Beullangjeri

The title of this post is a Korean rendering of boulangerie, the French word for bakery.

French-style (or at least French-in-name) bakeries are very popular in Seoul these days, and there are several highly successful chains with branches all over the city. I decided to compile a photo gallery of some of them.

The first one, Cherbourg, is the least fancy of the lot. I took this picture in the long-distance bus terminal (Gosok Teomineol 고속 터미널), which is where I catch the bus to Erma's parents'.


Bonespé is located on Jongno 종로, a major downtown thoroughfare. I've only seen this one, but I think it must be a chain, since the sign identifies this as the "Jongno Branch". It looks very fancy.


Jean Boulangerie is in Nakseongdae 낙성대, not far from where I live. I always seem to be walking by on a Sunday, when it is closed.


Paris Baguette is one of the largest chains, and is pretty fancy. This one, not far from the Seoul National University subway station, has a café inside. It's where I took the picture of the strawberry-cream bagel.

Tous les Jours is the most common chain store. I don't know of a neighborhood that lacks one.


And then, of course, there is my little neighborhood shop, Petit Amour.


There is something of linguistic interest here as well. For those of you who don't want to follow a slightly technical discussion, skip down to the next line of asterisks.

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Here are the names of the stores and their Korean renderings. I've also provided Korean pronunciations in International Phonetic Alphabet for those of you to whom it's meaningful. (Because there is no accepted IPA symbol for the Korean tense obstruents, I will simply double the letter.)

Cherbourg	쉘부르	Shwelbureu	[ʃwɛlbuɾɯ]
Bonespé	보네스뻬	Boneseuppe	[ponɛsɯppɛ]
Jean Boulangerie	쟝 블랑제리	Jyang Beullangjeri	[tʃaŋ pɯlaŋdʒɛɾi]
Paris Baguette	파리 바게뜨	Pari Bagetteu	[pʰaɾi pagɛttɯ]
Tous les Jours	뚜레쥬르	Tturejyureu	[ttuɾɛdʒuɾɯ]
Petit Amour	쁘띠 따무르	Ppeutti Ttamureu	[ppɯtti ttamuɾɯ]

What's interesting to me is the fact that the Korean transcriptions of these names show remarkable sensitivity to the actual pronunciation underlying the French orthography, and in particular to orthographic differences between French and English.

In particular, note the Korean rendering of the voiceless French sounds spelled with the letters p and t. In English, these letters generally represent aspirated sounds (i.e. they are accompanied with a puff of air), and therefore are rendered into Korean as ㅍ [pʰ] and ㅌ [tʰ] in the transliteration of English words. But in the names above, they are rendered as tense initials ㅃ [pp] and ㄸ [tt], reflecting their unaspirated pronunciation in French. (I've marked these in red above.) This seems to be quite consistent, except for "Paris", which as a place name already has a fixed Korean spelling of long standing.

Of particular note is the rendering of "Petit Amour", capturing the French liaison. The final t of Petit is, in the Korean orthography, the beginning sound of the second word, 따무르 Ttamureu.

Also of note in these transcriptions:
1) The French ch sound is always rendered in Korean with lip-rounding (note the [w] sound in the transcription of Cherbourg).
2) After Korean palatals ㅈ j and ㅊ ch, there is no distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized vowels. In other words, while one can spell 자 ja and 쟈 jya differently, the pronunciation is exactly the same: [tʃa]. Native Korean morphemes are always spelled without the -y-. But foreign words are often spelled with the -y-, probably because it makes them look orthographically foreign. Thus the English name John is usually spelled 쟌 jyan rather than 잔 jan, even though both are pronounced as jan. We see this principle at work in the Korean renderings of Jean and Jours.
3) Nasalization of French vowels is represented orthographically by a following -n. Koreans render this as ㅇ ng, whereas for English words final -n is rendered as ㄴ n. You can see this principle at work twice in Jean Boulangerie.
4) French voiced obstruents (b, d, g, j) are, like their English counterparts, rendered with the plain series of Korean obstruents, which are pronunced as voiceless unaspirated (well, slightly aspirated) word-initially, and as voiced word-medially.

