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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 »

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 »

Sangsu Station (상수역) Line 6 – Station #623

February 5, 2012

And after five years? What then?

The minute someone sits down at a keyboard, sets an f-stop, or turns over a fresh page in a sketchpad and tries to describe a place, it’s already a little bit gone. Unavoidable and just fine really. It clears the way for new records, allows for comparisons (maybe even lessons or conclusions), and staves off obsolescence for at least a few magazines and papers and describers a bit longer. But when a place changes as fast as Seoul does, it can sometimes feel like a new version is needed before the old one is even finished.

Part of me knew that would be the fate of this project before we even started it – that if we ever reached the end, what came at the beginning would likely need a whole new description. I try to reconcile myself with this by keeping in mind that posts at least serve as a snapshot of a neighborhood at a particular moment, even if their expiration date arrives the day they show up. We’ve been back to neighborhoods we’d visited earlier, only to find that a business or a building we mentioned before is gone, and that’s just the way it is with Seoul, some neighborhoods even more than others.

Sangsu for one.

I live just outside of the Hongik University neighborhood and go there at least once every couple of weeks, and quite literally every time I do I notice something that’s changed. Sangsu, which serves the southeast side of the neighborhood, is no different. It may even be changing more quickly than central Hongdae, as the combination of the influence of the school’s vibrant graduates and the rush to capitalize on the cachet the neighborhood has with the city’s young creative class continues to push the boundaries of what can be considered ‘Hongdae’ outward (see Hapjeong).

The area south of the station and Dokmak-gil (독막길) gives an interesting, but subtle picture of what’s taking shape here. When you step out Exit 4 and walk down the main drag and through the backstreets, things look at first exactly as they do in dozens and dozens of other mostly residential areas of Seoul: quietish one-and-a-half-lane roads surrounded by middle class red brick apartment buildings. But then you start to notice little things that betray the influence of the art school just a few blocks away: hip bike shops, vintage boutiques, small galleries, small cafes, small galleries cum cafes.

One of these had an unobtrusive folding sign on the alley outside that almost read like a haiku:

빵빵금지

아름다운

골목길을

만들어요

(Don’t honk

Making

A Beautiful

Alley)

But in a cheeky and very Hongdae touch the little lyric was accompanied by a picture of two stick figures: one on its knees, the other looming over its head, arm raised and baton cocked. They really mean it.

As I walked east down the main drag, past restaurants getting ready for dinnertime business, there was one image that seemed to sum up this side of the neighborhood for me: on the outdoor patio of a café that doubled as a crafts workshop uni kids were sipping lattes and knitting, while just next door a pair of ajummas stood chatting outside a store selling bags of bar snacks the size of toddlers.

If the changes taking place near Exit 4 are subtle, those in the area adjacent to Exit 3 are anything but. Between Dokmak-gil and the river the neighborhood is undergoing a facelift, and looks set for a considerable amount of redevelopment. Walking around, the green, black, and pink striped blankets often put up around construction sites were a common sight, and quite a few small businesses had closed up. Many of these businesses, and many houses as well, had red spray paint slashed across their windows and sides reading 철거 or 철거예장 (demolition or will be demolished). Squeezed between Hongdae and the new developments along the river, these buildings’ days have likely been numbered for quite some time.

If you head south down Wausan-gil after leaving Exit 3 and follow the signs as they point you east on Tojeong-ro (토정로) and then towards a small side street on your right you’ll spot a blue tunnel leading to the Hangang Park (한강공원). The stretch of park here is much more modest than at other parts of the river, not much more than a strip of grass running alongside a bike path and bunches of tan reeds with ash-colored tops that gently swayed in the breeze blowing off the river. In addition, you’re confronted with the Gangbyeonbuk-ro Expressway (강변북로) rising up out of the water and hogging the bulk of the view just in front of you, which kept giving me flashbacks of ‘The Host’ (괴물).

Despite these drawbacks the park was a popular place on the day I visited, the bike path in particular full of Seoulites out for a ride. And if you don’t mind having to gaze through the gaps between giant concrete pillars, the view across the river is an especially nice one, taking in a view of Parliament and the skyscrapers of Yeouido, as well as Bahm Island (밤섬).

