Settling In

We wander around Songdo, learn how to use the subway, and visit Seoul.

Our first taste of ordinary life in Korea–buying things for the apartment, eating out–was mostly centered around the Triple Street Mall. It’s called Triple Street because it goes on for three long blocks, with an underground portion and then two or three street-level and raised, semi-enclosed outdoor portions. When you see it from campus it doesn’t look big, but it’s really enormous–especially seems so when you’re first finding your way. Sections are decorated fancifully, as with the stringing lights in the picture above, or the artificial trees or green hanging lanterns in pictures below.

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The very size of Triple Street can, paradoxically, make it feel confining. Since it has a lot, one ends up going there a lot. That’s especially true because our closest grocery store and the subway are connected to the mall. So even when we go food shopping or want to take the subway, we end up in the mall. Fortunately, we are becoming fairly adept users of the subway, which is quite navigable even if you don’t have much Korean. There’s a lot of English signage, and good maps. Now we’re starting to go places!

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A couple of weeks ago we went to Seoul by bus and subway. We visited two palaces, Deoksugung and Changdeokgung. At the latter we toured the “secret garden,” a sprawling set of buildings and pavilions hid among rolling hills. In this area, the royal family and its guests took their leisure.

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We also wandered around Seoul. We saw the statue of King Sejong, who is revered in Korea for inventing Hangul, the Korean alphabet.

Near the Changdeokgung palace are some older Seoul neighborhoods with traditional Korean houses.

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We wandered around Seoul at night, enjoying the shops, bright lights and street food. It’s a pretty big contrast between these narrow streets and small houses to the rest of Seoul. Many cities have preserved old neighborhoods–Teresa’s New Orleans’ French Quarter comes to mind. But the pace at which Seoul has modernized seems really amazing.

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A highlight of our wandering was eating in one of Seoul’s informal tent restaurants. There’s no menu–just ingredients you ask the person running the restaurant to cook. Robert had a fish. While there, we sat next to a couple that was from China and Korea, but had lived in Northern Virginia for several years. In fact, the husband worked in a building about a 10 minute walk from our Northern Virginia home.

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We stayed at a hotel in Seoul overnight. On the way out, we took parting pictures with the giant stuffed bear and his little caterpillar and bird friends in the hotel lobby. Koreans do stuffed animals right!

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Goodbye bear. In the meantime, we’ve also been extending our range in Songdo. A few weeks ago we visited Songdo’s Central Park, an amenity of which Songdo is very proud. Apparently this Central Park was designed on the model of New York, but the scale and scope is pretty different. There’s a bit of a stretch in the name. Still, it’s pleasant to walk through, and nicely lit at night.

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As we find new neighborhoods in Songdo, of course we find new places to eat. And no blog post that ended on Korean barbecue could fail to end well. Just the other day we ate at a fantastic barbecue place that specialized in pork.

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As in most Korean barbecue places, you cook the meat yourself. And of course, there are the many side dishes that come with the meal: here there was (going counter-clockwise from the bottom right of the picture), green onions (also to be grilled); a light kimchi (grilling optional); a kind of marinated seaweed; a little tray of spicy red bean paste, garlic and salt; lettuce; two plates of pickled onions (delicious, but hard to see in this picture); a second bean, garlic and salt tray; a sweet potato pancake; pickled radish; an odd mayonnaise salad of pasta and corn; and pickled hot peppers. There are so many delightful little treats in a Korean meal!

Until next post, we wish you all a lot of delightful little treats.