**********

The other day, perhaps just to drum up business, out in front of Petit Amour there was a balloon arch and speakers blaring music. The song playing when I took the picture was "Hot Stuff". You can recreate my experience by looking at the photo while listening to this.

This kind of balloon arch is very commonly seen when Korean businesses have their grand opening, or as they call it in Korean, "Grand Open" (just like that, in Roman letters). But to really do a Grand Open right, you should have two scantily-clad dancing girls gyrating to the music.


Not long ago two construction projects took place near Petit Amour. The top floor of the building was renovated, and the street was repaved.

It all happened incredibly fast. I wanted to take a series of pictures documenting the process, but it was all over in one day.

Note, above, the thick electrical cables that run from the roof of the building down into Petit Amour. This is probably not to code!

I would like to mention here how incredibly hard-working the small business owners in Seoul are. The chef-owner of Petit Amour is there every single day (including weekends and holidays) from at least 7:00 am to 10:00 pm. (He might be open longer hours than that, but I haven't checked.) Restaurant owners, convenience store owners, and produce sellers in my neighborhood work similar hours. What recreation they enjoy (TV, newspapers, conversation) takes place during lulls in their work. And as tough as their lives must be, I have found in almost all cases that they are polite, friendly, and provide good service.

Sae-KKot-Namu

Last autumn Erma and I learned about the Seodaemun-gu bird, flower, and tree from posters at a building construction site in Shinchon. I was in Shinchon last week and that building is completed, no longer under construction. The signs with the gu (구 區, district) bird, flower, and tree are gone. They are still looking for tenants to fill the building:


Putting district information on construction site walls must be a common practice. Here in my current district, Gwanak-gu, I walked past this building (also visible in this earlier post):


Sure enough, look what's on the wall surrounding the construction site:


I still can't listen or express myself very well, but my Korean is getting good enough that with the aid of a dictionary I can translate these passages with some confidence.

Gu bird:

the magpie that has been viewed as a lucky omen said to deliver good tidings

It is said that this magpie in olden days greeted the learned scholars who crossed the southern divide and entered Hanyang [an old name for Seoul] in order to take the state civil service examination.

Gu flower:

When spring arrives the beauty of the fragrant(?) royal azaleas, the pink flowers that blanket Gwanak Mountain, adorn the season.

In Gwanak District, whose "Gwanak Mountain Royal Azalea Festival" is widely known, you can encounter the royal azaleas everywhere once spring has arrived.

Gu tree: the pine tree that symbolizes resolve and righteous integrity

All the year round growing green, stately and dignified, it has since ancient times come to symbolize the resolve and integrity of gentlemen and ladies.

(I welcome any corrections if I've made mistakes.)

There's some overlap with Seodaemun-gu; both districts have the magpie as their bird. I wouldn't be surprised if every district in the city has the magpie as its bird. They seem to be everywhere. Right near my house is a street named "Magpie Park" (까치공원). Here's a magpie I photographed on the SNU campus.

Gongsa

There's always something interesting going on in my neighborhood.

The other day I found one block of my little street closed off by fire engines. Some kind of complicated construction work was going on.


Although cars weren't allowed, there was no attempt to prevent pedestrians from walking through what looked like a potentially dangerous area. I walked to the other end of the block, turned around, and took this picture:


That shiny S-shaped pole looked so odd, it took my a while to realize that it was a new utility pole being installed. I don't know why it has a curved shape. They were a surprisingly large number of workers involved, dealing with a huge, complex tangle of thick electrical cables from four separate cranes.

This close-up shows three workers coming at the cables from three different directions.


A few days after I saw the construction, I went for a walk to explore a bit. I hadn't realized it, but just a block in from my dormitory building, the neighborhood climbs steeply up a hill. Looking down from the near the top, I discovered that the main road actually runs along the bottom of a narrow valley, and I could see across to the hills rising on the other side of it.


