City of Small Alleys

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…