The streets of Seoul strike me as a uniquely rich and incongruous mixture of the urban future and the urban past. As soon as I emerge from the city’s subway system – so admirably planned, so meticulously engineered, so impeccably maintained – I step into a reality where street names and addresses suddenly lose their meaning. Much of this has to do with an only recently revised building numbering system, based inexplicably on the date of construction.
Verbal directions are delivered with a similarly disorienting rusticity: “Walk five minutes toward the mountain, turn right at the fried-chicken place, then go past two other fried-chicken places and turn left into the first alley you see, the one with all the trash cans. It won’t have any markings.”
I find myself walking between, on the one side, gleaming towers with lavish, celebrity-endorsed shops offering personal glamour and “wellbeing” in all its latest manifestations; and on the other, makeshift sidewalk eateries and converted trucks making their simpler pitches for produce, liquor, fortune-telling and glistening haystacks of fried food. Both ends of the commercial spectrum do a lively business long into the night, but I never quite shake the memory of stopping for street-food and finding myself in the path of a lorry whose driver has decided to get up on the sidewalk.
Street life here exists in a delicate balance: to some (often Koreans), it can seem tilted too far toward bygone decades of poverty; to others (often foreigners), too far toward blander, more sanitised and monument-strewn times ahead. If I grieve for anything, it is the pojangmacha – informal outdoor eating and (especially) drinking establishments, operated by night out of wagons or under tents, best patronised in the rain at the tail-end of a long evening out.
Read the whole thing at the Guardian.
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