The park here also features something that’s a bit of a novelty, something that I haven’t seen anywhere else in Seoul, or Korea for that matter. Walk west from the entrance, and just before you get to the imposing industrial set-up of a water treatment plant you’ll come upon a pair of croquet courts. Huddled under a bridge to protect them from the elements, their flat packed-dirt surfaces were broken up only by the metal hoops on each. One of the courts sat empty, but the other was being used by a half-dozen 50-somethings having a bit of a knockabout.

While the area south of the station drops hints, the area north of it is distinctly part of what’s considered Hongdae. Although the neighborhood near Exit 2 was surprisingly quieter and more residential than I had expected (once I got off Wausan-ro at least), the power line poles on Wausan-ro decorated in Super Mario motifs and tiger stripes left no mistaking what part of town I was in.

One of the neighborhood’s most eye-catching features is the abundance of wall murals and colorful street paintings that pop up just about everywhere you go. There’s of course what’s known as ‘Mural Alley,’ running just south of the university’s main gate, but sections of this have recently been torn down to facilitate development, and I never found the paintings here to be among the area’s best anyway. To check it out, go straight on Wausan-ro towards the university and turn right on the 2^nd Wausan-ro-18-gil (와우산로18길) (just before Codes Combine). You’ll see the Simpson family on the left and then one cow standing on another’s back, busy whitewashing a nighttime cityscape. Take a left at the next little alley, go past some murals, and then hook around to your right.

The best wall murals are to be found elsewhere, though. To name just a small sampling of what I saw, scattered throughout the neighborhood are colorful flowers, grinning cats with angel wings, wolves in top hats, dragons and ogres on acid trips, 30-eyed swamp things swinging by on jungle vines, and a mutant ajumma, permed and lipsticked, but also fanged, warted, and bloodied.

This neighborhood of serendipity reaches its peak outside of Exit 1, where an afternoon’s exploration could very likely turn up your new favorite café, restaurant, shop, or all three.

I began by heading straight west on Dokmak-gil, past African, selling, of course, African art and knickknacks; Bella Tortilla, where the long-haired proprietor served up burritos; and Standing Coffee II, the second iteration of the popular Noksapyeong café. This eventually brought me to the south end of Parking Street, which any Saturday night Hongdae reveler is familiar with and which must have one of the world’s highest discrepancies between the coolness of a street and the coolness of its name.

The best way to conduct oneself in this neighborhood – the only way really, since there’s a pretty high likelihood that what’s there today won’t be there six months from now – is to simply wander about, let your ears absorb the ambient music, abandon any notion of trying to find something, and just let the neighborhood come to you.

You might stumble across a place like 차 끓이는 솥 (Boiling Tea Kettle), just a block down Wausan-ro-11-gil (와우산로11길), where hundreds of tea cups, saucers, and pots sit on shelves in the shop’s window. Some are simple, plain ceramic, while others are made of china and have intricate designs of roosters or dragons. Shelves inside are filled with string-wrapped paper satchels of tea, and their aroma completely envelops the shop in a scent that soothes and drags up exotic Orientalistic fantasies that I thought I’d been too seasoned to have any more.

You might also come upon Publique, just around the corner from 차 끓이는 솥, an artisanal boulangerie and patisserie where delicious-looking loaves of dark bread dusted in flour sit in the window, alongside certificates from baking schools in France, evidence that the baked goods here are the real deal. Though it hasn’t been around long, only since April, it seems to have already become a popular spot, as both the tables inside and on its outdoor patio were filled with people snacking on croissants and sipping coffee when I discovered it.

Speaking of coffee, perhaps nowhere has Korea’s newfound coffee-mania hit harder, or resulted in more superb independent cafes, than around Hongdae and Sangsu. Seemingly every other place in the neighborhood is a little café tempting you to come in from the cold and cozy up with a book and a latte for a while.

If the wandering has worked up an appetite, there are literally hundreds of places to eat around Sangsu, ranging from hole-in-the-wall dirty spoons to multi-story restaurants, from down-home Korean comfort food to Vietnamese, Mexican, or Nepali.

