A Day Trip To Incheon

My friend and I had decided to take a day trip to Incheon to visit Chinatown and the surrounding area.  I’ve always enjoyed visiting Chinatowns across the world to see how different they are from the one in my city.  Seeing as how Qingdao is located just across the Yellow Sea from Incheon, there was a great deal of migration between the residents of the two cities, and to this day, Incheon is home to the only official Chinatown within South Korea. 

Earlier in the year, the teachers at my school had taken me for some Chinese food and I learned that there are mainly 3 items associated with Koreanized Chinese food – black bean noodles, seafood noodles and sweet and sour pork.

These were said to have created by Chinese migrants in Incheon and is now widely known throughout Korea as “Chinese food”.  My co-workers were quite surprised to find that I had never had the Koreanized black bean noodles or seafood noodles before, when I told them that these weren’t Chinese foods I knew.

After a quick lunch of black bean noodles (which didn’t taste any different from the ones in Seoul or Paju), we began walking around the Chinatown area.  Similar to Chinatowns in Canada, there were a few shops that sold the typical Chinese souvenirs as well as tea shops, restaurants, and craft stores.

What was unique to Incheon’s Chinatown was that there were quite a few murals and even a large museum dedicated to Chinese-Korean relations.

The size of the Chinatown was quite large and we probably spent a good hour walking up and down the streets before heading out to Wolmi Island. 

Wolmi Island was full of people, even though it was quite a windy day.  The atmosphere was almost as if we were at a theme park.  Everyone was just sitting around the rocks, enjoying the scenery.

For more photos, please see my Photo Gallery of Incheon.