Beverly Hills of South Korea

We found the Beverly Hills of Changwon and it's about 10 minutes away on foot from our apartment. The houses were awesome and there were some very interesting designs. Most houses had solar panels on them and every inch of property was covered with what I call clutter. I don't think anyone in South Korea owns a lawn mower.

They have these signs posted everywhere and I thought it meant no private investigators but I was later informed that it meant neighbourhood watch in effect, "if you see any suspicious charactors please contact..." no one called to report me.

Angèle says: "I had the opportunity to go into one of these massive houses to attend my first official meeting of the International Housewives Club. In this club, a different woman hosts a meeting in their house every last Friday of the month. Everyone brings something to eat, and they share stories and chat over a potluck lunch.

The whole experience was a little surreal, as most of the women were much older and living in Korea because their husbands were Engineers working on huge bridge projects, or the construction of new ports in Busan. We were only English teachers, making a little money and living in tiny old apartments.

The inside of the house was quite nice, although I only saw the sunroom/livingroom, a second living room, the kitchen and a small bathroom. Security was tight considering the extremely low crime rate, to enter the yard, you have to ring and look into a camera, and then they buzz you in through the gate. The rooms are large and very bright. The floors were marble and heated. They had cathedral ceilings, very modern style furniture and the kitchen was enormous, especially by Korean standards. I can only imagine what the rest of the house looked like!"

To view larger images, just click on the pictures.

Moving in South Korea

We woke up this morning to some really loud noise and decided to find out what was playing the alarm clock today. We were shocked to see that someone was moving. It wasn't the fact that they were moving that shocked us but how they were doing it was completely out of the ordinary for us.

They have 2 trucks, 1 is to load their stuff in and the other truck clamps into the ground like backhoe doing some heavy lifting and raises a ramp to the required floor. A shelf moves up and down the ramp as required effectively bringing their things down from the 14th floor to the ground. I'm thinking they bring down the furniture through the elevator though as we saw a big pile of furniture near the security guards hut yesterday and people were tearing through the pile looking for gold, and that's were we found our new mirror.

Hike up the Mountain

On our first weekend in South Korea we decided to hike up the mountain that we can see from our apartment. As it turns out a lot of people hike up the mountain and there are several trails. The first thing we saw that we thought was quite interesting is that they have a Gym set up at the start of the trail and we saw a few people lifting weights before or after their hike. We aren't sure if it's free yet because we haven't tried but we saw a sign-in book and there is a guy watching the area so we think there is a fee or he just makes sure everyone signs in.

As we hike up the mountain we pass a lot of other hikers but the funniest thing we saw was forest advertisements. There are banners hanging in the trees as advertisements. They advertise everywhere around here. It's worse than Toronto with all the apartment flyers.

The mountain goes up pretty high. There isn't any snow on it however just a few cms below the dirt there are ice shards.

We hiked as far as we could and turned back. I think we made it almost halfway up the mountain. We plan on hiking this mountain weekly if not almost daily for exercise.

Apartment Buildings

Apartment buildings are way different than in Canada. There is only 1 row of units per floor and some buildings, like ours, are not closed in as you can see by the pictures. The first picture is of our lobby and the second is from the elevators leading to the "hallway" and you can see all the buildings around us. There are groups of buildings (6-8) that form small sub-divisions and ours is called "Green Vill".

This is a picture of the parking lot and you will see that people park wherever they can and I must say there are no parking restrictions like in Canada. I think the rule is you need to leave your parking break off and your car in neutral so people can move it to get out. I'm going to revisit apartments at a later date.