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www.groovekorea.com / July 2014 68 T he owner of the Korean restaurant on 62 Pärnu Street just turned 29 in March. Gyuho Lee is from Jeonju, North Joella Province, and before moving to Tallinn, Estonia, the farthest he had lived from his hometown was Seoul, where he went to university to study hotel management. So why a Kore- an restaurant, and in Estonia of all places? Estonia isn’t a household name in Korea. Tell people that it used to be a part of the USSR and you’ll get a few nods. Add that it’s right below Finland and people vaguely place the country somewhere up north in Europe. Finish with “The inventors of Skype are Estonian,” and most young people exclaim, “Really?” Korea isn’t exactly well known in Estonia either. Not many Estonians are familiar with kimchi, and most peo- ple gasp when they discover there are more than 50 million people in a country only twice the size of their own (Estonia has just 1.3 million). There are only 160 Koreans living in Estonia, and many of them are only temporary. So again, what’s Gyuho doing here? It was an accident. In 2009, he applied to study abroad in Latvia after traveling to Poland once, wanting to visit one of its bordering countries next. But some- one else got placed there and Gyuho got Estonia, where nobody had applied, so he spent a semester in Tallinn, later returning in 2010 after finishing the rest of his degree. “When I was in Jeonju, all I wanted was to go to Seoul,” he says. “But after coming back from Estonia, I couldn’t live in Seoul anymore.” He felt “dap- Reflections on a RestauRant a K o R e a n p o n d e R s h i s n a t i o n a l i d e n t i t y i n e s t o n i a Story by Haeryun Kang / Photos by Gyuho lee DESTINATIONS Edited by Shelley DeWees (shelley@groovekorea.com)