As the break for Chuseok (Korean thanksgiving, in essence) continues on I've been afforded a lot of free time. The holiday fell after only a week of school this year, leaving me without appreciable marking to do, thus I've been sprucing up the new apartment (post forthcoming) and generally living like a retiree.
My main source of mild recreation this week has been going for walks whenever:
A. The air is clear, the weather is nice, and I get the urge to photo-journalize.
B. It gets so hot and breathless in my apartment, with multiple open windows letting in air only slightly more than if they were closed, that I'm compelled to go out and get hit by any breezes that might come by.
I used to live at the bottom of Haebangchon, in a charmless 8-story apartment whose main benefit was proximity to the craft beer street and the bus stop to head to work. After a remarkable fiasco during the summer where the school snuck a summer school teacher into the place (oddly enough, I found out about it 2 days after it happened...oops!) I was due to find a new place for the new year.
There it is, the dark door at the top of the stairs on the right. In Korea it's pretty common to find an apartment via a realtor, and so it was with me (in absentia no less, remotely from Canada). It's only about a 4 minute walk further up into the Haebangchon neighbourhood, but it feels worlds apart.
For a start, it's quiet. My last apartment was an unenviable wedge between a huge arterial road and a narrow, often congested road which serves as a tributary. Thus it was always cars, motorbikes, and drunks broadcasting their status loudly enough to be heard from the 8th floor. The new place is just far enough up a slight hill that people are usually a bit puffed by the time they reach my place, so the chatter is dialled right down. It's thoroughly residential, so it's fairly rare to even hear a car go up the lane after about 7-8pm. I no longer get to hear the morning choral practice floating up from the military base on the weekends, but it's about the only sound I miss.
I get home about 4:30-5pm after work, invariably sweaty because we still have daytime highs in the high 20's in Seoul until about the end of September, more or less. It's starting to drop off week by week, but for the moment the ritual is to take off sweaty work shirt, grab a cold water/tea/beer and go sit on my low-walled brick deck (visible in first picture-wraps around whole front of building) to cool off. When it gets dark Namsan tower, which is easily visible from the deck, lights up in a variety of colours; beats looking out at a highway, essentially, from the last place.
As you walk you can tell HBC is old - it was a slum after the war that took in North Korean refugees as well as people whose villages were gone - through the prevalent twisting road system that winds through the area.
The hodgepodge development approach has led to an area wildly out of step with the uniform development of other areas of Seoul - the dominant building type would be a 2-4 story house of the type called a 'villa' here, almost inevitably made of brick. It's the kind of place where you can easily find a street/lane you haven't walked down before, with a chaotic yet organized profusion of vegetation stopping just short of blocking delivery van traffic.
In all but the most built up areas in Seoul there is an industrious approach to gardening suggesting an agricultural past not too distant, as the climate throws plants up out of the soil. Almost every villa has a series of pots in front of the gate or lining the walls, with hot peppers as a dominant feature.
It stands to reason, as the peppers find their way into so much of Korean food, and it brings a rustic appeal to the lanes as you walk, half-lost. Vacant lots are put into order, with clusters of pepper plants ringed by softball-sized green squash burgeoning on the vine. Soon it'll be time for the ajummas (middle-aged ladies) to uproot the plants and sit around plastic colanders sociably grading the peppers for their various uses.
The old Korean gals certainly like a bit of a sit and chat, and can usually be found outside in the late afternoon after the sun's rays move off the favela's byways. There's a slight tendency towards subtly-purple hair amongst a certain set, but the ladies usually have a fairly uniform appearance (including what my friend called "ajumma pants", which I realized to be super-accurate).
There's a bit of a disconnect between the older population and the newer ex-pats in HBC, not least of which is based on size. I'd imagine nutrition played its role for a generation, and I definitely have a single doorframe in my apartment designed for much shorter folk, but in general the seniors seem to be the ones who own all the villas that we all pay to live in; the cars are fairly nice around here.
As you walk you'll inevitably find market streets lined with neat shops, salons, and small hardware shops with an old man laying on his side, perhaps listening to a ballgame. There's also a surprising amount of small workshops making clothing of some sort or other that leave doors partially open to the street for fresh air. The new wave, however, is clearly a gentrification via cute cafes, craft shops, and the occasional upmarket, though understated, bar/restaurant.
It's not yet all juice bars and chimaek (fried chicken and beer) houses yet, but the high streets are going in that direction. You can usually see some angle of Namsan mountain/park from all but the narrowest lanes, which serves as a convenient escape from the closeness of HBC and other similarly-close boroughs.
When it quiets down at dusk the area becomes an agreeable pedestrian haunt, full of little bars and Korean restaurants who attempt to stick out with interesting windows or decor/music. Signage is about 30-40% English, at a guess, but I don't imagine there'd be any difficulty getting a maekju (beer) from any of these places given just that word and a chuseyo (please).
Then it'd just be a matter of picking the right alleyways leading back to the apartment. There's a numbering system that goes up from south to north in HBC, but generally it's landmark navigation.
I've been up the hill for about 3 weeks now, and I've got to say it's wildly preferable to my old location, which itself was more desirable than the anonymous high-rise apartments nearer to the school in Seocho-gu. I'm out a couple dollars a day getting to/from work, but I have to say that the area screams interest in a way only emulated by the bourgeois businesses that pervade the higher-rent districts.
Will it be a chore getting up the hill when it's windy and icy? Of course, but if the local semi-agrarian hobbit-folk (meant endearingly) have been content here for decades I imagine I'll trudge on. If it seems too daunting, there's only about 40 different places to grab a beer between my old apartment (where the bus lets off) and my new one, after all.
