Band of Outsiders

In Seoul is an area called Itaewon, maybe an hour from where I live, winding up the yellow line to the orange to the double-doored brown. And one finds in Itaewon, almost exclusively, foreigners and their everydays. Restaurants, bookstores, bootleg Abercrombie sweatshirts, banks where one can use non-domestic cards, pay-as-you-go mobile and normal-sized shoes.

It is the oddest place to visit, and makes me a good mix of uncomfortable and glad at once. Upon stepping off the subway, you're almost always greeted by the brownest man you've seen in days, giving you a flyer for "FOREIGN RESTAURANT -- HALAL SERVED" with a map of the Seoul subway on the back, and kind of unappetizing pictures of shawarma / palak paneer / actual roti plastered haphazard on the front. He does not look happy. His cohorts do not look happy. But my stomach leaps joyful at the thought of garam masala. The sidewalks right by the subway are also the worst, very slanty and thin and iced.

Around sit the signs of every American joint I don't particularly miss. Coldstone Creamery, Baskin Robbins, Subway, Hard Rock Cafe, Quiznos, usually on a theme of ice cream or sandwiches. And in them sit the happiest damned fatties I have ever seen. Thank HEAVENS there is a place without kimchi or crazy items, they maybe think. And then they bite into a rank roast beef au jus with cheese. There are, of course, also places with Indian food, and even nachos, and places which I one day want to try where one can get kangaroo steak, and Dubai Restaurant, and passable looking German side-dishes.

What the Book, a very greatly named bookstore, sits at the bottom of some more slippery stairs, and it is a dangerous place in which to bring a wallet. For starters, Indie Pop Rocks is always playing over the sound system. Always. For seconders, it is full of cute glasses-wearing caucazoids who seem to have wandered out of the local Fleet Foxes concert, a nice thing for my eyes to see, instead of the usual staring old Korean fellas. Admittedly, the used books are largely Dan Brown, girly shit, a healthy helping of sci-fi and others that I would not in my right mind read, but oh no, there are new books, too. Where I have snagged some Pynchon and some other novels. It is the odd side effect of being in Korea, teaching broken slow English, that I have a renewed appreciation for the more strange and rambling uses of the language. Do I like to listen to psych rock, read 'The Crying of Lot 49' and draw odd things in a notebook? Yes, of course, more than ever.

Before leaving Itaewon this weekend, I stopped at Foreigners Market, the Korean equivalent of the ubiquitous Asian Grocery Store from back in the U.S. It was a terrifying place, very small and with three aisles of overstuffed shelves. There are labels of every British, Japanese, Indian, American, European, Filipino food company, all sitting alongside another as uncomfortably as the foreigners who shove into one another for cans and bags of candy. Glares and stares exchanged as someone nabs the last Cadbury Milk bar. Good ol' American army boys shoving past vaguely-feared Ay-rabs in search of good catsup. The fish-smelling amalgam of Asian foods back in the states, now transposed across an ocean and into the necessary activities of such a strange group.

I left with 4500 won dal, though.