My Korean City: Yangpyeong!

Hello Badger in Korea readers! Thanks for continuing to stop by and catch up with me. I really appreciate all the comments and well wishes from everyone... you make it hard to be away!

Well, today I wanted to give everyone a bit of an idea of the city that I'm living in here in South Korea.

The name of the city is Yangpyeong. It's a decent sized city about half an hour directly East of Downtown Seoul. It's one of the last stops on the East Seoul Metro line and has a population of about 100,000. The city is famous for it's scenic placement right on a major river way and is nestled in between tree covered mountains. It's also famous for it's organic farming and gardening and you see them sprinkled throughout the city blocks and of course out into the countryside.

The downtown itself is a mixture of open-air markets, streets lined with traditional Korean shops and bigger streets with high-end western-catered businesses. There are poor shanties and food stands and there are high rise luxury apartments and office buildings. Yangpyeong, like most of Korea is UBERconnected with internet and cell phone stores occupying about every 4th or 5th store front. It's a very mixed vibe. To be honest I haven't quite figured out what to think about it yet. One minute you'll be taken back the simplicity of a poor store front with an old women selling roosters, crabs and hot chili peppers and the next minute you'll find yourself standing outside an ultra-modern, ultra-hip I-Phone store with an all white interior and loud Korean Pop Music (K-Pop) playing from it. I'm finding it a bit challenging to understand how everything works and what the routine is here because of the intense mixture of things. It's really quite different. But I suppose that comes with living in a different country, right?

Alright here's a short clip I put together showing you some of the landscape around Yangpyeong:

Here are some pictures and another video I took from around town:





Here's my apartment building. I think it's called "V2". The door is on the right corner and I climb up that glass stair case to the 4th floor every day!

         


  Here's the subway station that is  a  block away from my apartment.                                                                                                                                   

   A market on the side of a street. (Lots of these)




        
  






 One of the shop-lined pedestrian streets.
Lots of western shops on this street.

                                           Video of downtown Yangpyeong

                                                                           

 So you can see it's this very unique combination of Korean shops of every different kind. Pet shops, food stands, barbers and everything in between. Then... there are these random western implants that stick out like a sore thumb!

The strangest part for me is that they are the most random American stores that I would never guess. What would you guess would maybe pop up in smaller town in Korea? I would say maybe a Subway? Maybe a McDonald's? No... the first stores I see are an Adidas, a Dunkin' Donuts and a Baskin Robins. I don't think I've even seen any of those in the U.S. let alone seeing them in my town over here. It's a bit strange!






OK everyone! Thanks again for stopping by. Leave your comments, questions and requests on here or on Facebook and I'll get to them as soon as I can! Peace!

Mike