Sinchon and Haebangchon are like Jan Brady’s of Seoul nightlife. Always in the shadow of their more popular sisters of Hongdae and Itaewon, respectively. And our wiki has also failed to pay its due respect to those areas, with nary a wiki page yet, whereas we’ve made a good dent in the more famous two. So one thing that’s been on my list is profiling Sinchon spots better, with hope that it can evolve into something as comprehensive as our Daegu nightlife articles.
I suppose that any mention of Sinchon should first include something about the Canadian bar owner Sean Watts, who tends the bar at Watts On Tap. Unlike most places that tout being ‘foreign-owned’ despite being on the books listed under a Korean manager, spouse, or partner, Sean went through all the very finest BS that Korean red tape has to offer a foreigner looking to have something in his name.
The bar, stretched out onto 2 floors, opened in July of 2005 and features a lot of familiar tastes and feels from home, which explains why it has attracted a loyal following over the years among expats. Things like dart boards, sports and movies on the big-ass TV, comfy roof-top patio and real pub fare, featuring wings, nachos, meat pies and the like. And you can down all of that with a parade of imported beers like Budweiser, Moosehead, Beck’s Dark, Coors, Krombacher, Leffe, Miller American Draught, Rhenania German Draught, Alley Kat – Canadian Pale Ale, Erdinger/Hoegaarden Belgian Draught & Guinness Genuine Draught.
He’s also made good use of theme nights to attract a good mix, such as open mike nights, but also language exchange nights for those trying to pick up not only English, but also Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish and so on, which fits perfectly within the nightlife district that triangulates so many nearby universities with big foreign language programs, such as Yonsei, Ewha, Sogang, etc…
To get there: Come out of exit 2 of Sinchon Station towards Yonsei University. Go straight about 300m to SK Telecom & Starbucks/Baskin Robbins and turn left. Go 75m and they are beside GS25, RollingStone and above Aroma coffee shop. They are on the 3rd floor & roof.
If you ask most young Daegu urbanites about a top 5 list for downtown restaurants that are hip and have good 분위기 (ambience), Tteulerae seems to always make its presence somewhere in the conversation. Located right across from 2.28 Memorial Park.
I came to that city back in the fall of 2002. I remember not knowing hardly anyone other than a few internet friends already living in the city. While crashing on their couch, while waiting for my school accommodation to be lined up, I remember venturing out on my own and trying to make sense of it all. Unlike most teachers who line up jobs before flying over, I chose to come here first and conduct the job hunt locally. But as much as that seemed to make sense, job-wise, it provided a month’s worth of disorientation and adjustment, far worse than I’d expect most others to experience. I remember the challenges of trying to find things to eat or at least be able to now what place serves what. My temporary roommates, Rob, Brian, and Davin, would be my lifeline, as I had no idea how to read anything, let alone where to ask for it. I was staying in cheap house lost in the labryinth of backstreets south of Garden Hotel. I had no idea how close I was to the service street leading to Camp Walker, with its English signs lining the road and English-speaking owners who could have surely help orient myself to the surroundings. My roommates were always out doing privates and were seldom home. And in the evenings Rob and Brian would be busy building a downtown expat bar that they were prepping to unleash on the foreigner scene. But when they were home, one of the common things was to order delivery from this Korean bar on the Camp Walker street, who would send us this awesome teriyaki wing set. Another night we went out for galbi for the first time. It was there when myself and dwenjangjigae first caught each other’s gaze and we instantly fell in love. That soup was the first domino to fall in a long line of passionate love affairs that I’ve had with Korean food. And those love affairs contribute to the plethora of reasons as to why I can’t quite unglue myself from this country.