One thing that continues to astonish me about my neighborhood is the density of convenience stores, fruit and vegetable stands, and other little markets. Around my dorm, there's at least one every block -- and the blocks are not very big. The fact that so many markets can be sustained must reflect a very high density of residents. Even up here, near the top of the hill where it's almost entirely residential, there are markets tucked away here and there. In fact, there is one in the picture above. Can you spot it?

Well, it's hard to see. Here's a close-up:

Yep, that's it, the little blue sign with white lettering reading shyupeo 슈퍼. (That's borrowed from English 'supermarket', but in Korean it usually refers to a little grocery store.)

Two big banners were put up on my block.

They're both ads. The one on the bottom is, I think, for a children's daycare center. (Can someone tell me if that's right?) The one on top says, I think, something like "Now recruiting students for 2008 self-government program classes ", but I don't really understand what that's about either.

Gwanak-gu

You'll remember from this earlier post that Seoul is divided administratively into districts (gu 구 區) and further subdivided into neighborhoods (dong 동 洞). Last fall Erma and I lived in Seodaemun-gu (서대문구 西大門區), Daeshin-dong (대신동 大新洞), near Yonsei University. This spring I'm living in Gwanak-gu (관악구 冠岳區), Bongcheon-dong (봉천동 奉天洞). This map shows the relative locations of the two areas of the city; click on a marker to see its label.


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(If you can't see the embedded map, or want to see a larger image, you can go here.)

Historically, the city of Seoul was north of the Han River (한강 漢江), and this is where the main palaces, major universities, city government buildings, and most of the sites described in earlier entries of this blog are located. But as the population of the city grew rapidly in the last half of the twentieth century, the fields south of the river became urbanized, and today there is as much city south of the river as there is north of the river.

Seoul National University was relocated to Gwanak-gu from its original location not far from the President's house in 1975. It is widely believed (and may be true) that the government relocated the campus in order to get SNU's politically active students away from the center of town. During the reign of the US-supported military dictators, college students were highly radicalized and spent a lot of time protesting, demonstrating and blockading. As you can see from the map, the current SNU campus is located in the steep foothills of Gwanak Mountain (for which the district is named). This area was once wild and remote; now the city has, in its relentless expansion, almost caught up to the campus. I said I live in Bongcheon-dong, but actually I live in Bongcheon 6-dong. The neighborhood has been divided into at least 11 sub-units. My guess is that since the dong was first demarcated, the population in the area has grown so much more dense that it became necessary to divide up the neighborhood into smaller administrative (or at least postal) units.

(Incidentally, for those of you keeping track, the reason I've just given for the relocation of the campus was the third interesting thing I learned from my teacher, as described in this earlier post.)

The dorm I'm staying in is about halfway between two subway stations on Line 2, the same line we lived near in the fall. It's less than a 10 minute walk for me to get to either one. Although I'm just off a major road (Nambu Sunhuan-No 남부순환로, which I suppose means Nambu Ring Road, although I'm sure nobody actually knows this name), my building is actually on a very narrow one-way street that runs parallel to the road, and there's practically no traffic noise. Which is good, because the place is overheated and I have to leave the window open day and night to keep from roasting.

These are the views to the right and left down my street, from just in front of my building.



I often feel like I'm on a movie set when I walk down this little street. Everything is small and clean vibrant, as if it was all a recently-built facade. There are always a surprising number of people walking around, as if they were extras hired to populate the set.

Two doors down from me, on the left, is a little tteok 떡 mom-and-pop shop.


(Did you forget what tteok is? It's described halfway down this post.)

There are certain types of shop that are over-represented in my neighborhood. They are: real estate agencies, beauty parlors, dry cleaners, and chicken restaurants. And on my little block only, services for little kids. This is one of several music studios for small children.


Every afternoon I've heard rhythmic shouts and chanting of children drifting in through my open window. At first I thought there must be a school nearby. There is, in fact, an elementary school in the neighborhood, but too far away to be the source of the noise. And in any case, the chanting continued into the late afternoon, long after school is out. I finally realized the source a few days ago: above the music studio pictured here, directly across the street from me, is a large Taekwondo studio. It too caters to children.

