Seodaemun-gu | Seoul Sub→urban

Posts Tagged ‘Seodaemun-gu’

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 »

Dongnimmun Station (독립문역) Line 3 – Station #326

April 1, 2012

Seoul’s modern history is a tumultuous one, but the city keeps her scars well hid beneath hard-earned layers of development and success. There are some areas, though, where the wounds have been left exposed, and you can get a glimpse of the troubles the capital and its people have been through. A good place to do that and to gain a deeper appreciation for how far the city and country have come is the area around Dongnimmun, or Independence Gate.

The station takes its name from the triumphal arch that sits just south of Exit 4. Near the intersection of Tong-il-ro (통일로) and Seongsan-ro (성산로), the large gray stones of Independence Gate (독립문) frame the south entrance to Seodaemun Independence Park (서대문독립공원). The arch was constructed in 1897 and modeled on France’s Arc de Triomphe, as seemingly all arches everywhere are. Previously this had been the location of a different gate, Yeongeunmun (영은문), where envoys from the suzerain Ming and Qing dynasties of China were received. Soon after the First Sino-Japanese war ended the gate was demolished, and a year later Independence Gate was completed. Near the gate is a statue of 서재필 (Seo Jae-Pil), a renowned independence activist and the man who was responsible for organizing the gate’s construction.

Opposite the arch, across Seongsan-ro, is Yeongcheon Market (영천시장). Covered stalls filled with produce lead down a side street to a larger covered market. Quite a bit longer than you first suspect when coming from the station, the market building houses, in addition to the usual suspects, a small supermarket and even places selling finches, goldfish, and fishing supplies.

Back beyond the arch, Independence Park is full of remnants of and memorials to Korea’s troubled past. The largest and most significant of these is the Seodaemun Prison History Hall (서대문형무소역사관), just up the path from Exit 5. When you reach the top of this short path you’re met with the sight of a red brick wall about ten feet high with an arched entryway reminiscent of the front of a barn. Next to the entrance rises a gray octagonal watch tower with small windows in each side. The tableau is at once stern and quaint: the sturdy bricks and squat dimensions give it an air of authority, but for anyone who’s ever seen or is familiar with modern super-max facilities it lacks the ability to intimidate. Its slightly nostalgic quality shouldn’t fool you about the horrors that occurred inside, though.

Built by the Japanese, the prison was opened in 1908 with a design meant to hold up to 500 inmates. A mere 11 years later it held 3,000, an indicator of how vigorous the Korean resistance was and how harsh the Japanese repression.

Visitors are taken on a self-guided tour that begins in the Exhibition Hall with an overview of imperialism in Korea, from the French landing on Ganghwa Island (강화도) to the Sino-Japanese War to Japanese colonization. It also tells you how the prison was expanded in the 1930s by a magnitude of 30 from its original 1,600 square meters in order to accommodate the explosion in arrests of Korean independence activists. What the history glosses over is that the prison was not shut down with the defeat of the Japanese, but was maintained by Korea’s subsequent dictatorships and put to use for their own nefarious purposes until finally being closed in 1987.

From the Exhibition Hall you pass into the Central Prison Building, which was the command and control center of the old prison and held the warden’s office. Here there is a variety of information on resistance movements, with basic information provided in English. There is also a memorial hall, where the mug shots of some 5,000 killed independence activists cover the walls. It’s a humbling sight.

In Prison Building No. 12 the exhibitions continue in the basement with displays on how inmates were interrogated and tortured by their captors. One of these was simply called water torture (물고문), and consisted of a prisoner being strung upside down by the feet while a prison guard either dunked his head in water or poured water from a kettle up his nose to make him think he was drowning. I suppose you would have argued that the Japanese were only using an ‘enhanced interrogation technique,’ though, huh John Yoo?

Above the interrogation and torture chambers, and in Prison Building No. 11 as well, concrete block and steel corridors of cells show the prisoners’ quarters: small wood-floored squares with heavy triple bolts on each door. When the prisoners were let out it was often to go to the Engineering Work Building, which housed some of the 12 factories that were set up in the prison, mostly to produce textiles and clothes. Finished goods were used both within the prison itself and also to bolster the Japanese war effort.

