Korean Job Discussion Forums

[MarketFresh]

hi, wondering what number makes a town rural....

i'm assuming a 'town' of 60 000 wouldn't be considered rural?

i'm wondering whether going rural would be for me...i'm from a big city and wouldn't mind relocating to a smaller town...i know for epik you get an extra allowance for going rural but what exactly is rural...epik does not answer questions...

[tall_dave]

[lifeinkorea]

It's useful to have labels, and urban or rural seem to be concise and good enough. You could call things in terms of suburb, outskirts, newly developed cities, but at first crack, it's either urban or rural.

[tall_dave]

[jvalmer]

Once you leave Seoul, Gyeonggi and the major metropolitan cities, you'll have cities and counties ranging in population from 20,000 to 700,000.

Most places will be either called a city (shi) or county (gun). These areas usually range from 50 sq/miles - 500 sq/miles.

For most areas, if it has under 100,000 people it's considered rural and called a gun (county). These counties will have usually have 1, or 2, large towns (usually centrally located) with populations from 20,000 to 100,000+, which will still be considered rural even though they are pretty urban in character. And there will be a lot of smaller villages and smaller towns in the rest of the county with really small populations, which would be very very very rural and would be hard to see a westerner living in these places.

Some cities may have under 100,000, but that's because they lost population after being designated a city.

Hope this helps clearing up your understanding of how they organize things here.

[lifeinkorea]

[SanchoPanza]

[lifeinkorea]

What a splitting hair debate. I don't think you will find one answer to this if you are wondering where the line in the sand is drawn between rural and urban. It doesn't matter because Korea is so small anyway. It has more of a "country" (farm) feel, but it functions more like a unified city.

[MarketFresh]

rural means outside of the city? well then isn't that most of korea except seoul...lol

just wondering if anyone here is actually working in a rural area and gets their extra allowance for working there...

got a few offers in places like uljin which seems rural to me but it still ain't classified as rural...so just wondering what the hell is rural and what's there aside from rice fields

[crisdean]

My First year I got rural pay working in Gimpo (Masong-ni). They call Gimpo a city, but it's more like a county of several towns and villages. Some clusters were considered urban (i.e. no rural pay) and the rest was rural. I imagine several of the "cities" in Gyeonggi are similar.

The rural distinction seems quite arbitrary in Korea, when I was in Gimpo I had a pair of friends who worked just down the street from one another and one got rural pay and the other didn't, because that was where the line was drawn by the office of education. So potentially you could get a rural allowence in an area that isn't really rural, or vice-versa.

As for whether or not working in a rural area is a good idea, that's hard to answer, I liked certain aspects of it, disliked others. And I had the benefit of not actually living in the area I was working, I lived in one of the more urban areas of Gimpo, though that meant I had a 40 minute commute to work everyday, it was better for grocery shopping and meeting people.

[MarketFresh]

thanks man...damn, i would of never thought of gimpo as rural...but i guess it's up to the office of education.

what was the foreign community like there?