During the days, when I was starved, I’d go walking around and trying not to get lost. I remember Brian telling me to just go into a restaurant and asking for Bulgogi. He was ex-GI, so in hindsight, I understand that he was likely referencing the scope of the Korean cuisine that he got into. Now that I recall, I remember hearing that Brian hated Korean food, for the most part. A choice that one can willingly make, if you still have a pass to get onto Camp Walker and go to Taco Bell or shop at the PX. But as most dwellers of Korea know, bulgogi, despite it being popular among foreigners who sample the Korean restaurants around bases or Itaewon or in overseas Korean restaurants, is not a dish you’d abundantly fine throughout Korea and eaten by Koreans. The odd time that I see bulgogi written on a menu while passing a restaurant, I’d be a little bit taken aback, as that dish is just not as common as its made out to be. Distant cousins of bulgogi such as jaeyook beokkum are much more commonplace, but even if you were sitting in a restaurant that had jaeyook on the menu, but a Korean-illiterate foreigner asked for bulgogi, Koreans would simply say ‘opsoyo’, without even making the connection that they could easily offer the other dish instead, considering its almost exactly the same. But that’s Korea for you.
Anyways, I remember taking Brian’s advice and I walked into the first restaurant that I saw and moaned ‘bulgogi juseyo’ about 4 times, while rubbing my stomach. They repeatedly said something that I later learned was ‘we don’t sell that’. But in my Korean ignorance, I was just hoping that my pronounciation was wrong and that they’d cross-sell me something similar, once they see the pouty, hungry look I was trying to give off. Didn’t work. I shuffled my feet to the corner and found some temporary salvation. A 7-11. But open walking in, my hopes were dashed, as they didn’t have squat of what I was expecting. But they had Pringles. So Pringles it was, for my, near daily lunch. No way I was going to touch those creepy looking sandwiches. I did find microwaveable bulgogi, which was heavenly, under the circumstances.
Somewhere along the way, the learning process began and the pringles-eating began to subside. That time planted the seeds of my interest in wanting to build a comprehensive guide to living in Daegu, but also a focus on food and its restaurants. My love for Daegu and its food can be seen through the amount of time put into the the Daegu page. While still requiring a lot of work, I’m quite please at the depths of it, upon reflecting how sparse my knowledge was of pretty much anything, 5+ years ago. Since then, I’ve lived in Seoul to the north, Ulsan to the east, and Geochang to the west, but always seem to come back to the coziness and familiarity of Daegu. I have a lot of plans to evolve the Daegu wiki, but for now, I’ll continue my focus on building out the restaurants aspect of life there, emphasizing the international cuisine moreso than the local food. As I can’t cite content and images on the wiki as freely as a personal blog, due to our decision to license the content on the wiki, it’ll be fun to allow the blog to be an outlet for things that I discover on other sites and blogs.
One of my hobbies is spelunking through the caverns of Korean blogs and seeing what local Koreans in Daegu are discovering, things like:
Cafe Aellia (카페 아엘리아). A cozy, cafe that sells coffee, wine, and pizza, among other things. They seem to have 2 locations as far as I can tell and both appear to have become popular in the past few months. One is across from the south entrance of Debec and the other is in Kyungdae.
There’s also another Aellia Coffee franchise in Daegu, but appears to not be affiliated with this one. I’ll get images up shortly, as well as wiki profile.
Welcome to the blog of Galbijim.com. Our blog keeps you up-to-date on developments related to the Galbijim family of sites that focus on Korea, such as our popular wiki community, our forums, our ESL job portal, and KoreaBeat, our blog that translates Korean news and media. We’ll also sometimes refer to something called Project X, which is a super-duper, top secret project that we have in development. The scope and potential impact of which is so big that, when all rolled out, will dwarf the rest of our past developments and effectively become the centerpiece that ties everything together.
But when not talking about such things, this blog aspires to be a hobby project that also focuses on some of my personal joys of being in Korea. You’ll see a lot of blogging about Korean food, restaurants in Korea, and other related things that reflect some very early interests that helped inspire the creation of Galbijim.
I’d also like to have this blog supplement the wiki, so feel free to drop comments about stuff that I’m writing and any info that you are seeking on Korea.
Furthermore, once we get into more themed blogging, it’d be nice if any others with similar interests would be up for co-blogging here.
