Noeun-Dong

Noeun-Dong

This little area has been our home for the past 7 months now. Noeun-dong (dong means area) is a suburb of Daejeon. It is quite a small area, the entire picture you can see is only about 4km^2. The populated area is about 1km^2. By counting the number of apartment complexes and number of apartments per building (100 complexes x 80 units per complex x 4 people per unit), and by asking people, I estimate there are between 25 and 35 thousand people living in this area. That makes it about 2 million times more densely populated than Nunavut. Or 20 times as dense as Saskatoon.

To make this work, obviously most of the people live in multi-story complexes. You can see lots of these in the north, center, and south west. They are usually at least 18 stories high, with four 'apartments' per floor. As I mentioned before, this area is also FULL of every type of business you can imagine. A lot of these businesses (especially on the side streets) have two - five floors of villas like ours above them. Like these:
Otherwise you get something like the buildings below, where you get a wide variety of businesses occupying the same building. The long white sign is our school. We are above a bakery, a donut shop, a pharmacy, a jewelry store, a oriental medicine clinic, and a bookstore. Above us is someone's villa (you can see little trees on top of the building). The greenish stuff in the top right of the picture is a driving range.



It is really set up so you don't need to leave the area at all. In fact, as I said before, we don't need to leave a 3 block radius from our house. The only thing we are lacking in Noeun-dong is a large department store/supermarket (which is about a 40 minute walk from our place).

To the west of us (the green) we have a nice 'mountain' where we go hiking often. Further west (about a 10 minute bus ride) is Gyereong-san National Park, the mountain where we enjoy hiking. There are also two parks you can see to the east that we go to quite a bit. Further east there are lots of farms and LOTS of greenhouses. All the buildings on the mid-right side are greenhouses, and they go on for quite a while.

Probably the nicest thing about the area is how safe it is. I'm sure you have already heard this but we are still amazed at how kids can walk around safe by themselves or with other kids all day and night. I feel a lot safer at night here than I did in Silverwood (but maybe that's just because I wasn't allowed out of Trotchie Court by myself until I was 10).

Every day is starting to feel like a huge step towards leaving... already missing this place as we say our goodbyes and the house gets emptier.