Wide

Look outside and you’ll see Korea.  Not to be confused with Seoul.  Not the zoo of sleek, modern office buildings.  Not the Armani, Prada, or Lexus retailers. 

But Korea.  Real Koreans doing real Korean things.  The street outside is narrow.  The buildings old.  Retired men ride bicycles.  Elderly women walk permanently hunched from years of planting, picking, and planting (again) in the rice fields that constitute the nearby countryside.

Across the street, past the bicycles mounted with baskets carrying stacks of cardboard, past the scores of motorbikes, past the Korean school children and shopkeepers, men and women sit in a cluttered restaurant advertising fresh octopus, squid, and all the rice you can eat.  They look hot.  Sweaty.  Some eat iced noodles to keep their bodies cool.  All use the typical stainless steel chopsticks, a matter of pride on the peninsula, as they require more finesse than those used by their neighbors across the sea, whether to the east or west.  This is Korea.  Yeongju to be exact.

But from where I’m sitting, it’s a different story.  On my side of the window, the line dividing the old and the new, the humid and the cool, the Asian stereotype and the artsy, vintage, espresso filled air of my favorite café, I hear bouncy jazz.  I envision a cozy club in lower Manhattan.  My foot is tapping, but it’s not from the iced Americano.

This is Café Wide, tucked away on a side street in my small Korean town.  Inside are shelves of 1960’s era electric fans, alarm clocks, and tea sets, reminiscent of June Cleaver’s make-believe kitchen.  Across the cafe is a display of vintage cameras.  Big.  Bulky.  Boxy.  An era of technology long gone.  To my right is a shiny pastel blue refrigerator, stolen from the year that Beatles made it big.  On the wall behind the espresso machine, painted in black and white, is Vultron.  One part artsy.  One part eclectic.  Throw in a little big city feel and cozy atmosphere, stir well, and you've got Cafe Wide.  My home away from home.