City of Small Alleys

Mark Tetto

I came from New York – a perfect grid of big streets and wide avenues. “Concrete canyons,” we call them – lined as they are from end to end with towering buildings. We pass our days and live our lives in these named and numbered streets. A bar on 34th Street. A business meeting on 6th Avenue. And yes, Seoul, too, has its wide streets. Even wider than the avenues of New York. We have Teheran Road, and the sprawling 12 lanes of the Yeongdong-daero. The two meet at Samsung Station - probably the largest intersection I have ever seen. And yet our lives don’t happen there. In Seoul we breathe, we drink, we live, we argue, we love and we break up in the countless small alleys that have no name.

The foreigner who passes through on business might never know. Taking a cab from Kyobo Tower to Gangnam Station, he may travel down Gangnam Boulevard and think that he has seen Gangnam. But he doesn’t know that one block back, behind Giordano, is an alley that is thronging with students and soldiers, interns and people getting out from work. An alley which hasn’t changed in fifteen years – with batting cages and carnival games, where guys are trying to impress their girlfriends by swinging a bat, or punching a bag. An alley with a bar where a group of four guys is hoping to find a group of four girls. A basement Hoff house where salary men are having a second round of beer.

North of the river or south, in any neighborhood, these are the nameless, winding alleys where we pass our lives. Where only one car can pass at a time. Where taxis drivers honk to get people to move out of the way. Where people sit at plastic tables on plastic chairs in front of convenience stores, drinking a can of beer late at night while baring their souls. The alleys which fill with water during the summer rains, leaving nowhere to walk, and in the winter freeze over with a permanent sheet of ice, making every walk to work a dangerous adventure.

The alleys are unashamed and unguarded – they don’t pretend to try to show you the best of Seoul. They only offer to show you the raw and unedited Seoul. The good and the bad. Red neon crosses of neighborhood churches, and red neon arrows beckoning into basement noraebangs. The guy hustling in front of the bar. The corner dry clean shop, run by the old couple who are up at dawn, lights on and already working as I walk to my office in the morning. And when I come home late at night, they are still there, still working. “When do they sleep?” I wonder, realizing they are perhaps the hardest working people I know.

These are the alleys where the best food is found. The best spicy octopus is at a restaurant in a small alley in my neighborhood with no name. The restaurant has a name, but to be honest, no one knows that either, or cares. The food is good and the grey-haired lady who runs it is like family. And so if you ask me where it is or how to get there, I can only tell you, “I’ll take you there sometime.” When I first came to Seoul, they didn’t have names, these alleys. Now someone gave them names, but no matter – no one knows them. And I think I prefer it that way.

Taking a cab on the main roads, you may never see them. Until the moment when you ask the cab driver to do a P turn. And then all of a sudden, the curtain is pulled back and you catch a glimpse of more real people living in a more real Seoul.