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- Jul 29, 2006
Originally Posted by yayer
ok **+% a skyline determining the best place to live
u guys are delusional about Seoul or just going by your friend's 6 month experience teaching english there
(who also has the wisdom of a 13year old)
This was taken from another forum..
Assessment of Seoul:
Cons:
- Architecture - absolutely awful, commercial and residential alike, for everyone from the top to the bottom of society. The basic principles of architecture are ignored - no quality, no commodity, no firmness, no delight
- Cost of living - real estate, food and drink, entertainment, personal effects, safety, etc - insanely high. Intrinsic or stated quality, toe to toe, more expensive than NYC, more expensive than Tokyo, more expensive than London.
- Food - 20 million people that know nothing about food, with a country that doesn't produce anything good domestically, and won't import anything due to xenophobia. Get used to weird substitutions on normal foods, get used to everything tasting awful, get used to insanely expensive meals. Expectations of hygiene and for things to be appetizing really need to be curbed, and replaced with very primal slop that is formulaic and represents cooking techniques made several hundred years ago, only due to the lack of refrigeration and limited resources in the 18th century.
- Drink - the local drug - anything imported is expensive and used as a status symbol, rather than for enjoyment
-Cleanliness - Seoul is filthy, smog is heavy and yellows the skies, trash litters the streets, people spit often, communicable diseases are easily transmitted, many areas smell like open sewers and rancid urine
- Culture - awful. Nobody has any inkling about the currency of 'cool' and nobody really knows anything about anything. The internet has helped alot, but there's still so far to go. Most popular culture is cringeworthy and embarassing if you figure out what is going on. On the other side of things, what it means to be Korean, to live in Seoul, to be a Seoulite - that is all losing a lot of the meaning it ever had.
- Local politics - awful
- People are impolite, and you see people fighting in the streets very often.
- Traffic is terrible, drivers are terrible and unsafe, gridlock and accidents all the time
- etc, etc, etc,
Pros:
-a lot of good looking girls lately (but a shocking number of women involved in prostitution, as well)
-it's pretty easy to impress people here, a lot of people fake it and make it to the top, with things like blogs, being white, etc.
- 24 hr convenience and freedom in some aspects