Where we live

OOOOhh the greenness of it!

One can see emdless numbers of photos and still not quite picture or understand the atmosphere and feel of a place if one has never been there. Despite this, I'm going to post some more photos of our little city Sangju, so your picture can hopefuly come a bit closer to the real thing.

As Jules has written somewhere, it has grown on us. In my mind it has moved from being ugly and grey-brown with higgledy-piggeldy, ugly architecture, fields and huge apartment blocks adjacent to one another, garbage and other discarded items at every turn, an almost constant smell of sewerage...to a place I could almost call a 3rd home Now when I picture Sangju, I see it surrounded and interspersed with bright green rice fields, onion fields, cabbage fields; Ajummas and Ajoshis (the male form of the Ajumma) everywhere; a lovely tree-lined path along the river (which looks so much healthier now that the first spring rains flushed out the junk and filled it up a bit!); friendly if curious and rather insensitive people, an easy lifestyle, a place one can happily and safely walk everywhere, a place where one has a few similar-minded foreign friends, some less similar-minded but still genuine Korean friends, and a place which is starting to feel familiar!

A place where within 5 minutes on a bike/scooter one can get away from teh bustle and be in the forest, halfway up a mountain or simply amongst fields of green. A place which when one gets off the bus after a long weekend bussing around as a tourist, feels sweet to come home to! So here are some pictures to show you our sweet Sangju. Still quite ugly and with higgeldy-piggeldy architecture but now tempered by a constant green-ness and a nearness ot nature - albeit farmed nature - which I had missed, and I feel I have re-discovered!

Sangju from halfway up one of those small mountains

Our apartment is somewhere near the blue arrow. In amongst all the love motels! :)

The building with the big blue roof is the auditorium at my school.
To the right of it are the main buildings of my schools - I am quite lucky to have both my schools on the same property, very convenient. The balloon was in honour of Buddhas Birthday on May 2.

The next few pics are of the fields I walk past on my way to school in the morning. Life's sweet isn't it? I really enjoy this 'agricultural' vibe in Sangju!

And then there are the lovely green broad-leaved forests just a few minutes outside town - literally all around us.
Birds cheeping and insects buzzing around. Being out in the forests makes me want to start an insect collection all over again! I have ordered a bird book online and am eagerly awaiting its arrival so I can at least get the bird-watching going!

And in these forests are cute little purple irises...



and REAL wild violets...



And bumblebees doing their thing!



Life is indeed schweeet!