In a rather disorienting contrast with the horrors and deprivations that once occurred here, the grounds of the prison are beautiful. The stately red brick buildings contrast with the bright green grass of what are some of the nicest lawns in Seoul, and the entire complex is surrounded by hills that are often shrouded in mist, and fronted by the rising peak of Mount Inwang. I haven’t been there in winter, but I’m sure that it would be equally lovely on a bright, crisp January morning, covered in a blanket of snow.

The one building that, fittingly, scars the lovely scene is tucked away in the far southwest corner. The Execution Building is a homely structure of unpainted wood planks that looks something like a frontier schoolhouse. Inside three benches face what looks like a miniature stage, where a noose hangs above a stool set on a trap door. There are even curtains, and one wonders if they were opened for the performance or closed before the final act, each its own respective type of cowardice.

Surrounding the Prison History Hall is the large Independence Park, which has many of the things your average neighborhood park would have – walking paths, exercise machines, basketball courts – but which also hosts a couple of structures related to Korea’s independence struggles: the Patriotic Martyr Monument (순국선열추념탑) and the Independence Hall (독립관).

The former, a tower of taegeukgis flanked by bas relief of scenes of famous activists, was erected by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on August 15, 1992. The latter, just a few meters away from the Independence Gate, went through a transformation similar to its neighbor. Originally called Mohwagwan (모화관) and used to entertain Chinese emissaries, it later hosted forums to promote independence. Destroyed by the Japanese it was reconstructed in 1996 and now the handsome dark brown wood structure houses memorial tablets and relics.

Across Tong-il-ro is the neighborhood’s other main feature: an entrance to Mount Inwang (인왕산), Seoul’s most spiritual mountain, and the trio of attractions found on its lower slopes: Guksadang, Seonbawi, and a carved Buddha.

If you step out of Exit 2 you should notice a sign pointing left up Tong-il-ro-14-gil (통일로14길) to Seonbawi and Inwangsan Guksadang. Past this the route isn’t well signposted, but the entrance isn’t too hard to find. From the station exit, make the sharp turn at the sign and follow the road up to the Hanok Restaurant (한옥). Take a right there, toward the steps that you should see in that direction. If you’re not sure, the friendly ajumma in the nearby convenience store will point the way, as she did for me. At the top of the steps is an inclined sidewalk with a wood fence on the right and I’Park apartments on your left. Here you should see a sign or two again. It’s only about 200 meters to the mountain path entrance.

At the entrance to Inwangsan is a brightly painted wooden gate, from which it’s just 150 meters to Guksadang and another 30 to Seonbawi. You’ll pass a few small temples on the way up, including Seonamjeong Temple (선암정사), where a vicious-looking pair of door guardians scare off evil spirits, one wielding a scimitar, the other holding a boulder over his head.

I could already hear the sound of drums coming from above, and just a few more steps took me to their source at Guksadang (국사당), a wooden shrine in the familiar burgundy with emerald trim, finished off with bright and intricate detailing. Vivid robes in several different bright colors hung from a thin rope across a doorway, and inside was a large central altar stacked with fruit and flowers and bearing a pig head, its mouth stuffed full of money. Several shaman assistants in all white hanbok sat inside, a couple of them on smoke break. Off to my right I noticed a monk in gray robes and wide-brimmed straw hat ascending some steps, a big plastic bag full of groceries in either hand. As soon as he disappeared through a gate the drums, which had gone quiet, took up their cadence again, this time joined by a pair of cymbals and a piri (피리), the keening traditional Korean flute. The female shaman, or mudang (무당), dressed magnificently in royal blue robes and a red hat with two pheasant feathers sticking straight up, began to walk around rhythmically in front of the alter, her eyes closed.

Guksadang is the country’s most important shamanist shrine, said to house the spirit of King Taejo, founder of the Joseon Dynasty. Originally located on Namsan, it was rebuilt here after being demolished by the Japanese in 1925. Korean shamanism is an animist religion or, maybe more accurately, belief system, and one of its primary features is the gut (굿) (pronounced goot), a rite performed by the mudang to do everything from pray for a bountiful harvest to initiate a new shaman.

This particular rite was a memorial service being performed for the surviving family, which consisted of the widow, some sons and daughters, and one grandchild, who seemed far more interested in his ice cream than in what was going on around him. Indeed, the expressions on the sons and daughters’ faces were mostly ones of forbearance; indulging mom in a belief they themselves had lost.

I lingered outside for a bit, trying to make myself inconspicuous, unsure of whether or not I was welcome, but just as I was about to leave one of the assistants, a woman with a small streak of hot pink in her hair, waved me around to the side and invited me in, and I sat down to watch the ceremony.

Guts are hard to reconcile with modern Korea, but they’re still a common occurrence at Guksadang. This particular one mostly alternated between the shaman intoning, bouncing, and walking about in front of the altar, and inveighing in a chant-talk before the family. It also involved more costume changes on the shaman’s part than you’d see at most pop concerts. The most curious moment came partway through when the family was ushered outside to sit on the temple steps. They were then given a large sheet of white crepe paper to hold over their heads, onto which the shaman sprinkled first water, then sesame seeds that had been in a bowl together with eggs and what looked like feces. Several colorful flags were then waved above them, followed by a pair of knives that the shaman banged together, tapped on each family member’s head, and stabbed the air with. Finally, she took the paper, lit it on fire, and waved it in the air before taking a sip of liquid and spitting it in a spray over the family’s heads.

The ceremony was long – after this climax everyone went back inside for more of the back and forth of chanting and posturing before the altar – and when it reached a point where it began to turn into a session of genuine mourning I quietly made my leave, hiking the 50 meters up to Seonbawi (선바위) (often Romanized as the Zen Rocks, Taoist Rocks, or Immortal Rocks). Called this because they are said to resemble a pair of robed monks absorbed in meditation, they’re a popular spot for women to visit to pray for a child. My secular mind was unable to make out anything even remotely monk-like in their appearance. What they mostly look like is a giant chunk of half-melted butter that someone then took swipes out of with their fingers, or like an ooze creature that had risen up from the ground only to glimpse Medusa and be turned into stone. You might not be after a child, but the rocks do offer magnificent views across the city, taking in Namsan, Jongno Tower, and the folds of mountains ringing the city. It’s a peaceful view, and it’s likely the only sounds you’ll hear will be the drumming carrying up from Guksadang and the cooing of the dozens of pigeons that like to hang out on the rocks.

On your way back to the station, you might want to stop by the Rock-carved Buddha (마애불) that’s down a pathway to your left if you’re standing facing the steps to Seonbawi. Frankly, it’s not very impressive. About two meters high and lacking in intricacy it left me a bit disappointed, though it undoubtedly suffers from comparisons to the area’s more fascinating surroundings.

Independence Gate (독립문)

Exit 4

Yeongcheon Market (영천시장)

Exit 4

South on Tong-il-ro (통일로), cross Seongsan-ro (성산로)

Seodaemun Independence Park (서대문독립공원)

Exit 4 or 5

Seodaemun Prison History Hall (서대문형무소역사관)

Exit 5

www.sscmc.or.kr/newhistory/index_culture.asp

02) 360-8590~1

Hours

Mar – Oct: 9:30-18:00; Nov – Feb: 9:30-17:00; Closed Jan. 1, Seollal, Chuseok, and Mondays (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday)

Admission

Adults: 1,500; Teenagers: 1,000; Kids 7-12: 500

Mount Inwang (인왕산)

Exit 2

Left on Tong-il-ro-14-gil (통일로14길), right at Hanok Restaurant (한옥), up stairs and sidewalk

Guksadang (국사당)

Follow the path leading up from the parking lot on your left after passing through the Inwangsan’s entrance gate; approximately 15 minutes from the station

