Meet You at the Byol Da Bang

Seoul to me is not really a big city but hundreds of small cities that are joined by a subway system. The subway stations – I counted almost 400 and my map is 5 years outdated – are linked in a way that I can be just about anywhere within an hour.

When you reach the surface of a station and hit the street, looking around, it could be a suburb of anywhere. There will always be a Starbucks and a Coffee Bean in spitting distance of the exit; and plenty of people spitting. So these are your typical meeting places.

The traditional Korean word for coffee house is “da bang”. The Korean word for “star” is “byol”. So they call Starbucks the Byol Da Bang. The Korean word for “bean” is “hong”. So the Coffee Bean is the Hong Da Bang.

What gives the station its truly Asian feel is the flashing neon advertising that goes way over the top, piled five stories high as far as the eye can see in every direction.

The stations are on huge blocks along 10+ lane boulevards. Ducking into one of these blocks, the roads narrow and become more pedestrian; that is, there are no sidewalks, so you walk in traffic. The first block within the block is where most of the restaurants are and the atmosphere feels more distinctly Korean. There are tents and tarp and carts selling street food and junk items.

Having met and had dinner, Koreans will then move on to the next stop – which could be a “po jang ma cha” – a pub with cheap beer and pub snacks, like chicken ass or barbecued pig skin, or a “no re bang” – a singing room, like karaoke. The same strip will have room clubs – private rooms with hostesses for big spenders, pool halls and massage parlors.

Then beyond this strip of restaurants and pubs and singing rooms, there will be a strip of “discrete” hourly hotels; discrete in the sense that there are black curtains covering the entrance and the car park. They have hot names, like hotel novios, or funny ones, like the tomato hotel. The names always seem to be English but they’re not for travelers.

Walking farther from the station, the neighborhood becomes more residential, rows of apartment blocks, churches and schools.

Korean society is a complex system of strict and rigid rules and traditions, like curfews, that govern love and life.

Yet their cities seem perfectly designed to combat the very rules they live by.