Let's proceed down the block.

Here's the hair salon, called He-eo Ateu (that is, "Hair Art"). It's actually only one of two on the block -- you can see the other in the first picture of the post, with the sign reading Miyongshil 미용실.


Just a bit farther down the street, on the left, is a small kids' stationery and toy shop. It's called Yeong Ateu 영 아트 (that is, "Young Art"). There are always two or three excited kids crowding in or rushing out any time I walk past. On the sidewalk in front are these two tiny video games with miniscule plastic seats in front of them. There's something really cute about the little kids perched on miniature furniture playing miniature video games. You also gotta love the hula hoops.



(You can see the sign for yet another music lesson place just behind the kids.)

On the corner of my block is a harin mateu 하린 마트, or discount mart. It's small, but carries all the daily necessities, from orange juice to alcohol to bread to packaged foods to toothpaste to toilet paper to slippers. It's not a large store, so they keep a good chunk of their wares out on the sidewalk. It's great to live literally less than 30 seconds from a convenience store. I don't know if it's open 24 hours or not, but so far I've never seen it closed. Need pancake mix or dried squid at 10:45 pm on Saturday night? No problem.


If you were standing next to that woman with the pink purse and glanced to your right you would see a fruit-and-vegetable seller, a taciturn middle-aged man who looks somewhat beaten down by many decades of a hard and lonely life. The first time I visited him he seemed stunned by my appearance. I said "hello," and he said, "Hunh?" I don't think it occurred to him that I would say anything in Korean. I repeated myself, and he said "hello" back. So far he's my main source of cooking ingredients. He also sells me tofu, pulling fresh blocks out of a big soaking barrel.

Not everything is a mom-and-pop store. There's a 7-Eleven on the same corner.


If you are coming from my dorm and turn left at this corner, the one with Young Art, the Discount Mart, and 7-11, you're on another little alley heading toward the main road. You're looking down that alley in the picture above. A little farther along it, on the right, are two restaurants, pictured below. One I think of as the restaurant with the longest name in the world. It translates to something like "Let's make it rice ...! Let's make it noodles ...!" It's where I had my first meal after moving into the dorm.


Next to it is "OH my chicken". I can't tell if this is supposed to be "Oh, my chicken!" or "Oh my, chicken!" I'd really like to know, but I suppose it doesn't matter. The Korean name is Omaichikin 오마이치킨. You'll notice the English word "chicken" in there. Korean, of course, has a perfectly good word for chicken, and that word (dak 닭) is ordinarily employed in the names chicken dishes. The English borrowing chikin is used, so far as I can tell, exclusively for deep fried chicken drumsticks, thighs, and breasts in the KFC style. When I said earlier that chicken restaurants are over-represented in my neighborhood, this is the kind of place I was referring to. There's one on every block.

Next is a Chinese place. It has a typical sign showing a chef pulling really long noodles. I'm a bit afraid of this place and its extraordinarily long noodles. Beyond it, with the yellow sign and red-and-white awning, is a gimbap shop. Gimbap 김밥 looks like a sushi maki roll, but it's made with plain rice, not vinegar rice. It's a commonly eaten food for a snack or an on-the-go lunch.


Finally there is my neighborhood fancy French bakery and pastry shop (or, if you like, boulangerie/pâtisserie), where I buy my bread for toasting and jam for putting on it. I'm not sure what "Self cake" is, but the rest of the sign is self-explanatory.

And that's one of the gazillion real-estate agencies, to the left of the pastry shop.

As soon as you emerge from the alley onto the main road, the world changes. Looking to the right, in the direction of the Seoul-Dae Ipgu 서울대입구 subway station:


And the left, in the direction of the Nakseongdae 낙성대 subway station:


Back to the right, that's my bus stop, marked by the blue sign on the sidewalk. As you can see, I've just missed both the #5412 and the #5528, the two buses that go to the main gate of SNU campus. I'm not worried, though. They come every five minutes during rush hour.


