Cheongnyangni

Cheongnyangni is one of the most underrated mid-stay neighborhoods in Seoul, and it's underrated because foreigners almost never look here. Four subway lines converge at Cheongnyangni Station, including the Gyeongchun Line — the train that goes directly to Chuncheon and the lake region. Three major universities are within a fifteen-minute walk: Korea University (one of Korea's top three), Kyung Hee University, and KAIST's Seoul campus. The Hankuk University of Foreign Studies is a few stops east. This combination of transit access and university density means Cheongnyangni has a real student-and-young-faculty population — but without the scene-bar density of Hongdae or the price tag of Sinchon. What you get living here for a month or three: a real Seoul neighborhood that hasn't been retouched for tourism. The traditional market (Cheongnyangni Market) is still operational, with everything from medicinal herbs to cheap fruit. There's a Lotte Department Store, a cinema, big chain bookstores, hospitals, the kind of unglamorous infrastructure that makes a daily-life neighborhood actually work. Cafés have multiplied in the last few years on the side streets toward Korea University. The trade-off is distance to the rest of Seoul's nightlife — Hongdae is forty minutes, Itaewon is thirty, Gangnam is forty-five. If you came to Seoul for clubs and cocktail bars, this isn't where you should sleep. But for a foreign exchange student at Korea University or Kyung Hee, for a visiting researcher, for someone here on a fellowship, or for a remote worker who wants to be inside Seoul without paying central-Seoul prices — Cheongnyangni quietly delivers more value than almost any other neighborhood in this guide.