I had earlier been walking down a tiny side street east of Wausan-gil when I came across a small place with a sign in Japanese and a sticker in the window declaring it Zagat rated. It was only 5:15, but there was already a line of ten people out the door. I had no idea what the place was, or even what kind of food was served there, but that mystery, and that line, meant I had to try it.

The place is Hakatabunko (하카타분코) and they serve up Japanese ramen, along with a couple other dishes. There are two types of ramen served at Hakatabunko, one in a pork-based broth that’s rich and full, the other a milder and lighter pork and chicken mix. Both varieties are incredibly savory, the noodles cooked to the perfect firmness.

There are about four tables in Hakatabunko, but if you can you’ll want to grab a seat at the bar along with the dozens of small toy figurines – Keroro, Sailor Moon, the Catbus from ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ – that sit on a ledge above it. This is so you can watch the action taking place in the open kitchen right in front of you. With a rolled-up bandanna tied around his head and sleeves pushed up sinewy arms, the chef boiled noodles, poured broth, and garnished dishes in a practiced and seemingly reflexive series of motions, all the while barking out welcomes and dish announcements in a loud Japanese rasp.

So what now? We visited and created this post in November, but in a neighborhood as quicksilver as Sangsu, there’s every possibility that it’s now obsolete. Well…so be it. That’s what makes Seoul, Seoul, and what makes living here so endlessly interesting. You try to know the city, but she’ll never really let you. The best you can hope to do is to keep coming back, keep reacquainting yourself, and remember that there are, in fact, some things about her that don’t change: the slow march of the Han, the sly glee of kids with paint, the midwinter perfection of steam pouring off a hot bowl of noodles in a cozy izakaya.

Hangang Park (한강공원)

Exit 3

South on Wausan-gil (와우산길), east on Tojeong-ro (토정로), follow sign pointing to entry tunnel up ahead on the right

차 끓이는 솥 (Boiling Tea Kettle)

Exit 1

North on Wausan-gil (와우산길), left on Wausan-ro-11-gil (와우산로11길)

02) 325-1542

daniel75sj@hanmail.net

Publique

Exit 1

North on Wausan-gil (와우산길), left on Wausan-ro-11-gil (와우산로11길), left after차 끓이는 솥 (Boiling Tea Kettle)

02) 333-6919

blog.naver.com/inbp83

Hakatabunko (하카타분코)

Exit 2

North on Wausan-gil (와우산길), right on Dongmak-ro-19-gil (동막로19길), just after the mutant ajumma

02) 332-7900

Parts of this post first appeared in the January 2012 issue of SEOUL magazine.

Tags:art, Line 6, Mapo-gu, nightlife, park, restaurant, shopping
Posted in Line 6, Mapo-gu | 1 Comment »

Gongdeok Station (공덕역) Line 5 – Station #529, Line 6 – Station #626, AREX – Station #A02

January 29, 2012

If someone were to blindfold you and then drop you off at the intersection above Gongdeok Station, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Gangnam and not Mapo-gu. The neighborhood is starkly different from the much more modest nearby areas of Aeogae and Daeheung – massively more developed, a forest of brand new steel and glass towers with streams of heavy traffic moving along the wide avenues below them. It’s clear that Gongdeok has seen a lot of change, and seen it fast, and having recently been linked to the AREX line that runs from Seoul Station to Incheon Airport, it’s likely to see more.

The AREX expansion is still new enough that the entrances accessing it and the surrounding plaza haven’t yet been completed, as I saw after stepping out of Exit 8, where white metal fencing and piles of dirt show signs of a work still in progress. Just past those, however, things are spic and span, Mapo-ro (마포로) lined with sparkling new buildings housing banks, restaurants, and cafes on their first floors. It’s more of the same along Baekbeom-ro (백범로) from Exit 7: tall modern structures, in front of several of which are the sorts of sculptures commissioned by corporate groups. There’s a big blue man like glued together lollipops holding a glowing white orb, and metal stick figures running up a silver arc towards vertical.

In the area framed by these two avenues the neighborhood lets its hair down a bit, and a number of restaurants, bars, and small shops sit invitingly on some small streets paved with stone.

