Korea is a land of mountains, but compared with the famous peaks in other parts of the world, Korean mountains are really just "hills". Nearly every one is climbable in a day; there are very few multi-day mountain hikes available. But that isn't to say the views aren't fantastic from any of them.
The best thing is that it doesn't even take a mountain to get a fantastic view. Just 8 1/2 minutes is all that's needed to climb Nojeok Hill and see the entire Ansan area.
So, for the record, here's the climb from bottom to top... (BTW, sorry for the shaky camera... and the smoggy view at the top... Other photos on this weblog were taken on clearer days.)
Myunghee and I arrived at Nojeok Hill around 6am this morning and started our walk along the perimeter trail in the dark. About a hundred yards down, we came across Candidate #7, Kim Seok-Gyoon, handing out campaign cards under a park lamp. As luck would have it, I had brought my camera and asked Candidate Kim's assistant to snap the memory.
Tomorrow is special-election day in our district, Sangrok-Gu, to fill the position held by someone else until he was impeached for corruption. Every candidate gets a number, with the lowest numbers going to candidates from the largest parties. So that means my pal, Candidate #7, is hardly the leading contender for the position.
Sure enough, his campaign card shows him as "unaffiliated", though it is clear he is aligned with a dissenting faction of the Grand National Party (GNP), which is the party of President Lee Myung-bak and which currently holds power in the Korean National Assembly. Candidate #7's faction is that of Park Geun-Hee, who is the daughter of former President Park Jung-Hee (see yesterday's post) and who was beaten by President Lee to lead the GNP in the presidential primaries a couple years ago. The bad feelings from that political battle still dog the government party.
From the back of the card, we can see the issues that are important in our area. First of course, is the question of who will best protect the disadvantaged in the current economic recession. But second is the decision of where the new Ansan subway line will be built. Candidate Kim assures us that as assemblyman, he will make sure the new line goes through our neighborhood and not the area a few miles to the west. The final decision is set for December, so there's a lot of lobbying going on. The residents of whichever neighborhood the subway line goes through can look forward to a big property value boost.
Korean elections in the city are notable by how easy it is to meet and greet the candidates. Because of the close proximity within which everyone lives, just a casual stroll through the neighborhood can generally produce a candidate's campaign truck roaming around with speakers blaring (see video below) or an actual candidate (as evidenced by our meeting in the dark this morning). And when campaign workers line up on street corners and bow to the passing cars, they make no distinction between voting Korean and non-voting foreigner. I always get a kick out of being bowed to as I drive around during election season.
Finally, just as I was finishing up this post, I received the following text message on my phone. It says: "October 28 (Wednesday) is election day for the national assembly member representing Sangrok-Gu. Voting is your right. Sangrok-Gu Election Committee". I would have expected it to also mention something about not accepting money from politicians in exchange for a vote but perhaps the days of that kind of blatant corruption have passed.
National election day in Korea is always a public holiday; unfortunately, because these special elections are being held in just certain areas, we don't get that benefit tomorrow. If we did, I could miss my Strategic Economics class at university...
This is Hasan, a friend of ours from Bangladesh who is living in Korea. We took this photo in our neighborhood near the foot of Nojeok Hill. Myunghee met his sister in Texas while studying English together several years ago but the sister's US visa ran out and she returned to her home country in 1995. In 1996, Myunghee visited the family in Bangladesh for almost a week. While she was there, Hassan was her "tour guide", showing her around the area where they live, but communication was difficult because his English-ability is limited.
Unbeknown to us, shortly after Myunghee's trip, Hasan applied to work in Korea as a foreign laborer. It involved a bribe to a Korean bureaucrat or official fee (we're not sure which) in the amount of about $5,000 (a huge amount of money there) to earn the privilege of coming to Korea to work. He also studied Korean for a year in order to increase his chances of being selected for the Korean work visa. It seems that there are far more applicants for these work positions than there are positions.
He called one day about a year ago to notify us he had arrived; we'd heard through his sister that he might be coming, but we didn't know when he was going to show up. His year of Korean study had paid off as communications with him are much easier now that we can all speak Korean together.
