Tongin Traditional Market

This guide to Tongin Traditional Market in Seoul opens with an unexpected visitor: a U.S. Secretary of State handed rice cakes by a stallkeeper known as Grandmother Jung. It traces the alley back to 1941, when Japan's colonial government built it for Japanese officials, and follows how Korean vendors kept it trading through war and the decades after. You'll meet a former college professor who traded his classroom for a charcoal grill in the same passage. Follow the smell of grilling rice cakes down the alley to find him.