When spring comes, merely walking down a street makes all sorts of thoughts leap out. It begins with the simple thought that the spring air feels good, then past good things, then regrets about what I might have become if things had not flowed as they did and some unexpected variable had appeared along the way. Thoughts that would not have surfaced if I had walked the same road in winter suddenly link together one after another.
One day, while walking in Jamsil, I suddenly remembered the days when I walked the streets of Jongno. I was walking in the spring of 2024, and the memory that appeared without warning was from 2004, twenty years earlier. Seoul had still not fully escaped the heat of the World Cup cheering. The media was struggling to keep alive the new phrase “plaza culture,” and it had suddenly become normal to see foreigners on the street. It was summer vacation during college, when I went back and forth to Jongno every day to attend an English academy.
Jongno 2-ga, with its many bars, was very quiet when we came out for lunch during class, except for a few restaurants that served lunch. I did not know where everyone else ate, but the people in my class always went to the soybean paste stew restaurant behind the academy. Since we could not eat the same thing every day, we would all order one menu together, then choose a different menu together the next day, trying a variety of dishes that way. Sometimes we ordered lunch boxes from Hansot.
After lunch, unlike the others who drank coffee, I did not yet understand why people drank it. The only coffee I drank was a can of Let’s Be at eleven at night during exam periods, to stay awake. I did not even drink vending-machine coffee. So during that time, I wandered outside the academy. On rainy days I had no choice but to stay in the classroom, but otherwise I walked Jongno Street in the sunlight.
Had the Cheonggyecheon overpass already been demolished then? I do not know. I did not go all the way to Cheonggyecheon. I simply walked the road between Jongno and Cheonggyecheon to somewhere near Jonggak, then returned along Jongno. Back then, too, I looked around in a daze. The street was made of large blocks, meant for many people to walk through, and in broad daylight, in the paradoxical condition of having few people precisely because it was not dark, sunlight filled the asphalt and warmed it.
There were buildings everywhere, yet most of the shops inside them were closed. The air was warm, but there were few people on the street, and I was walking through the middle of it. It looked like a street from a zombie story. Then, once I reached Jongno, it was suddenly full of cars, and people kept pouring out of Jonggak Station from who knows where, hurrying this way and that. The contrast filled me with an enjoyment I could not explain.
It would have been nice to cross the road from Jongno and look around Insadong too, but the contrast between those two streets was already entertaining enough. Whether it was something worth remembering was not important. What mattered was that I had been there and felt it with my whole body. Looking back like this, I realize that the sensations accumulated that way have invisibly influenced the person I am now. They were not things I thought up and achieved, but situations that reached me on their own, like radiation, whether I knew it or not.
The street at lunchtime was that warm, but the same street after all the classes ended was different. The air was still warm, but not in the cozy way of lunchtime. It was a tired, languid warmth, like sinking into a bathtub while traveling. It also felt as if there were more exhaust and dust. Above all, in the evening, people leaving work for home, people leaving work for dinner, and people leaving work for drinks all mixed together, and the wide street became packed with people moving back and forth. At lunchtime I had felt the street with my whole body; in the evening I was busy just avoiding people.
Everything felt full of stimulation. Things that would have seemed natural if I had gone there only in the evening became unnatural because I had walked there at lunchtime. The flashing neon signs felt unfamiliar. The music pouring from speakers at every karaoke entrance and bar window seemed to shout that the places that had been shadowed in contrast to the sun-filled asphalt at noon had now become dark asphalt with pounding, colorful sound. Especially, countless people flowed like water, while many others gathered in groups of three or four like rocks set in a stream, ignoring the current. After a little more time passed, even before night had fully arrived, drunken people began to appear, shouting slurred Korean.
But that too was spring. In winter, those scenes do not look leisurely. Even in the middle of them, once people choose a destination, they hurry because it is cold. In spring, and in summer too, because it is warm, there is leisure in the street.
When I passed drunk people shouting, I frowned because I disliked the loud noise in my ears. Yet the reason I walked through that place almost every day, the reason I chose the middle road to Jonggak instead of walking straight along the main road and going into the Jongno 3-ga exit, must have been that I disliked only that particular stimulation, while the scene itself was enjoyable.
Even now, when I visit that area, I always end up walking that middle road. Even if I walk along Cheonggyecheon, from Jongno 3-ga onward I turn back that way. Places that come alive at night are still full of leisure by day. People who come every night can see how the shops change, but people who pass only during the day do not know what shops have changed and how. Even if more than half had closed because of a recession, it would be hard to notice during the day. That is how it became a good place to feel old memories again.
People who have known Jongno for a long time would say it had already changed a lot by 2004. But someone who first went there in that condition can feel relieved in 2024, thinking it has not changed much, and go home warmed by that feeling.
Original Korean article: 봄날의 종로거리