Today I went to visit "Chinatown" in Daerim, Seoul (the name is in quotes because even though there are a few places in Seoul that are informally referred to as Chinatown by Seoulites due to the heavy influx of Chinese immigrants, the only place that is officially designated Chinatown is in a neighboring city, the port of Incheon*). True to its name, the neighborhood, including the open-air market, exhibited a distinctly Chinese flavor, with a majority of the shops displaying signs mostly in Chinese characters and offering food, products and services that were a mixture of Korean and Chinese wares.
In Korean but it reads "Hong Kong Karaoke"
Durians (a rare sight in Korea because it's too cold for it to grow here)
"Yanbian (Korean Autonomous Prefecture, China) Wedding Hall"
over "Yanbian Chilled Noodles"
Even the sidewalk "No Smoking Zone" sign was mostly in Chinese.
Anyway, I learned a few things from today's trip:
#1. Here restaurants openly advertise dog meat dishes, even though dog meat is illegal in South Korea; wonder why the law doesn't crack down on them -- do Chinese-owned businesses get some kind of waiver?
"Dog hotpot"
#2. As I've read somewhere before, some Chinese people really do go about outside in their pajamas.
#3. The Sinified nature of the neighborhood still can't keep out the "Seoul Church Proliferation Syndrome".** These three churches
plus this one
make for 4 churches on 2 blocks.
And one more item... that could get me in a bit of trouble with some overly sensitive folks, but I just had to include it. I freely admit it's probably the American side of me stereotyping Asians, despite myself being one, but when I saw this in an alley
I just had to laugh, because
(Thank you, internet)
And lastly, an interesting coincidence that enclosed today's trip like a symbolic parenthesis. At the beginning of my trip, when I arrived at the transfer point to wait for the train that would take me the last leg of the journey to Daerim I was greeted by this sight:
As the whole platform was underground it was highly unusual to see the pigeon trapped so deep inside the station. Then, at the end of my tour when I came back to Daerim station I noticed this "bird" trapped on the ceiling:
All in all, an interesting day.
*Incheon is well-known in military history as the site of the brilliant surprise attack behind enemy lines (the "Incheon Landing") during the Korean War, conceived by General Douglas MacArthur in September, 1950; it reversed the course of the war and enabled the UN allies to recapture most of the Korean peninsula, most of which had been lost to the North Koreans; unfortunately, the Chinese then swept over the border in a human-wave attack in support of North Korea and pushed the allies back; nevertheless, the allies rallied and re-re-took most of the lost territory, only to be pushed back again, etc.; over the course of the war Seoul, the capital of South Korea, changed hands four times, only for the fighting to come to an inconclusive end three years later with a truce that has lasted until today; today the border between North Korea and South Korea is almost exactly back where it had been before the war -- nearly three million lives tragically lost and the whole country flattened for nothing; left without much in the way of infrastructure or resources, for the next decade and a half or so South Korea remained one of the poorest countries in the world, poorer than North Korea and poorer than many of the most underdeveloped countries in Africa; various bigwigs abroad opined it would take South Korea a century to recover(JFK at one point even asked author Pearl Buck, considered an authority on East Asia, if he shouldn't "give Korea back to Japan"!), but now look -- no wonder they call it "The Miracle on the Han River"
**The reason you are highly unlikely ever to run into a vampire in Seoul:
