Wangsimni

The Fork at Wangsimni.

I leave my tiny apartment in the neighborhood of Wangsimni in Seoul at 9:20am at the latest.  It takes ten minutes to walk the couple blocks to my school.  This is the latest I can leave.  I try to leave earlier but the reality is that it doesn’t matter: whether I arrive on time or early I sit at my desk and do nothing.  I do not utilize the 30 minutes of prep every morning. 

The route is a straight shot.  I hit the pavement, turn left outside of my building and keep walking.  Eventually I cross an intersection.  The intersection serves is in essence an unofficial border in much the same way Charles Street is the border between Beacon Hill and Back Bay in Boston.  From the other side of the intersection I cross another street, shuffle past a convenience store, down some stairs, into a narrow and dirty alley, and then into school.

My commute is no different from that of almost any member of any workforce on earth.  What makes this morning jaunt worth mentioning is that I am not from these parts.  In a previous life I lived in the homogenized borough of Gangnam.  My daily walk then involved Starbucks, Smoothie King, and Burger King.  Though my life is dirtier and less affluent, it is also more valuable to me as an observer.

I step outside my building and it is raw.  This is no surprise: my bathroom is part of a poorly made addition in my building and there is no insulation.  If I hang my head out of my apartment and look at the outside of my bathroom I see a window that holds in some Styrofoam and cardboard.  This is the only insulation I have in that room.  If it is freezing outside then there is a layer of ice on my toilet and I shit with my hat on.  I could see my breath in the bathroom.  I already know that it’s cold outside. 

Across the street is a small hair shop that caters to old men and women searching for something with no frills apart from some curlers.  It is empty at this time in the morning. 

A man walks through Wangsimni.

Next door to my place is a butcher, one of many in the neighborhood.  I live in a marketplace.  Butchers dot my daily life here.  They display their meat, bones, and insides on counters and in the open air.  On my way home at night the proprietors sit amongst hooks, knives, and saws as they watch Korean dramas on old TVs jammed into the corners of harshly lit showrooms of sorts. 

The butcher next to me is quiet as he cuts spring onions on the street.  He looks at his knife and to a pile of green stems lying on the wet pavement.  It’s tame.  The other night I wandered out to a steady thud to find him chopping the giant, lifeless head of a pig down the middle with an axe.  At home in the States butchers use saws or cleavers, butchers paper and gloves.  He used an axe.  The street was covered in skull fragments, brain, and gore. 

This morning, it’s only onions. 

I pass three food markets.  Boxes of cabbage, radishes, bananas, oranges, bean sprouts, and about a dozen vegetables whose name I have no idea are being pulled out onto the curb.  One grocer maintains a giant tent at the entrance, giving it the appearance of a perpetual east-Asian bazaar.  I pass them and see the first bit of fresh seafood of the day.

Squid.  Squid is a part of my daily life.  If it isn’t served at school for lunch or at the bar for anju (the necessary drinking appetizer at the local pubs), consumed by my girlfriend, or stockpiled by my students then it is a guaranteed part of my morning walk.  They swim in dirty tanks.  They lay in clumps in buckets.  They fester in cardboard boxes covered in ice.  Their grey, white, and silver bodies glisten in the morning light.  It is too cold to smell much but come nighttime even the cold can’t keep their stink down.

Squid have good company.  At one stall I pass by squid, crabs, scuttle fish, octopus, shrimp, snails, flatfish, mackerel, and a dozen other things I don’t want to see sitting in their own post-mortem slime right after I ate my coco ball cereal. 

The street glistens for the whole walk down this stretch.  Water leaks from bubbling tanks holding flounder and eels.  Vendors spray yesterday’s scales, guts, and general grime from their area.  Oil and blood from the butchers flow down the curve of the street and into the gutter.  Every wetness and trickle contains the insides of any manner of things you don’t want on the bottom of your work shoes. 

I pass the claw game.  I pass the game that requires the player to operate a piston that will hopefully knock free a little trinket.  The prizes range from stuffed animals, mp3 players, Zippos, playing cards, and vibrators.  There are all in the same machine.  It is also possible to win a pack of batteries for said vibrators.  I pass five of these machines.

The vendors operate in all manner of structures.  Most maintain wooden shelves of varying levels of utilitarian decrepitude.  Thought in these places is not put into décor or into making something more appealing.  The most common element in the local motif is blue tarp or pressure-treated hunks of 2x4.  One hunched old woman sits day and night on a tiny grey blanket selling carrots and other vegetables.  Her goods sit on crumpled and saturated newspapers of Korean script.  Her only shelter from the weather is the remains of a cardboard box that she has arranged as a wall to separate her body from the heaps of wires, trash, and filth of a dark alley.  Just outside of the market is a brothel.

A wagon stocked with cardboard.

This woman squats for hours looking straight ahead at the mandu shop.  Steam rises from the jutting stall of dumplings.  The proprietor of this stand sells pork, kimchi, and vegetable mandu.  There is a small selection of steamed buns and large slabs of rice cake to be had, but her main business is in cheap dumplings.  It is possible to sit in her florescent cubicle of a dining room in the back and watch a flickering TV as you eat but nobody but old men half drunk on rice wine indulges in this luxury.  Mandu is a utilitarian meal best enjoyed to go.

Towards the end of the walk I pass a stretch of building populated by stores selling pots, pans, bug killer, floor mats, flowers, cutlery, candy, and all manner of junk.  Across the street a bent old man is pulling the covers off of the same Styrofoam boxes of slimy fish he was trying to sell last night when I made the return trip at 7pm. 

I pass by empty restaurants that will be teeming with the locals in a few hours.  Now empty tables will be teeming with men and the occasional woman grilling pork bellies, intestines, kimchi, and garlic.  Soju spills early in these places and come night time the entire neighborhood will reek of sizzling meat and oil. 

In Korea the difference in fare between breakfast and every other meal is thin if not, at times, entirely nonexistent.  Small restaurants that are hardly bigger than the greasy kitchen populated by one or two wrinkled old women are already full.  Men and women slurp noodle soups, scald their immune mouths on boiling red and brown stews.  The most common fare in this neighborhood is sundae gook.  It is a soup not made of vanilla ice cream but of a kind of black blood sausage filled with cellophane noodles.

Fish drying in the sun.

Before I make it to the intersection and into the part of Seoul that looks no different than the working class districts of Boston, of New York, of Worcester, of any city anywhere in the world I pass one of the dozens of fried chicken joints in the market.  The windows are dark now but in a few hours bones will be crunching and oil will be dripping from the fingers of the classiest Samsung execs.  An empty counter sits in the open air.  It is abandoned but soon there will be a couple dozen chicken feet steaming in the cold, coated in a spicy red sauce.  Those that enjoy them will eat them with clear plastic gloves and let the tiny bones fall out of their mouths as they enjoy the succulent but tiny amount of gelatinous meat on them. 

The last stall I pass sells tteokbokki, a kind of rice cake not unlike gnocchi that is braised in a sweet and spicy sauce.  It is popular with everyone in Korea.  Students and business people, local vendors and old women will stop by for a glutinous snack and walk away with a thick red mustache in an hour’s time.  It is likely that I myself will drop a dollar and walk away with a cup full of the rice cakes, fried mandu, and sundae to snack on while I walk back.

After I pass a Dunkin Donuts, cross the first intersection and then another on my way to do battle with my lot of kindie students.

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On Dogs and Alcohol

The next day I got lost.

It was bound to happen as it always does. When I moved to Beacon Hill I managed to get all turned around in the brownstones for two hours before I found my way back to Somerset St. I was going to meet Larry from Cheonan at Starbucks in Cheongju and there we would have a reunion neither of us thought would ever happen. Larry found Starbucks with no trouble. I never had a chance.

