Gupo-dong. Signs in Vietnamese advertise, "REFRESHING DRINK/ SUGARCANE JUICE / SUPER CLEAN."
A friend emails me about this neighborhood, "I used to live in Deokcheon-dong, which houses Kupo Dog Market, the largest dog market in South Korea. Dog markets were cleaned up and banned way back around the 2002 Olympics, but Kupo always survived it because...well, if you go there, you'll never see a foreigner. When I lived there, I had shouts of hello given to me almost non-stop for a year. When i went back a year ago, amazingly I was still getting hellos and the occasional 'I love USA' which is something I also got a lot in the 1990s in that area--there are just a lot of real old guys there who remembered U.S. GI's there from the Korean War, so there is this odd high American patriotism that would be quite absent from the universities and colleges around Seoul."
Gupo Dog Market was finally shut down last July.
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1 comment:
very interesting, like everything you're posting from there. how i wish i wasn't clueless (a), and had had the real internet (b) back in 95-98 when i lived in seoul. i never tried poshuntang, dog soup, but almost did a couple of times. i remember it was a seasonal thing, being available in the fall. my co-worker and neighbor in one of my flats was rumored to have killed the pet dog of the owner's, who lived upstairs and kept the poor animal chained on a very short leash, living in its excrement, with a frozen water bowl in very cold winter months. someone said, seemingly seriously, that it was made into poshuntang, i don't know. also i heard it was only a certain breed of dog they used, something like a yellowish husky type dog, but i never looked into that either in those pre-internet days so different from these. i can't say the closing of a dog market saddens me much.
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