While waiting at the bus stop, I can contemplate this fellow and his fashionable suit. Apparently it is more fashionable if you wear it sockless with sneakers.


Finally, I wanted to throw in this picture. I stumbled across this restaurant a few nights ago, while wandering around. It's a chain that serves juk 죽, a thick flavored rice gruel (known as jook (粥) to aficionados of Cantonese food). There was one just a few yards down the street from our Yonsei officetel that Erma and I frequented last fall, so I felt really happy to eat there. It was like a bit of home.

Juso

One of the odd things about Seoul (and perhaps Korea in general) is that street addresses don't really exist. Every street has a name -- I've seen the street signs on which they are written, and I've seen them on maps. But aside from a few major boulevards downtown (like Sejong-no, named after King Sejong, the inventor of hangeul) nobody seems to know or make reference to those street names.

Official postal addresses do not contain street names or numbers. An address in Seoul consists of the city name, a postal code, the gu (district), the dong (neighborhood), and a dong-postal code. It appears that the dong-postal code, just like our 9-digit zip codes, might specify addresses down to the individual building, but this is not helpful to the average person trying to find a home or business.

(Those of you who have seen the address of our apartment here might have noticed that there is no street name or number on it.)

So how do people find their way around? They use landmarks: subway stations, buildings, palaces. "Get off the bus at the police station, walk to the next intersection, turn right, go past the palace, and you'll see it." We tell taxi drivers that we are across from the back gate of Ehwa University. We haven't ordered take-out yet, but if we do, we'll have to give complicated instructions to the delivery guy so that he can find the building.

As you might imagine, this is a source of considerable difficulty for the language learner trying to give or get directions.

It is also a challenge for businesses. Just putting their gu and dong on a business card won't help customers find them. So almost every business card has a sketch map on it. The streets are never labeled, but major landmarks are. Many of those landmarks are themselves businesses, and if they go out of business the maps quickly go out of date.

Here's a sample of restaurant business cards, most from around our neighborhood. You can click on the image to see a larger version. It's actually kind of interesting for us to look at them and see which things in our area are considered to be salient references to the average Seoul resident.


Erma and I have heard that the situation in Tokyo is or was similar. (Can anyone confirm this?) Further, we heard that in the 1980s it was common when ordering take-out food to fax a sketch map over to the restaurant so that they would know where to go to make the delivery.

It's somewhat baffling to me why Koreans don't make use of street addresses. As I've said, the streets have names. Not only that, but as far as I can tell, every single building has a placard on it listing the street name AND the street address.

Here, for example, is a building on the way from our apartment to the Language Institute. Gotta love the name of this cafe.


Right there by the entrance is the address.


It says 38-1 Yeon-Dae Dongmun-Gil "38-1 Yonsei University East Gate Road".

I suppose that for most people, the system as it is works fine. It does seem harder for people unfamiliar with local landmarks (like me) trying to make their way around using street maps.

Incidentally, the Lord Sandwich building is architecturally somewhat interesting. Here's another view of it.

Jangmi

It's really autumn here now. The days are cool and wonderfully crisp and sunny. The sunlight is bright but weak, and you can smell the incipience of winter in the air.

Took a picture on Yonsei campus today of roses in bloom. This is just outside the main library building.

The rose, as we discovered, is our gu flower.

Kkachi

Today we took this picture of a magpie perched on a pole just outside our apartment.
The magpie, you will recall, is our gu bird.


There really are a lot of magpies around, especially on campus.

Gu

Walking in Shinchon today, Erma and I noticed for the first time a large billboard-sized sign above the sidewalk on the construction site of a new highrise building. The sign pictures the official tree, bird, and flower of our gu, Seodaemun-gu. Who knew that each district of Seoul has its own officially designated flora and fauna? Turns out our gu tree (區木) is the pine (소나무), our gu bird (區鳥) is the magpie (까치), and our gu flower (區花) is the rose (장미).