There are tens of thousands of foreign workers in Korea from various countries. And it turns out that Ansan is the city in Korea with the highest number. According to an article in the Jungang Ilbo last week, approximately 35,000 foreigners are living legally in Ansan and another 35,000 or so illegally. Of these, by far the most are Chinese, followed by Indonesians and Vietnamese. Most come to live in the area around Ansan Station, which is far from our neighborhood. And most of these foreign residents are providing labor for the factories that sprawl through the the Banweol and Shihwa Industrial Areas, south-west of Ansan and south of Shihwa City.
Photo taken from Nojeok Hill
At current exchange rates, foreign workers coming to Korea can expect to earn the equivalent of about $800-$1,400/month for 40-60 hours/week of work, as well as living accomodations, which are often very basic. And most foreign workers send between 60-80% of their earnings back to their home country.
It was only 20-30 years or so ago that Koreans were going overseas (mostly to the Middle East) to labor on construction projects. The fact that Korea is now hosting hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill the need for unskilled labor, even during the current economic difficulties, is testimony to the prosperity that Korea enjoys today.
See the map below for orientation to the Ansan area:
The Korean Chuseok holiday took place this weekend to celebrate the harvest full moon. It is one of the two major Korean holidays of the year (the other being the Lunar New Year).
I took this photo of the full moon early in the morning today from Nojeok Hill facing west. In the distance on the right, you can faintly see the new skyscrapers of Songdo IBD (click the photo for a bigger view), the latest Korean new city, which is being built on reclaimed land off Incheon (and very close to the place of MacArthur's famous Incheon Landing on September 15, 1950).
My Korean hometown started life as one of the first "new cities" in Korea, master-planned by the government and built to alleviate congestion in the Seoul area caused by millions of people moving from the countryside into the capital region during the course of Korea's rapid modern development.
Construction on Ansan began in the early 1980s in this area which previously existed as little more than a small fishing village called Banweol. When I arrived in late 1993, the city was about half-finished. The area north of the metro line was mostly complete and the area south of it still mainly undeveloped.
Today, Ansan is a city of a million residents adjacent to the giant Banweol Industrial Complex, an area of factories producing all manner of goods for the Korean industrial economy.
The following photos which I've taken from the top of Nojeok Hill show the dramatic changes in a large swath of the city that I've personally witnessed during my time here.
1995
2002
2009
It is these beautiful views of the city, for which a 360-degree panorama is available from the top, that make Nojeok Hill such a nice place to get away for a hike several times a week.
Today, there are many other new cities, mostly but not all, in the Seoul area. Other early new cities where construction began in the early 1990s include Shihwa, which is adjacent to Ansan; Ilsan, north of the Han River to the west of Seoul; and Bundang, south of Seoul. Another more recent new city under construction and of particular interest to me is Songdo, which can be seen in the distance from the top of Nojeok Hill.
Even today, as Korea moves from "emerging market" to "advanced country", similar construction is still underway in countless places, most a bit further from Seoul thanks to faster transportation links, and all still being referred to as "new cities".
But no matter how gleaming the new apartments are everywhere else and how much they resemble my neighborhood, I always remember that this "new city" wave of the future in Korea started, in large part, here in Ansan some thirty years ago.
Several times a week, I climb Nojeok Hill near our apartment here in Ansan. It's just a 10-12 minute climb but I get pretty winded on the way up. By the time I've gone to the top and down twice, and gotten back home, the round trip takes a little over an hour.
I've been climbing this hill since I first arrived in Korea over 15 years ago. A lot has changed for me in that time... and for my town of Ansan. Indeed, this hill has seen a lot of Korean history, and in the last 25 years, it has been at the center of incredible economic development.
Today I start a series entitled, "Nojeok Hill, My View from the Top". The first few posts won't have much to say about business, as the Korean economic miracle only started less than 50 years ago. But from this vantage point, we'll get some remarkable glimpses of how Korea became the economic player it is today, as well as some insights into where the country is headed.
