Because she asked.

Gwen had recently read a book that involved some fictional locale here in South Korea. She wanted to know what a typical Korean neighborhood looks like. Far easier said than done, said I. For several reasons. I’ll enumerate them.

When Korea was liberated from Japan at the end of WWII in 1945, it was an agrarian country and one of the poorest in the world. Subsequently split in half by FDR and Stalin at the Yalta conference into North and South Korea. Within just five years, North Korea decided to invade the South in an attempt to reunify the two nations. That war did a good job of destroying what the Japanese had during their occupation the previous half of the century. Few places existed that had any serious history.

After the Korean war, an influx of foreign aid helped South Korea grow from a 3rd world backwater farming country to what is now the 10th largest economy in the world. Beginning with light industry and consumer products, and then shifting to heavy industry, Korea has gone through unbelievable growth. All of that has occurred just since  1953 when the war ended. That much growth doesn’t come without a price.  Tremendous numbers of apartment complexes, factories and shops were built, thus causing the wholesale removal of older, traditional housing.

The old style still exists, but they are off the beaten path and, well, old. As cheap as it seems to build here, tearing down and starting over seems more prudent for many.

The neighborhood pictured below is near Ulsan. All of the homes have external walls with a courtyard of sorts. None have grass. What land there is is put to use growing foodstuffs, like the rice paddy in front.

Many of the external walls surrounding the homes are more function than form. They’ll use whatever material is available, be it stones from the ground or cinderblocks.  The house roof is typically clay tile, although may be steel. The yellow/blue roof beyond the trees is an older home with its blue steel roof corroded and peeling.

This is a small road that runs up through the neighborhood. What roads exist in these older places generally are wherever the homes aren’t, twisting and turning in labyrinths around the irregular shaped plots. Buildings codes and zoning laws are non-existent, even in the city. It not uncommon to see fairly old and rundown structures like the one on the left adjacent to a newer structure like the brick building further up. The stone wall building on the right serves as a barn and houses half a dozen cows.

Some of the homes are fairly nice. The two below  appear to be relatively new. Number 11 uses stones to hold down the shed roof.

While we might places pictures of our family and ancestors above the fireplace mantle, these Koreans place theirs above the front entrance.

  Although the buildings are larger and evidently newer, even Seoul retains its flavor of roads built around homes rather than the opposite, as westerners do. This picture was taken from Seoul tower looking down onto one of the older parts of town. It clearly shows the haphazard placement of thoroughfares around structures. Most of these are “villas”, consisting of three or four stories. Many of the walls surrounding walls won’t be there, but it will have the look and feel of a maze.

How’s that, Gwen? Does it give you a feel for what Korea is like?