The Cheonan story

The streets of Cheonan are hard and quiet. In the afternoons heeled mothers push strollers into coffee shops and leave behind empty apartments. Cars cruise from downtown jobs onto my strip, then underground into the vast unending. They don’t leave again until morning.

The only real noise in the Buldang neighborhood comes from school children, construction, and wheeled advertisements that roll around, speakers blaring. Like large neatly placed checkers, apartment complexes grow in rows towards the mountains. The residents are hidden in offices and after-school programs, sat in half-empty drab boxes plunked down at random.

My neighborhood is half English academies, half Love Motels and lady-bars. There, norae bang karaoke come with dancing naked women in bedroom-sized boxes rented by the hour. In the next-door massage parlors a handjob sets you back sixty dollars.

Children file in on buses and fill the area in daylight, drunk company suits when the sun sets. The layover is about three hours. This whole miniature city of smut and education rests on top the first floor of the drab boxes. The ground floors are dedicated to the consumption of women’s clothing, coffee, pizza, and Korean cooking.

The area has become standard issue since these seven months of living. All seems normal. Cheonan and I, we get along, but I have better friends by the dozen. Cheonan I’d talk to at party, but Seoul I’d bring home and cook breakfast for in the morning.

So last summer I learned the proverb about the prairies rang true. But truer still, I learned about the city. Once you simmer a boy four years in urbanity, it’s hard to bring him elsewhere.

All of this, I guess to say, that I took a walk around Seoul last weekend and took some pictures.