 

Starbucks, it turns out, was in Uptown while I thought it was in Downtown. This mistake didn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t find Downtown to begin with. I walked for an hour or more until the people all disappeared and the trendy shops were replaced with dirtier streets and shambled stores.

Being lost in your own country is embarrassing, but being lost in Korea on your third day can be panic inducing. I managed to get so jumbled about that before I knew it I couldn’t even find my way back to where I had come from. I walked and walked until I was pouring sweat in the humidity and more or less wanted to cry.

Eventually I came to the main gates of Chunbuk University. Remembering that Downtown was situated off of the University, I walked a half mile in either direction but never found Downtown. Finally, I plopped myself down against the gates and told Larry that I would not be moving any further or else I might be wandering my way into a North Korean Gulag. If he wanted to hang out then he was going to have to try and find me.

Larry found me in all of 5 minutes. He was a sight to see after not seeing him since my old place at 24 Proctor , and what’s more he was decked out in leather and riding an old black motorcycle. It was good to see him; after all, he was the one who convinced me to pack up and head to Korea.

Together we walked to Uptown as it was the only place we knew the general direction of. It was a long way and it was humid as hell. I would have taken my jacket off if I hadn’t been sweating like a tweeker. We wandered the markets that we came across; almost hidden in alleys. They reminded me of the markets I found while wandering about Mexico: dreary and far off the tourist path but vital arteries of culture. The first was tiny and soon spit us back onto the main road, but the second was something to see.

It was one main throughway on a dingy street. It was dark and a little bit dank but there were so many people! Vendors sold everything: Bugs, crops, sand shrimp that jumped from their baskets, the ugliest fish I had ever seen and bags and bags of this and that. We continued on down the main path until we came at last to a live market.

If people were speaking around us I no longer remember. There were the squawks of chickens and the calls of roosters. One vendor had pens and pens of farm birds, while another had a collection of ducks sitting in tiny wire cages. Another sold rabbits and everybody sold eggs. If only I had my camera. If that was all that was at the market I would have left happy and satisfied. As it was we came into the last stretch and Larry broke our silence.

“Yep, there’s the dog.”

I had heard rumors of this, but I didn’t really believe them, but there was the proof right there. First, it was just cuts of formless meat beneath clouded glass, but finally we came to a few stalls that had de-furred or skinned dogs hanging like sausages in a butcher shop.

It is hard to look down on a culture that you do not understand, and I don’t, but there is something sacred about dogs. Whatever I have ever heard about the historic relationship between man and canine was that it was generally a mutually beneficial sort of thing; but here, there was nothing beneficial going on for Fido who now dangled dead from a chain.

I asked and Larry told me that they got many of the dogs from China as it was illegal in Korea and had been since Seoul hosted the Olympics, but it apparently was not enforced. Still, even he was surprised to see so many openly hanging or laying about.

It was a sad sight to be seen by somebody who misses his dog.

Still, life goes on and I am just a visitor to this place in the end. We wandered for a long time. We passed through Uptown, and through the street with the animal-people and microphones and sound systems and I was once again finding myself dizzy as we walked through the thousands. It seems that always we are walking against the crowd here.

We ate a good lunch in a food court. I had spicy pork, rice, kimchi and soup until Larry informed me that it was essentially squid broth and the once odd flavor and funny little chunks became disgusting. We walked back to the general direction of my place.

I would like to say I went and got my camera and took a bunch of photos, or that Larry and I went and had a cultural outing. I would like to say all of these things but we didn’t do any of them. Like most of my Suffolk friends, the original bond between Larry and I had a high proof. We went to one dark and smoky local bar, then to another where we watched Korean soap operas and ate a potato sampler and drank Cass beer and soju. We ended up at a joint called Vons that had the most wonderful chicken, though I have no idea where it is anymore, where we had one last pitcher. Actually, I had one glass and could not drink any more and poor Larry drank the rest of it.

That was the end of the night.

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