Kiddy-corner from that, I found things to be exceptionally residential. Just outside of Exit 2 is the tower of the Lotte City Hotel, sequined eggs out front, and behind it, via Exit 2 or 3, the neighborhood is 100% apartment towers and their trappings: convenience stores, bakeries, real estate offices, and a few hagwons.

But if there’s one thing that residents of Seoul have come to know it’s that not even the most modern and sterile neighborhoods are without their traces of grime or stubborn remainders from a rougher and not all that remote past.

Take a bus (or a walk) along Sogang-ro (서강로) west of the station on any given night, and you’ll see a sidewalk flooded in a pulp magazine shade of pink where a strip of hostess bars line up, especially on the south side of the avenue, nearest Exit 1. I’d seen these several times before, but always from late night bus windows; this was the first time I’d walked past them. Up close, they seemed curiously shrunken, as if employees and clients alike were two-thirds size. The front of each establishment was only about three meters wide, and the doors were exactly my height or an inch or two shorter. Most of them had peepholes. Facades were usually painted in one solid color, doors in another, and almost all of the establishments used an old-fashioned font resembling hand-drawn brushstrokes on their signs. It almost goes without saying that none of the bars had windows.

The hostess bars front a thin strip, a half block wide, of old, slightly beat-up, tile-roofed buildings that reminded me of similar scenes I’ve come across in the more industrial parts of Yeongdeungpo and elsewhere. Where was the money that was so proudly on display elsewhere around Gongdeok?

Compounding the incongruity was the fact that just behind this humble row a new park was going in. It was just a thin strip of concrete walking path between saplings, but I’d seen something similar near Daeheung Station, and my guess was that the two, and possibly more, would connect in a ribbon of park running above the extension of the Jungang Line, going in underground. Much development is left, however – dump trucks sat around idly and the exercise equipment placed at a bulge in the walking path was still wrapped in protective blue plastic.

For a bigger look at what Gongdeok was probably like a few years ago, pop out Exit 5 and head to Gongdeok Market (공덕시장) by heading straight on Mallijae-gil (만리재길) and veering to the left onto Mallijaeyet-gil (만리재옛길). A block up on the left is the market, as old school as you like. Its main alley runs parallel to the street, squeezed between two old three-story brick buildings that have tufts of grass and weeds growing out of cracks in their sides and roofs.

Along the outside alley were vegetable sellers and piles of shoes and butchers whose cuts of meat were illuminated with the same pink lights as the hostess bars a couple blocks away. The market continued in dimly lit stalls occupying the first floor of the building between the alley and Mallijaeyet-gil, a low-roofed, cramped place that brought to mind Guro Market (구로시장) near Namguro Station. Many of the stalls were closed on a Sunday, but some potent-smelling lunch booths were open and manned by wizened ajummas, though at least one of them had snuck away to a noraebang, judging by the wail pouring from a second-story window.

I’d heard of the Gongdeok neighborhood being well-known for a couple of foods, so one of my main goals on this visit was to try them out. Fortunately for the serial-eater, the places for both of these are right next to each other, occupying the outer edge of the market and are the first and second things you see on your way there from the station.

As soon as you arrive at the market you’ll notice several signs advertising places for jokbal (족발), or pork trotters. The most prominent of these, and the one my companion and I ate at, is Gungjung Jokbal (궁중족발), which doesn’t appear all that big from the street, but once you step inside the market alley reveals itself to be spread over about a half-dozen rooms, as if it’s metastasized. Every single one of these was boisterous and packed when I visited, as any good jokbal place should be. Jokbal is maybe one of the world’s least pretentious eating experiences, and every time I have it I feel as if I really should have just finished working at the docks and should now be telling loud off-color jokes. My longshoreman fantasy was graciously aided by the fact that a minute after we were seated two guys pulled up chairs at the table next to us, one of whom had the most beautiful Korean mullet I’d ever seen. Less than ten minutes later they were already on their second bottle of soju. Keep up the good work, men.

Gungjung Jokbal’s popularity probably owed quite a bit to its generosity. Along with a liberal portion of jokbal, the joint provides both a plate of sundae (순대) (blood sausage) and sundae-guk (순대국) (sundae soup) free of charge. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, but in practice, splitting all that nasty bit pork between two people can feel like you’re eating your way towards your own death. My advice? Don’t go with less than four people. Which is not to say that it wasn’t all delicious. It was. I was just ready to sign myself into the nearest cardiac hospital by the time I was done.

Slightly less heart attack-inducing is what’s referred to as Twikim Alley, just next to the jokbal places. First of all, this is a total misnomer. This isn’t a row of restaurants specializing in one food, like Tteokbokki Town in Sindang or the bindaetteok stalls in Gwangjang Market in Jongno-5-ga. It’s two big twikim restaurants next to each other, though prices here are a bit cheaper than in other parts of town.

The two restaurants, Cheonghakdong (청학동) and Mapo Grandma Bindaetteok (마포할머니빈대떡) sit on either side of a market alley and are each fronted by a long table piled with dozens of varieties of twikim, battered and fried snacks similar to tempura. There are the standard varieties you see at any old tent restaurant – vegetable, potato, squid – but also more exotic fare like hot peppers, sesame leaves, and octopus rings…just about anything you could batter and deep fry. The selection did not, however, extend to deep-fried Oreos or butter. America – still undisputed deep-frying champion. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Like Gungjung, Grandma’s spreads out through a warren of first floor rooms, but Cheonghakdong, where we ate, mostly takes up a large second floor dining room. After loading up a tray Dunkin’ Donuts-style we handed it over to the woman working there and went upstairs to sit down while our twikim was fried up.

When our food came, along with a grease-splattered receipt, it was served with dongchimi (동치미), a light, slightly sour soup; two kinds of kimchi for cutting through the grease; and soy sauce with slices of onions for dipping the twikim in. Comforting, filling, and warm. Order up a bottle of makkeolli and you’ve got all you need to get yourself through the winter.

Gongdeok Market (공덕시장)

Exit 5

Straight on Mallijae-gil (만리재길) to Mallijaeyet-gil (만리재옛길)

Gungjung Jokbal (궁중족발)

Exit 5

In Gongdeok Market

02) 718-7087

Cheonghakdong (청학동)

Exit 5

In Gongdeok Market

02) 706-0603

Mapo Grandma Bindaetteok (마포할머니빈대떡)

Exit 5

In Gongdeok Market

http://www.빈대떡.net

02) 715-3775

Tags:AREX, Line 5, Line 6, Mapo-gu, market, park, restaurant
Posted in AREX, Line 5, Line 6, Mapo-gu | 8 Comments »

Daeheung Station (대흥역) Line 6 – Station #625

January 22, 2012

A short ways from Sinchon Rotary, Daeheung Station serves Sogang University (서강대학교) and the surrounding neighborhood. One of Korea’s most highly-esteemed universities, Sogang is a small Jesuit college, its undergraduate student population standing at around 11,000.

Sogang’s front gate is about a ten-minute walk up Sogang-ro (서강로) from Exit 1. Because I arrived there just a week before Christmas, the campus was decorated for the season, including with a Korean-style nativity scene just inside the entrance. Statues of Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus, and company had been set in a thatch-roofed hut of the kind that you see in folk villages and occasionally even out in the countryside. While livestock and an angel watched over the newborn Christ, strings of garlic, peppers, and soybean paste hung drying from the roof. It was a unique take on the traditional scene, but one that I found rather charming.

Behind the manger is a circular plaza with Sogang’s ‘Albatross’ monument: a pyramidal structure with the Latin inscription ‘Obedire Veritasi’ written across it, in front of which a metal arrow lodges in the university crest at the pyramid’s base.

Sogang sits on a hilly patch of land, and after a short walk up, past a slanted artificial soccer pitch, I came to a statue of Father Theodor Geppert, S.J., who helped found the university in 1960 at the behest of Pope Pius XII. Despite the Roman collar, he looked more like a TV detective about to explain a whodunit: long coat reaching his knees, right hand stuffed in his pocket, the left held out palm up as if to demonstrate a point that should have been obvious all along.

