Yesterday morning, I went into Seoul. I travel so rarely, these days, even to just go into the city for a half-day – it was the first time I've left Ilsan since returning from my North American odyssey last November.
My friend Peter is on the Peninsula, now that he's a grad student specializing in Korean Studies, he has reasons to come back to visit, and apparently he managed to make it quite affordable. We met in that area around Dongdaemun that I have always called "Russiatown" – it's one of my favorite neighborhoods in Seoul, with much of the same "international" or cosmopolitan feel of, say Itaewon, but without the pretentiousness or gentrification, and fewer "fratboy" tourists, as the US soldier-on-leave crowd in Itaewon always seems to come off as. Nevertheless, I would say that "Russiatown" seems a bit gentrified, lately, too.
Anyway, my old standby, the Russian restaurant of the ever-changing name but fairly constant menu, was still there. Peter pointed out that it was in Russiatown in 2009 that we met for the very first time. I don't think I blogged that particular trip to Russiatown – I went rather frequently back in that era. Anyway, Peter and I had lunch at the restaurant, and then met a friend of his (colleague also enrolled in the same graduate program at Johns Hopkins, apparently) and went to Hongdae briefly, where I got to visit the Korean Language hagwon where Peter studied last year some. Peter is trying to persuade me, I think, to get more serious about my own regrettable progress in the language. Certainly I feel jealous of his amazing competence in the language relative to my own.
Then I went to work, taking the Gyeongui line subway route that follows the old railroad mainline to Ilsan Station. The line is several years old, now, but it still doesn't form part of my default mental map of how to get around.
Here are some pictures. I think Russiatown looks much more prosperous than it did 5 or 8 years ago. Still, there is much Cyrillic signage – not just in Russian but other central Asian languages typically written in Cyrillic, such as Mongolian, Uzbek, Kazakh and others. As I chatted with Peter, I coined a new name for the neighborhood: "Stanville." This reflects the Central Asian character as opposed to strictly Russian (all the "-stans" of the former Soviet sphere).
Борщ и Голубцы (borscht and cabbage rolls).
[daily log: walking, 7km]