Gongsa

There's always something interesting going on in my neighborhood.

The other day I found one block of my little street closed off by fire engines. Some kind of complicated construction work was going on.


Although cars weren't allowed, there was no attempt to prevent pedestrians from walking through what looked like a potentially dangerous area. I walked to the other end of the block, turned around, and took this picture:


That shiny S-shaped pole looked so odd, it took my a while to realize that it was a new utility pole being installed. I don't know why it has a curved shape. They were a surprisingly large number of workers involved, dealing with a huge, complex tangle of thick electrical cables from four separate cranes.

This close-up shows three workers coming at the cables from three different directions.


A few days after I saw the construction, I went for a walk to explore a bit. I hadn't realized it, but just a block in from my dormitory building, the neighborhood climbs steeply up a hill. Looking down from the near the top, I discovered that the main road actually runs along the bottom of a narrow valley, and I could see across to the hills rising on the other side of it.


One thing that continues to astonish me about my neighborhood is the density of convenience stores, fruit and vegetable stands, and other little markets. Around my dorm, there's at least one every block -- and the blocks are not very big. The fact that so many markets can be sustained must reflect a very high density of residents. Even up here, near the top of the hill where it's almost entirely residential, there are markets tucked away here and there. In fact, there is one in the picture above. Can you spot it?

Well, it's hard to see. Here's a close-up:

Yep, that's it, the little blue sign with white lettering reading shyupeo 슈퍼. (That's borrowed from English 'supermarket', but in Korean it usually refers to a little grocery store.)

Two big banners were put up on my block.

They're both ads. The one on the bottom is, I think, for a children's daycare center. (Can someone tell me if that's right?) The one on top says, I think, something like "Now recruiting students for 2008 self-government program classes ", but I don't really understand what that's about either.