A Morning Walk Through My Neighbourhood

My neighbourhood of Busan sits at the edge of a mountain popular for hiking, and is a mix of old and new.  We live in the very first 'modern luxury' apartments built on this side of the city - in 1989 - and most of the rest of the neighbourhood either sprung up to service the apartments back then or predate them.  Many of the old, original houses still exist around here, but have been gutted and redone inside so that their interiors meet the much elevated standard of living that has come to be normal in the last 25 years.  These contain trendy cafes, expensive bakeries, and an assortment of restaurants both established and up-and-coming.  The houses that haven't been redone also have a variety of businesses inside - traditional Korean restaurants that have been serving the same food for generations, old-style drinking and singing rooms, hardware shops, massage parlors, seamstresses.  All of these survive or thrive thanks in part to the strong community support that makes this part of town feel like its own little village, and partly because of the large numbers of hiking fanatics who flock to the mountain trails daily.

 

A lot of the people who live near us are either old people who moved in when this was a booming part of town and never left, or very young families who can't yet afford to move into the many (many!) newer and more luxurious apartment complexes that have sprung up throughout the entire city and are considered more desirable than this one.  Compared to other more developed parts of the city there aren't many tall buildings around which leaves room for many tiny 'farms' (what might more accurately be called urban gardens in other parts of the world) sprinkled through everything else.  It's a place where you still see yards around a few homes, animals other than pampered pet dogs and stray cats, working trucks with everything from knife sharpeners to stationary stockists to furniture delivery, grandmothers squatting on street corners selling fresh vegetables from their farms alongside buckets of live eels (from where?).  It's home.

 

The pictures below don't really do justice to how interesting and diverse the neighbourhood is, but they're what caught my eye during my last stroll...