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CNU Town Is Becoming a Space for Communication and Sharing Culture
By Kang Min-hee, Student Editor
Chonnam National University has almost 60 years of campus history and more than 17,000 students are coming and going around it. There are many buildings and spaces for shops and others on Yongbong Campus. CNU town was formerly regarded as a space for only consumption, but now a new culture, a communication and sharing culture has been building around the town. In those existing and new-born places, CNU students and local residents are making their own new and pleasant atmospheres. For example, Soft Straight Line, a live café around the Back Gate, supplies a stage for indie bands, and CD Art Hall, a theater near the CNU Intersection, holds a comedy show. In those places people regularly enjoy a variety of music and performances, and talk seriously to each other about diverse topics. Let’s visit some of the places for cultural sharing around CNU.
In front of the Main Gate, there is an old café called Daeraewon. It offers traditional tea and porridge. It has an old feel to it as it has not changed its interior, menu, or prices for a long time. The single change is the increasing number of notebooks which are filled with doodles. They have left their own traces and the traces are accumulated in the notes of café. Since 1991, there have been many notebooks for its customers who want to write or draw something. They wrote about their own lives and their individual worries in the dark and small café. There are some old prayers for lovers who had been tracked down for an account of Students Movement. It is a part of our university culture as a shared house of recollection for students. However, many old places have disappeared including Chungnyeon Geulbang which sold social studies and humanities books.
Instead of disappeared or old places, new spaces are born continuously. Grinbi is one of the new places for university students and also supplies some beverages and snacks but it is not the same as Daereawon. It sells glasses of coffee or juices but that is not its main business. They lend seminar rooms to their customers who want the space for group study or team projects, or even as a study room for watching movies without subtitles or practicing speaking in English and using as an internet café. The rooms are equipped with tables, beam projectors and microphone system for their customers’ activity.
All of the spaces differ greatly in terms of history, mood, and other things. Why do they have so many differences? The social circumstances around university students have changed. That makes many changes surrounding the university. Old spaces have disappeared and new spaces are born. It seems unconnected to our situations but it is very much related to our life cycles. The life cycles of many cafés, shops and restaurants around the university are dependent on you. What will you make out of it?
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