Thursday, January 1, 2009

La Petite France (à Seoul????)


A few Sundays ago, I went on a search to find 서래마을, Seorae Village. A French friend informed me of a French neighborhood in Seoul, so of course I couldn't pass the opportunity to go on a mission to scope out the new territory. Seorae Village is located at the Express Bus Terminal, just below the river, but after reading several websites, I decided that it would be tricky to find it, so Chandra and I jumped in a taxi and made our way to Little France. We were dropped off at the bottom of a small hill expecting to actually be in France. Since Korea is pretty homogeneous, I wasn't surprised to actually feel like I was still in Seoul. The only thing that made this street different than most Korean streets was the tricolore sidewalks; bleu blanc rouge and the drapeau française on every pole.
One other characteristic about this Little France that was beared resemblance to the country where I once resided was that many shops were closed on Sunday. In Korea, I don't have a hard time finding something open on Sundays, however in France, Sundays were never pleasant if I wanted to go do errands. The only thing that we could really explore were the restaurants, which I was completely fine with. We entered a small French restaurant in hopes to eat some French onion soup, but we were informed that they were closed for break. Ah, typical. So the next place available was a cute little sandwich shop run by two older Koreans. The sandwiches were satisfying enough and then we wandered further up the hill, where we found a lycée française (a French high school). It was pretty frigid outside, so we set foot to the local Starbucks (you would hardly see one of these in France) and people watched.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems Starbucks is taking over the world :)

lindsey said...

la france te manque?

love
lindsey.