Seoul's Secret Slum

In Korea, you can live in many types of homes. There's officetels, lavish skyscraper apartments, toilet houses, hanok villages, and, if your home was demolished in preparation for the 1988 Olympics, there's a slum. Every city has its rich and its poor, but it was really surprising to find out that such poverty was 15 minutes away from the heart of Seoul's Gangnam financial district. I'd never seen a slum before; here's what it was like:

Mel noticed the shacks on her bus ride home from work one day. The city has certainly hidden them from view behind this wall of cement and trees just off a busy highway a few blocks from Costco, but you can see a few of the huts from the road if you look carefully between the spaces in the trees. The bus stop is called Guryongmaeul. From this photo you'd never know about the living conditions of the people behind this wall.

The homes just seem to be made out of "found" materials like carpets, plastic and old signs. We wondered how the residents fared with the torrential rains we had experienced over the last 48 hours.

The homes are all really close together, connected by narrow, twisting walkways. There was one road on the west side of the slum which we followed up to get a view of the area. In the background of the photo you can see some skyscrapers including Seoul's tallest building, the Tower Palace.

We read that 1300 families live in this slum. Their addresses aren't recognized by the post office so they receive no mail, but they do have electricity which is put on one bill that the residents split. When we were walking around we noticed that lots of families have cable TV and satellites too, and there were phone booths for residents to use. The bathrooms are shared, though, and I can just imagine the condition. The area didn't really smell but there was trash everywhere and lots of flies.

Of course any area with 1300 residents has some amenities. One ajumma had a little restaurant set up in a modest shack, we saw a pizza guy making a delivery, and this sign points the way to 2 different badminton courts.

They have their own landfill too. I don't think the city takes care of these people very well so they have to handle things like trash themselves.


There was a little church set up in this shack, and we could hear people singing inside. For being a place with so many residents we hardly saw anybody out and about... the church was one of the few signs of life in this area.

On our way out we stopped into an ajumma's little convenience store to get a cola. Then we went to E-Mart to pick up a few things and headed back to our apartment, but what we saw this afternoon was interesting and we still talked about it with great interest. Who are these people that live there? Do they tell people where they live? Do they go to academy?

But when I opened the door to our apartment and saw the huge mess we'd made over the weekend, reality sunk in- we're messier than the slum. Time to go tidy up... have a good night, internet.