Seonbawi (선바위)

Follow the path up from Guksadang

Rock-carved Buddha (마애불)

Standing at the base of the stairs to Seonbawi, follow the path to the left

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

Tags:history, Line 3, market, monument, museum, park, prison, Seodaemun-gu, temple
Posted in Line 3, Seodaemun-gu | 1 Comment »

Chungjeongno Station (충정로역) Line 2 – Station #243, Line 5 – Station #531

March 4, 2012

There are some neighborhoods in Seoul that have their own distinct character or spirit. Then there are neighborhoods like Chungjeongno that don’t feel quite like their own place but rather sponge up elements of the neighborhoods around them. West of the station, you quickly find yourself on the edge of Ahyeon’s large furniture market; to the east are new office and apartment towers that spill over from Seodaemun and downtown’s western edge; southeast you run into the homeless and eccentricities that tends to wash up around Seoul Station; and the lower-class neighborhoods of Aeogae’s northern end extend into Chungjeongno’s southwestern reaches.

That last part of the neighborhood was where I began my visit, leaving Exit 6 and immediately heading up the sloping street in front of me that led directly to the east end of the Ahyeon Furniture Arcade. A shop with large glass windows, selling kids’ furniture, had a picture of a smiling robot painted on its wall, saying, ‘I’m your friend.’ Now, it’s one of my cardinal rules – a rule that, I hasten to add, has kept me alive this long – that a robot that says it is my friend is a robot that is not to be trusted. I suggest you don’t by your kids’ beds there.

As I came to the top of the rise I could see a huge, denuded hill in the distance, a dun-colored expanse whose only features were the trio of stationary earthmovers sitting idly on its slopes. It was the same swath of land being readied for apartments that I’d walked past when visiting Aeogae recently, but it appeared even more stark from far away, as if someone had simply hit reset on the entire neighborhood.

I then turned left on Sohn Kee-chung Gil (손기정길), which eventually leads up to Sohn Kee-Chung Athletic Park (손기정체육공원). Now, we actually visited this park quite recently, via Seoul Station, and I wrote it up for that post, but because Seoul Station is the April 2012 SEOUL magazine column, this post might actually go online first. And because I don’t want to rewrite everything, I’m just going to copy and paste the park info from that post here:

Longtime readers (and those savvy to Korean athletic history) may find Sohn Kee-chung’s name ringing a bell, as we earlier had a run-in with a Sohn memorial when we visited Sports Complex Station (종합운동장역). We touched on his history in that post, but to briefly recap: Sohn was born in 1914 in Sinuiju (신의주), on what is now the North Korean border with China. Because Korea was under Japanese occupation at the time, Sohn was forced to compete under the Japanese flag and a Japanese name, Son Kitei. In Berlin he set an Olympic record, and on the medal stand he used a pin oak sapling he had received as victor to cover up the Japanese sun on his chest.

Befitting a park dedicated to Sohn, the emphasis here is on athletic facilities, and there are several terraced into the slope, including tennis courts, a nice soccer pitch, and even a ping-pong table. Additionally, there is the Sohn Kee-Chung Culture Center (손기정문화센터) and Library (독서실), housed in handsome red brick buildings with ivy climbing up their sides.

There are two sculptures of Sohn in the park. One is a large rendering of just the elderly Sohn’s head, looking out from the park’s highest point over a wonderful view of the rooftops of central Seoul. In front of the sculpture is the pin oak (손기정 월계관 기념수) that was given to Sohn upon his victory in the 1936 Olympic marathon. According to the nearby plaque, Olympic medalists were originally presented with crowns of Mediterranean laurels, but starting with the ’36 Games the laurels were replaced with pin oak. The oak that Sohn received was planted at Yangjeong High School (양정고등학교), Sohn’s alma mater, but when the high school relocated the former site was turned into the athletic park.

