things change

A disappointing-yet-educational trip out to my old stomping grounds bore no fruit but gave me an idea of how fast a neighborhood can change. I went out to the Sookmyung Women's University neighborhood this afternoon in search of the old print shop where I'd had my 2006 Water from a Skull printed for distribution in Korea. As you might imagine, Seoul is an ever-changing landscape, and a lot can happen in sixteen years. Sure enough, about the only thing I recognized when I stepped out of the taxi at the university's weird double front gate (the two major halves of the campus are split by a main road that runs between them, causing there to be two jeongmun, or main gates, that face each other) was the terrain. Sukdae, as the campus is nicknamed, sits on a slight hill, and the street leading away from the front gate slopes downward toward Sukdaeipgu (i.e., Sukdae Entrance) Station. I followed the slope downhill, looking out for that old print shop, which I recall being set half underground. No such place exists now, and while I did find two or three places offering basic copy services for desperate students needing to print out research papers and whatnot, there was no full-scale print shop to be seen. Another dead end. All this is frustrating because there's that print shop right up the street from where I work, but every time I tried visiting, it's been closed.

Anyway, the Sukdae neighborhood has moved on—really moved on—since I left it in 2008. The wide-open south side of the campus (called "Gangnam"—river-south—by the kids because it's the newer, shinier-looking side; back when my mom went to Sukdae, there was no Gangnam side of the campus, just the side now called "Gangbuk"—river-north—for being older and stodgier) is no longer wide open; it's been built up into some sort of glassed-in center. The sprawling concrete courtyard is now gone. I was at the university when it celebrated its centennial (fireworks banging over the neighborhood sounded like artillery); there's now a Centennial Building, which I don't recall being there when I was teaching there. (Maybe it did exist back then; I don't remember.) The shops and restaurants are all different, now; nothing from my past looked familiar. The situation evoked a weird, lost feeling as I proceeded down the street. And I never found any sort of print shop that would fit my needs. It could simply be that such a shop is now on some side street; Sukdae is fairly downtown, being only a five-minute cab ride away from Seoul Station, so it should have all the trappings of a campus neighborhood. Full-scale print shops are normally found at most college campuses because they provide a hardback-cover print service for students getting their theses and dissertations printed out in a formal manner; only the poorer campuses don't have such print shops, and Sukdae is, last I checked, the #2 women's university in South Korea (Ewha, with its bizarrely misspelled designation of "Womans University," is #1).

But I'm not going to bother going back to search the neighborhood's nooks and crannies. There's got to be some print shop somewhere that can help me. Maybe I'll talk to my buddy Charles about print shops around the Seoul National University campus.