Friday, December 4, 2009

My Neighborhood

Before I left Korea, I took some photos of my neighborhood to make some blog posts after I left. First I'd like to show you around Sindang Station area, the station closest to my old home.

Here is my apartment entrance. It's supposed to be called Joongang Cityville. Unfortunately, that "CI" sound doesn't really exist in Korean and the closest is a "SHI" sound. Therefore, I lived in Joongang Shitty-ville for the past year and 4 months...

My FamilyMart... One building over... very fun to hang out there when the weather is nice...

A back alley near my house. My one adventure down there lead to me finding many strange oddities like pig's nose, hooves and maybe ears for sale. I never went down there after that... They don't get many forigners down there, you get some strange looks back there...

A new cell phone store. Three stores down from another cell phone store, and probably across the street from 3 others. But this one is particularly big and new and shiny.

The corner leading to my house. It's kind of cut off, but you can see on the first floor here there is a big fish place (the one that says 9900 won). On nice nights the sidewalk here will be full of tables where people eat thier 회 (hui- raw fish. Correct my spelling if necessary... ) and soju. I always ment to try it, but it never happened...

Here is one entrance to Sindang station. I was super lucky to live in such a good area. Sindang is on the green line, line 2, which makes a circle around the whole city, and it intersects with line 6, the brown line that goes to Itaewon. It's only 1 stop away from Dongdaemun stadium where 3 lines meet, and 2 stops away from Wangsimni, where another 3 lines meet (eventually will be 4 lines... someday).
The vegetable halmoni (grandmother). I only ever bought things here a few times in a year and a half, but I always felt like I should have bought from her more often.. poor old woman out in her vegetable shack no matter the weather. She seemed very sweet too...

The cool thing about my neighboorhood was that there were many shops that make those mother of pearl inlaid wood things that you can buy in Insadong. There are at least 7 or 8 shops that I've seen, and there could be more on some side streets that I never ventured down. I'll bet many of the things that you buy in Insadong are made right around here. I always wondered if it would be cheaper to buy them here, than in insadong, but they never really looked like stores, just the workshops. Maybe if you wanted something big and custom made you could come here.

Stay tuned, I'll have 2 more posts about my old neighborhood!

**Atention stalkers, I don't live here anymore, so don't try to find me here...

5 comments:

  1. Soju? Is that the high octane everclear-like alcohol?

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  2. It seems funny to me that people don't know what soju is... but if you're not in Korea... how would you? Soju is a liquor made from rice that's about 20% alcohol and tastes quite simmilar to vodka... and just as deadly, dispite the lower alcohol content...

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  3. is Soju made from rice???? I don't think so.
    Sake or Jeong-Jong(Korean sake) or Mak Gol Li, or Dong Dong Ju are made from rice. But soju is not.

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  4. Soju is not made from rice.

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  5. Sorry Sanghyun dear... soju is TRADITIONALLY made from rice, but today they often use other things to make it...

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