Photos Taken Around Daejeon

Exploring my City with A Camera!

Here we are behind the main road, in the small farmy place where I like to ride my bike at night.  (Or I did, before it got really cold.)

Small road bordering a field, and the houses behind it. It's odd, but I ride though this area and all of a sudden I could be in a very Asian looking Ghana. There are water tanks on top of the houses, and they are flat, with little railings around the roofs.

Its things like these gates and concrete blocks that make me think that. Plus this is a wonderful break from the monotonous city development, which really is all the same.

You can see those lovely apartment buildings waiting in the background--almost as stark as the mountains behind them. They have intreguing names, but the kids who live there only say which block they live in--I live in 900 or 1000. These things are built with great gusto, and the same apartment building style can go on for ten city blocks, changing only by the numbers listed on their windowless sides. When I first got here I thought I might be lucky enough to live in one. Yeah, definitely not. These are the ritzy ones.

And now, here were are in Kung-dong, the college neighborhood close to me. It serves Chungnam and Kaist, so there are a fair amount of international places here. On this particular Sunday, I had a rather terrible kimbab roll and a place where the staff was just so nice that I couldn't complain. But that tuna had definitely been sitting out for hours.

Another intriguing Korean thing is that guns are perfectly normal toys here. And they look like real guns. The more realistic it looks, the better it is, and these kinds bring this stuff to school. One child (who actually got kicked out of the hagwon) was firing his toy bb gun out of the window. My hagwon is on the 6th floor. But besides firing the gun out of the window, having it and playing with it whenever you want is totally acceptable. I saw one kid riding around with a toy AK strapped to his back, on his bike--he was four or five.

Anyway, those are some pictures from my Daejeon bike riding adventures. I'll leave you one more... a pic of my trusty dusty Korean bike!