefied. Then I too roused myself to motion and headed down the hill, left to ponder all the mysteries of the universe that I didn’t know and that the machine did.

김진환 제과점 (Kim Jin-hwan Bakery)

Exit 7

South on Sogang-ro (서강로), Right on Sinchon-ro-12-gil (신촌로12길), Left on Wausan-ro-32-gil (와우산로32길)

02) 325-0378

Seoul Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (예수그리스도 후기성도교회 서울성전)

Exit 1

Straight on Sinchon-ro (신촌로), Right on Sinchon-ro-7-gil (신촌로7길)

Yonsei University (연세대학교) and Severance Hospital (세브란스병원)

Exit 3

Straight on Sinchon-ro (신촌로)

www.yonsei.ac.kr

http://www.iseverance.com

Tags:history, Line 2, Mapo-gu, monument, nightlife, restaurant, school, Seodaemun-gu, temple
Posted in Line 2, Mapo-gu, Seodaemun-gu | 4 Comments »

Seoul Sub→urban

Archive for the ‘Line 2’ Category

Sillim Station (신림역) Line 2 – Station #230

Ewha Womans University Station (이대역) Line 2 – Station #241

Samseong Station (삼성역) Line 2 – Station #219

Yongdu Station (용두역) Line 2 – Station #211-3

Sinchon Station (신촌역) Line 2 – Station #240

Our Partners

Search Seoul Sub→urban

Show Us Your Local!

Seoul Sub→urban in the Media

Awards and Acknowledgements

About Seoul Sub→urban

About Us

Recurring:

Blogroll

Follow “Seoul Sub→urban”