Every new semester brought a familiar sight: students ordering jajangmyeon on the campus lawns. Lawns were everywhere, near the main gate, by the carp pond, beside the first student union, and no one fenced them off, so it was perfectly natural to see freshmen and seniors sitting in a circle, calling in black-bean noodles. When the mood shifted, bottles of makgeolli would start making the rounds, and flushed freshmen who had blown off class would trail after seniors toward a second venue. Most of us ordered from Seoul Dae Banjeom. The food was cheap, but more than that, the delivery speed was absurdly fast. No matter where you were on campus, I never saw it take more than five minutes. The taste was exactly what you would expect from a campus Chinese joint: edible, nothing more. Seoul Dae Banjeom’s “speed” strategy was not limited to delivery. Urban legend had it that if you ordered directly at the counter during a break, your jajangmyeon would hit the table before you finished sitting down, and no one found that hard to believe. Looking back now, I have a new respect for the delivery riders who must have crossed those wide lawns all day yelling, “Jajangmyeon delivery!”
Thinking of Seoul Dae Banjeom leads naturally to the small hot spots around school. The main drag was the alley where the bar Sooljaengi sat. Some called it “Sooljaengi Alley,” others “Gongneung-dong Rodeo.” Several memorable places lined that stretch. The two stars were Sooljaengi and Naruteo, complete opposites in mood. Sooljaengi drew mostly underclassmen. Inside, the latest pop songs blasted, while a projector threw up music videos and concert footage on one wall. The moment you walked in, the roar of drinking games at every table hit your ears. The snacks were around five thousand won a plate, and things like potato gratin sold well. Outside, exhausted drinkers often sat squatting in little groups, and it was not hard to spot puddles of vomit nearby.
Across from Sooljaengi stood Naruteo, about half the size and with a completely different feeling. It looked like the kind of place that would appear in Reply 1997. Graffiti from generations of alumni covered the walls, yellowed with age, and the staple dishes were “traditional” drinking food like bandori stew or dubu-kimchi. The atmosphere drew mostly upperclassmen. The first time I followed a regular senior there, he called the owner “Father,” and the owner, without a word, pulled a bottle of soju from the fridge and said, “Do you boys think you’re drinking alone?” Then he poured for us. Behind him I caught a glimpse of the owner’s wife looking distinctly unimpressed. He told us he had once been a teacher and opened Naruteo after retirement. Every semester he gave scholarships to students in need, the famous “Naruteo scholarships.” Sadly, I hear the place has since closed. Once, drunk, I scribbled something like “so-and-so club, signed so-and-so” on the wall. It remains one of those small regrets tied to a place that is gone forever.
As a freshman I spent most of my free periods in the club room or the pool hall. I often went to Evergreen Billiards near campus. It was famous not only for the billiards but for the sweet toast they served, so people would joke that they were “going for Evergreen toast.” Still, among my own classmates, only a handful really played pool. Most preferred PlayStation rooms. Billiards had been the social pastime of my seniors’ generation, but from the class of 2006 onward it had already faded, so I mostly shot pool with older students.
Outside the pool hall, I basically lived in the club room after class. The club I belonged to was already about twenty years old at the time, and if you opened the cabinets you found old notebooks and photo albums stacked inside. When I was bored, I would pull them out and lose myself for an hour. The photo albums showed seniors in dated acid-wash jeans and awkwardly dyed brown hair, posing around campus and the club room. Some photos even reached back into the 1980s, though the 1990s dominated. Alongside them were spiral notebooks we called nal-jeok-i, from some phrase meaning either “please write the date” or “write every day.” They were filled with everything from silly doodles to painfully earnest poetry. The sensibility was nothing like the way people write online now, but the worries, boredom, excitement, and happiness of that era all leaked through the pages. I have no idea whether nal-jeok-i notebooks still survive as a custom.
Whenever I killed time alone in the club room, idle friends would drift in one by one. Once enough people had gathered, we often set a little net on top of a drum in the small field and played foot volleyball. You could borrow a ball from FC SNUT with your student ID. That small field, packed with little memories, disappeared around 2008 when Frontier Hall was built. The new building’s labs stayed lit late into the night with students grinding away. Under those lights, we used to loiter until late, order bossam, drink soju, and more often than not pass out drunk in the club room. We exchanged GPA points for good times. Looking back, I think we enjoyed college exactly the way we were supposed to. On sunny days we would drag out the blankets and pillows we slept under every other night, wash them in the club bathroom machine, and spread them over benches in the small field to dry.
Once midterms were somehow behind us, festival preparations began. We had two festivals a year, one each semester. If I remember correctly, the student council ran the spring festival and the club federation handled the autumn one. Spring was usually bigger and more fun. How you experienced the buildup depended entirely on what circle you belonged to. Student council members lived and breathed the festival pubs. Departmental budgets were always tight, so the festival pub had to turn a profit to support a year’s worth of events, and most years you were lucky just to break even. Council presidents spent their nights emptying glasses for visiting alumni until they were passed out, while vice presidents dealt with the aftermath. Freshmen in central clubs spent their days either staffing booths or rehearsing performances. The performance committee had it worst. The campus festival stage was second only to the regular concert season and invited direct comparison among the performance clubs, so practice became intense. Until you actually went on stage, you barely got to enjoy the festival at all, locked away in the club room drilling your set. Friends who belonged to neither clubs nor student government cared more about other schools’ festivals than our own, and for good reason. Our festival was not exactly famous for scale. Back then we lagged well behind many private universities. Corporate booths were common elsewhere; ours was almost entirely student-run. Guy friends often visited the Seoul Women’s University festival simply because it was nearby.
The festival pubs were set up across the main athletic field. These days, with turf laid down, I wonder where they put them, or whether they are even allowed at all anymore. I have heard that on-campus drinking tents were eventually banned. Back then, though, that enormous field was lined from end to end with departmental tents. Most felt similar, but the design department’s booths always drew special attention. One of them, where the staff wore cheongsam-style outfits, stayed crowded late into the night. When the main field overflowed, some pubs spilled over toward the carp pond. There was one especially large tent under a big tree behind Dasang Hall, and the atmosphere there was lovely. It felt a little like what I imagine the Japanese custom of drinking under cherry blossoms in spring must be.
The carp pond had changed as dramatically as anything else on campus. In 2006 it was basically a swamp. There were no wooden decks or benches as you see now, and when you got close, the smell made you cover your nose. People joked that if you fell in, you would catch every disease except HIV. At universities with scenic lakes, drunk students sometimes fall in. Our pond looked so vile that no one went near it. Yet after I returned from the army, it had turned into a date spot for campus couples. The murky water and stench were gone, and every now and then a little fountain show would start. Astonishing.