The second statue is partway down the slope, and captures Sohn in a pose as the runner is more commonly remembered. The bib on his chest identifies him as racer number 382, the number he wore in the Berlin race. He is midstride, his head cocked at a peculiar angle, straining to outrun the other athletes and, just as surely, the shame and burden he was made to carry.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The neighborhood that Sohn Kee-chung Gil cuts through is a lower-class area, and among the brick apartments I passed one wooden shack that looked like it was about to tumble down, and a couple more wood, cement, and tin shacks on a side street. There was clearly no one living in the former, but I wasn’t sure about the latter.

The area is very hilly, and though it’s generally all uphill from the station to the park, the smaller changes of elevation en route were sudden and disorienting, reminding me of a less extreme version of the Escher funhouse that is Chongqing, China. A number of cement stairways and ramps had been built into the neighborhood to deal with the terrain, which sometimes resulted in ghetto renovations like the one I looked down on as I stood on one of those stairways: residents had coiled barbed wire on the tin roof just outside their windows because the elevation had made what would otherwise have been an inaccessible spot a simple dangle and drop from the steps I was standing on.

En route to Sohn Kee-chung Park you might spot a patch of trees down one of the side streets to the left, as I did. There’s an apparently nameless park here, which is a popular place for the area’s oldboys to get some exercise, but if you hike up, the park’s north end offers some superb views in that direction, including part of Inwangsan (인왕산) and model-toy seeming cars streaming down Sinchon-ro (신촌로).

Step out Exit 5 and you get a totally different neighborhood. Suddenly, on Jungnim-gil (중림길), things are gentrified. There are Italian and Japanese restaurants, boutiques, softly lit minimalist salons, and even a craft shop. Literally twenty feet away and you’ve jumped up a couple income brackets just like that.

I followed Jungnim-gil down to where it truncates at Cheongpa-ro (청파로), a couple blocks from Seoul Station, and here, again, things shifted. There were several disheveled storefronts on the main drag, and the pungent smell of fish hung in the air as I passed a shop were a man was feeding dried chilies into a machine that ground them up and spat out flakes into big tubs. Not far away a couple of the area’s homeless had built and were warming their hands over a fire in a big metal bowl on the sidewalk, half of the long wooden plank used for fuel burning away as the other half hung out, resting on the concrete.

Further north on Cheongpa-ro is Seosomun Park (서소문공원), though it’s more easily reached by walking straight from Exit 4. I reached the park that way, where it sits just before a pair of train tracks, and as I approached the boom barriers came down and the red warning lights began flashing as a KTX slowly rolled in toward the station.

As its name implies, the park occupies the site where the city’s minor western gate used to stand, and during the mid-20^th Century it was the site of a fish market.

Near the park’s entrance I noticed a sign that declared it the ‘Seosomoon Martyrdom holy land’ (서소문 순교성지), which led me to think that the park would commemorate killed Korean independence activists. It turned out, however, that the ‘Martyrdom holy land’ part was explicitly religious, as it was here where nearly 40 early Korean Catholics were killed during the 1800s as part of a purge meant to root out Western influence. One of the park’s centerpieces and the first thing you see upon entering is a large memorial sculpture of the Crucifixion. Several smaller stone and metal sculptures dotted the park, and they were just abstract enough that I couldn’t tell whether they had religious meaning or not.

The east side of the park had a second large sculpture, this one a statue of the Goryeo General Yun Gwan, who was a major figure in extending Goryeo domain northwards into Khitan territory in the early 12^th Century. Around the base of the pedestal three homeless men napped on spreads of newspaper.

Back at the station, I went out Exit 7, which again put me practically right in front of the Ahyeon Furniture Arcade, but instead of exploring that again I took the immediate right onto Kyonggi-daero (경기대로), a very nice, tree-lined street that ran through a relaxed neighborhood. The street is named after the nearby university, and features the cafes and cheap restaurants you’d expect to find.

If you’re heading directly for the uni, though, it’s quickest to go out Exit 8 and swing left on Chungjeong-9-gil (충정로9길). If you see the giant silver building like a 1950s b-movie UFO, you’ll know you’re on the right track.