Dongne

We arrived at our apartment in Seoul last Thursday, over a week ago. Our classes at Yonsei University's Korean Language Institute (KLI) don't start until Monday. So what have we been doing with ourselves for over a week?

Well, for starters, we had to clean the apartment and unpack. The apartment was actually quite dirty, and some of it couldn't be cleaned until we had found and bought appropriate cleaning supplies. Getting fully settled took a few days.

We also had to go shopping. Since we're only staying for 3 months, our intention was to avoid purchasing too many things. Erma's mother graciously provided us with a lot of basics, but we still ended up needing to buy some knives, trash cans, an iron, a blow dryer, and the like.

But most of the time we've spent exploring our neighborhood. Seoul is divided into large administrative districts called gu (구 區). Our district is Seodaemun-gu (서대문구 西大門區), "Great Western Gate District". It's located just outside of the old Seoul city walls, which no longer exist, where the large western gate entrance to the city once stood. (Dongdaemun and Namdaemun, the eastern and southern city gates, still exist.)

Gu are further subdivided into neighborhoods, called dong (동 洞). Our OfficeTel is located in Daeshin-dong (대신동 大新洞). This neighborhood sits just to the southeast of Yonsei University, which is itself in the foothills of the mountains that frame the north side of the city.

The OfficeTel's main entrance is on a rather large, busy, and noisy street, which runs past the main gate of Yonsei University about a quarter mile to our west. The street, Seongsan Street, looks like this:


The reason traffic is so light is that this picture was taken during the Chuseok holiday. Lots of buses run down this street, including the one that took us over to Gyeongbuk Palace on Chuseok.

More appealing is the back entrance of the OfficeTel, located on a small alley. The immediate neighborhood is full of upscale little cafes, restaurants, and bars, tucked discreetly into the nooks and crannies of the surrounding buildings. In the bottom floor of our OfficeTel there is a La Bonne Tarte (라 본느 타르트 Ra Bonneu Tareuteu) pastry cafe and a fancy wine restaurant called Côte (꼬뜨 Kkotteu). Erma's standing on the pastry side, of course.


Looking up and down the alley the view is like this:



Within two minutes' walk are, in addition to inexpensive Korean restaurants serving simple fare, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French and German restaurants. A short block from us is a cafe called Princeton Square. There comfy seats are surrounded by full floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and what wall space is left over is decorated with American college banners. Here we recently purchased cups of hot chocolate for just shy of $8 each. Erma finished off the latest Harry Potter novel while I, with the help of the electronic dictionary that was a gift from Erma's mother, worked my way through a short newspaper article in Korean on Seattle Mariners pitcher Cha Seung Baek.

Severance Hospital, which is part of Yonsei University and one of the best hospitals in the country, is very close by. On one occasion we saw a medical helicopter take off from the rooftop helipad.


Yonsei University is the result of a merger between Severance Hospital and Yonhi (연희 延禧) College. (The name Yonsei is a combination of the first syllables of Yonhi and Severance.) Here's a picture of Lance on the old part of campus, where the ivy-covered brick buildings look very much like those found at the older American universities on which Yonhi was modeled. The statue is of Horace Grant Underwood, a protestant missionary who founded the school (originally Chosun Christian College) and served as its first president.


About a 10-minute walk away is the bustling Shinchon area, an amazingly vibrant neighborhood with an incredibly high density of cafes, restaurants, bars, and amusement-park stalls where a young beau with good aim can win a giant stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh for his girlfriend. At night the sidewalks are so packed with young people out having fun that you can barely move. The signs, many neon, form a multilingual forest canopy over the streets.



Shinchon is also the location of the closest Metro station to us.

Here is a satellite map of the area where we live. Some of the places mentioned in this entry are tagged.


View Larger Map

If it doesn't appear properly, you can follow this link instead.

[Note: The Romanization of the title of this post was corrected from Dongnae to Dongne on March 14, 2008. The Korean word for 'neighborhood' is 동네, not 동내.]