I'm fascinated by the weird connections, cultural and economic, that seem to exist between Korea and Central Asia. These are largely Stalin's legacy: in the 1930's, millions of ethnic Koreans were relocated from the area around Primorsky in the Russian Far East (and neighboring the Korean Peninsula) into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Russia. Even today, Koreans are one of the larger ethnic minorities in Uzbekistan, and South Korea has cleverly leveraged these ethnic connections into economic ones, in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Back in Soviet times, however, many Korean-Central Asians had fled the region, and, in the years when Iran was reliably in the Western camp (i.e. before 1979), some Koreans had settled in Iran. The consequence of this is that there were Koreans in Iran, too.
I was reminded of this because I was watching a documentary on Korean television this evening, about the strong economic ties that currently exist between Iran and South Korea (which of course underscores the fact that Korea, for one, has no interest in sanctions and blockades). But what really struck was that the documentary film crew were strolling around Tehran, and randomly ran into a group of Iranians who spoke excellent Korean. These were ethnic Iranians – not Korean-Iranians. But they explained to the film crew that they'd lived and worked in Korea for a number of years, which of course jives with my observations regarding the way certain parts of the Itaewon area, in Seoul, seem to resemble a "little Middle-East," these days.
Anyway, I don't really have a major point, here, except that it was very cool to see a group of Iranians talking to Korean reporters using the Korean language, in Tehran, with bustling crowds of women with head-coverings and big signs in Farsi in the background.