Just past that is Kyonggi University (경기대학교), its wall outside of campus lined with framed copies of old paintings of tigers. I stepped around some construction work going on and went up the stairs to the university’s front plaza, past an ivy-covered rock wall.

The plaza didn’t seem to go anywhere. A pair of buildings hemmed it in, and the only option for movement that I had was a narrow road leading off to the left that I walked down for about five minutes before finding myself off campus. Simply put, there’s just not much to Kyonggi-dae – a few unremarkable buildings jammed together on a hilltop, some satellite buildings elsewhere in the neighborhood, and significantly little common space. The campus map showed a small but pleasant-looking park at the campus’ rear, but it seemed that the only access to it was through one of the buildings, and I didn’t care to walk in and try to find my way back as the school was more or less shut down for winter break. It seemed like it would be a downer of a place to go to school, more like an office complex than a university, but a sign out front displayed some fairly ambitious campus redesign plans so it’ll be interesting to see if things change once redevelopment is completed.

Ahyeon Furniture Arcade

Exit 6 or 7

Sohn Kee-Chung Athletic Park (손기정체육공원)

Exit 6

Left on Sohn Kee-chung Gil (손기정길)

Seosomun Park (서소문공원)

Exit 4

Straight on Seosomun-ro (서소문로)

Kyonggi University (경기대학교)

Exit 8

Left on Chungjeong-9-gil (충정로9길)

Tags:furniture, Jung-gu, Line 2, Line 5, monument, park, school, Seodaemun-gu
Posted in Jung-gu, Line 2, Line 5, Seodaemun-gu | 3 Comments »

Muakjae Station (무악재역) Line 3 – Station #325

September 18, 2011

Muakjae sits squeezed between Inwang Mountain (인왕산) to the east and the smaller An Mountain (안산) to the west, giving the neighborhood a bit of a bowling lane feel. Uiju-ro (의주로) cuts northwest-southeast above Line 3, and there’s not much space off of it, meaning that the area doesn’t have much to see or do.

Inwang and An Mountain have matching summits, mixes of vegetation and bald tan rock, and their close proximity to the station means that there’s little space for development, resulting in relatively fresh air and leaving the neighborhood much quieter than Dongnimmun to the south. The space that is available is pretty compactly utilized, however, especially on the east side of the street where you have a layer cake of businesses along Uiju-ro and mid-size red brick apartment buildings behind them, followed by a strip of huge apartment towers sandwiched in front of the mountain. Unfortunately, this last grouping blocks the view of Inwang-san from many places, denying the neighborhood of some of its potential beauty.

Because of the local geography, walking about you oddly find yourself looking around with your head tilted back like a gobsmacked country bumpkin tourist as you follow the contours of buildings as they rise up the slopes. If you feel the urge to do the same, there’s an entrance to the Inwang-san hiking paths near Exit 2. Simply go out the exit and take the first left up into the apartment complex, behind which you’ll find the entrance.

This direction, out Exit 2 or 3 heading south, is particularly quiet and green, with big swaths of trees on either side of the road. The opposite, north from Exit 1 or 4, is more developed, and after passing some rather run-down apartment blocks to the east you start approaching Hongjae Station (홍제역). As I neared the halfway point between the stations the scene got a bit livelier and trees were replaced with businesses, some in rather new buildings, as people came downhill to get groceries or a bite to eat before going back up and going home.

Entrance to the Inwang-san hiking paths

Exit 2

South on Uiju-ro (의주로), first left

Tags:Line 3, Seodaemun-gu
Posted in Line 3, Seodaemun-gu | 2 Comments »

Seoul Sub→urban

Posts Tagged ‘Seodaemun-gu’

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

Sinchon Station (신촌역) Line 2 – Station #240

Dongnimmun Station (독립문역) Line 3 – Station #326

Chungjeongno Station (충정로역) Line 2 – Station #243, Line 5 – Station #531

Muakjae Station (무악재역) Line 3 – Station #325

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”