When in Seoul on Sunday and showing my friend around we went into the Russianish neighborhood just west of Dongdaemun, where I stopped in an Uzbek/Russian bakery I sometimes frequent. It used to be you could buy dark rye bread, locally made in the Russian style, but the last few times I’ve been there they haven’t had it. Now they’re selling packaged dark rye bread imported from Tashkent (Uzbekistan). It’s just as tasty but it rather violates any notions of localism or freshness. I suppose it’s not different than going to Homeplus and buying cheese from Europe or getting fruit from Chile. The world is round.
The label says “Sourdough rye bread” in Russian (“хлеб ржаной кисло-сладкий”) and under that the same in Uzbek, I think (using roman letters “lotin”) – I figured that out because “javdar” is Uzbek for rye (Russian: рожь / adjective form ржаной).
There are a lot of interesting and complex commercial relationships between South Korea and the Central Asian countries, driven partly by the large Korean diaspora found in those countries (engineered by Stalin during his rearrangement of ethnic groups, such as moving Koreans native to the Russian Pacific [i.e. just northeast of Korea] to all kinds of far-flung places), but also by the fact that South Korea was viewed as a “neutral” country with which to develop commercial relationships after the fall of the Soviet Union – unlike the other major economic players: the US or EU or Russia or China or Japan or India or Iran, all of which had various perceived geopolitcial agendas. As a result, Korean businesses are quite strong in Central Asia and there are a lot of Central Asians in Seoul, for whom the lingua franca is generally Russian (the Soviet legacy).
I often gravitate to Russian when feeling frustrated by my efforts with Korean. I studied Russian in college, 20+ years ago, and progressed pretty far with it. I was probably better at Russian in 1989 than I am in Korean now. But having not used it at all for more than two decades means it’s all dormant and rusty in my brain. I suspect I could resurrect it pretty easily, though.
