#2. Bundang
For the past 19 months I have been living south of Seoul in a district called Bundang, which is in
a town called Seongnam in Gyeonggi province. Bundang was a planned suburb, built for all the company men working in the southern part of the capital who wanted a nice place outside the
city to live and raise their kids. Now I have been to all parts of Seoul, Daegu, and Busan, but I have come to the conclusion that there really is no nicer place to live in Korea.
First of all, Bundang is just plain pretty. Some people might not like that all the streets were laid
out on a grid, or that nothing here has developed naturally in a hodgepodge of streets and hills like in the districts of Seoul. Speaking as someone who lived for three years in the District of Columbia, I can say that the straight lines don't bother me so much, and moreover, that the Koreans did a fine job of incorporating natural beauty into the things they built here. Bundang is still surrounded by mountains on one side, giving residents easy access to hiking trails and some peace and quiet from all the cars and buses. There is a park built around the Tancheon River, which runs through Bundang, and gives locals a nice place to have a picnic, or in my case a good place for a morning run. The sidewalks are lined with marble curbs, and in some places the sidewalks themselves have been covered with that stuff they put on top of running tracks to ease the pains of the poor halmoni's knees as she hobbles to the bus stop.
Second, Bundang is full of things to do and places to see. We have five theaters and a beautiful
arts center that shows Korean version of off-Broadway plays. There are plenty of great restaurants to try and plenty of foreigner friendly bars that make for a good night out. It's pret
ty easy to get to a nice coffee shop or bookstore from anywhere you happen to be in the district, and there's even an artist's street selling the product of the local art college. Most weekends, I don't even bother going to Seoul unless its to meet up with a friend, and sometimes its just as easy for said friends to come down to Bundang and take in some of the fun here.
Third, Bundang is just the right combination of foreigner and Korean. Some places in Korea--most notably a place called Itaewon right outside the Yongsan Army Base--are so packed full of foreigners that sometimes you really feel like you've been transported back to America. Others--the places that are too far outside the city or many cities in the south of the country--have so few foreigners that you get stared at no matter what you're doing and you feel almost like you've forgotten to put on pants before leaving the house. I work at an academy with 7 other foreign teachers, and we work next to a building with another academy that has 6 more foreign employees. We're easy to spot on the street, to say the least, and over half of us live up the hill from the street our academy is on. That's enough foreigners per capital that we see each other on the streets, we can wave and give a friendly hello, and then we can be on our way without having to deal with the awkward foreigner song and dance. I have nothing against the other foreigners in Korea, but I like that I don't feel obligated to hang out with every one that I see because I don't have a lot of options in choosing my friends. However, there is also enough of us that the locals have gotten used to seeing us everywhere; they greet us when we come into their businesses and can offer some (although mostly limited) assistance in English if we get confused or stuck. I think that mix can be hard to come by--most teachers I know are either surrounded by other foreigners and have little if any contact with the Korean culture or are so isolated from native English speakers that they're miserable.
Bundang is one of the wealthiest areas in the country, while is nice if you want to find some good wine or are craving some kind of foreign food from the supermarket. It can be a little tough on the wallet, but since teachers don't have to pay for their own apartments, most of this cost is absorbed by the school that hires us. I could really go on and on about how wonderful I think it is here and how much I'm going to miss it, but I think that the only way I can really get anyone to understand how I feel is to have them come spend some time here themselves.
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