Consistent with its small student body, Sogang doesn’t have a very large campus, and it was quite quiet when I explored, unsurprising given that it was a Saturday and exams had just ended. Apart from a soccer game being played on a pitch in the back and what looked like a get-together of 40- or 50-year-old alumni laughing and drinking instant coffee, there wasn’t much happening. That subdued atmosphere, however, creates a good opportunity for a stroll along the hilly walking paths that wind between trees in one corner of campus.

En route to Sogang, I passed a gem of a café that I’d heard about before and had made a mental note to visit when I found myself in these parts. About halfway between Exit 1 and the university’s main gate, Soom Island (숨도) is easily recognizable by the black and white vertical zigzags on its exterior. There’s also a giant, rather inscrutable, stuffed bear peering out and waving from behind the window next to the door.

Soom is divided into three sections. In the middle is the café, called by a separate name, Café CITA, just to confuse things. The coffee was good, and my companion and I shared a nice Lintzer Tart. What makes Soom special, however, are the sections at either end of the establishment.

To the left is the Book Theater, where shelves of books (a handful of them in English) line the walls, with dozens of titles available for reading, lit up by a mobile of glowing fish, like a school that had been frozen and lifted into the air. Many more books occupied shelves on a small balcony, but there didn’t seem to be a ladder or any way to get up there, though a large, stuffed green lizard had somehow found his way, leaning over the balcony, open book in hand as he was. But maybe the nicest thing about the Book Theater are its rules: no talking on your phone, no using your computer, and 스펙쌓기 금지, or no stacking up your spec, as the obsessive accumulation of resume-padding accomplishments is known. The theater is for reading and reading only.

On the opposite side of the café is a small gallery space where rotating exhibitions are displayed. The current one was a whimsical showing by way studio. The work ranged from a slide show to story books to posters to a collection of small sketches and trinkets, all touching on the intersection of humans and animals, sometimes real, sometimes in cartoon form.

In the opposite direction from the station, out Exit 2, I passed a few small hostess bars on the main drag, most of them with pink signs, and one with tube lights casually arranged on the door in the shape of a heart. Mid-afternoon, they were closed up, but I’ve taken a bus past them at night on several occasions, when their dim pink light seeps out past the bodies leaning in the doorframes.

Beyond those, and about halfway to Gongdeok Station, is the handsome stone façade of Dongdo Middle School (동도중학교), which dates from 1955. Completely different from your average Korean middle school, it looks much more like a university building, its central tower flanked by three-story wings lined with slender windows, those on the third floor meeting in small peaked arches.

Nearer the station, the Mapo Art Center (마포아트센터) hosts shows and performances, as well as a swimming pool, in a modern glass facility that sticks out among the older buildings surrounding it and contrasts sharply with the brick homes you can see terraced on the hill up ahead as you walk towards it. More representative of the majority of the area are the dozens of small business spread about – pet stores, cafes, restaurants, and fruit sellers, at one of which an old woman sat wrapped up in blankets and huddled next to a space heater as she waited for customers to arrive.

Sogang University (서강대학교)

Exit 1

Straight on Sogang-ro (서강로)

Soom Island (숨도)

Exit 1

Straight on Sogang-ro (서강로)

http://www.soomdo.org

02) 717-3535

Café Hours: M – F 8:00 – 23:00, Sa – S 9:00 – 23:00; Book Theater and Gallery: M – Sa 11:00 – 22:00

Dongdo Middle School (동도중학교)

Exit 2

Straight on Sogang-ro (서강로)

Mapo Art Center (마포아트센터)

Exit 2

U-turn, right on Daeheung-ro (대흥로), right on Daeheung-ro-20-gil (대흥로20길)

Tags:art, cafe, Line 6, Mapo-gu, school
Posted in Line 6, Mapo-gu | 4 Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘Mapo-gu’

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

Sinchon Station (신촌역) Line 2 – Station #240

Sangsu Station (상수역) Line 6 – Station #623

Gongdeok Station (공덕역) Line 5 – Station #529, Line 6 – Station #626, AREX – Station #A02

Daeheung Station (대흥역) Line 6 – Station #625

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