A long time ago, Sinpo Market and Chinatown felt really far apart. Chinatown back then wasn’t much to speak of, either. But going there recently, the two are practically joined together. Chinatown just keeps growing, it seems.

A place selling mooncakes and gonggalppang

Well.. it’s probably factory-made, but the truth is the lines at the famous places are just too long.. if you’re a tourist, casually grabbing something at a spot like this seems perfectly fine to me. Since I’d come all this way, though, I queued up..

Apartment towers here too

The area in front of Incheon Station still keeps a bit of its old atmosphere. But apartment towers have gone up here as well.

In front of Simnihyang

There really are a lot of people.

Yeongyeong Daebanjeom

I wonder whether a place that big ever fills up — but it must, or they wouldn’t have built it that big, right?

Sinseung Banjeom

The line is long here too — it seems to have gotten famous enough that branches are popping up all over.

The Korea Express warehouse

It looks like an old logistics warehouse that seems to have been turned into something like a park.

The park

Among the relics of Korea’s modernization era, there don’t seem to be many places left in this good a state. That’s probably why it’s so popular.

Incheon is a port town

Incheon does face the sea, but you only really get to see it if you climb up to Jayu Park or head out to Wolmido. And unless you work there, you never set foot in the port itself..

The Incheon Landing Operation Memorial Tower

Jayu Park also has the statue of General MacArthur — it is a historic spot.

Inside Simnihyang

They’re busy baking mandu in the oven.

Gonggalppang

It looked good, but I was planning to go to Sandong Mandu, so I skipped it.

The price list

They sell mala mandu too. But I went for the most famous one, the meat mandu.

Mooncakes

They sell them by type. If all you want is mooncakes, it seems you don’t have to queue at all. The line gets long because the oven-baked mandu take a while to come out.

Oven-baked mandu

It’s cheap, so I wasn’t expecting much, but it’s quite good.

The inside

The filling is your standard juicy mandu, and since mandu are at such a high level these days this is about par — but the real revelation was the wrapper. It’s thick yet chewy, and the flavor it picks up from the oven is almost the same as a Neapolitan wood-fired pizza. I couldn’t believe it — two completely different foods from two completely different countries, and the taste connects like this.

The nut mooncake

I’ve tried all kinds of fancy mooncakes, but most of them are dry and sweet, so they’ve never really been my thing.

The filling

But this shop’s mooncake has tart ingredients like cranberry and orange peel in it, so it isn’t dry at all — it felt like a modern dessert. This is the real mooncake place, it turns out. The price is reasonable too, so it would make a good gift to take home.

Maybe because Chinatown has such a long history, there’s still a lot I don’t know about it. It’s made me want to look into it more deeply.

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