Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bbud656]

Looking at a job. About 600,000 people. 3 hours from Busan and Seoul about. How bored am I going to be living here?

[giantyogurt]

Very bored, unless you're a history buff and into old houses.

I was there to spend a night with a buddy of mine and we ended up spending the night talking to ourselves eating icecream on the street.
I would not live there.
Just my thought.

[kjane]

i'll be starting there the end of august...let's meet on the street for some ice cream....ha.

[kjane]

http://www.thejeonjuhub.com/

this website can give you an idea of whats around...

[sallymonster]

You can eat a lot of bibimbap! Jeonju is famous for the stuff.

[air76]

[Sector7G]

Jeonju is not bad at all. I live about 30 minutes away in Iksan, a town half the size of Jeonju. Westerners who live in Iksan(which is not bad either) go to Jeonju often for a change of pace-more bars and more westerners.

The one down side to it- Jeonju is not on the KTX line while Iksan is.

[air76]

This has been hashed and re-hashed and hashed all over again....there are those who will only be happy in Seoul and those that much prefer smaller town Korean life (small town life is often a proper city, but Seoulites will call it small town life)....it is also SO different now here than it was just 5 years ago. Even 5 years ago a town of 250,000 people wouldn't have a decent coffee shop or a western fast food chain....now every town of this size with have 5+ coffee shops, 3 Dunkin Donuts, VIPS, Outback, 2 Baskin Robbins, HomePlus and an EMart, each store having a western fast food chain...and pretty much any town of this size or larger will have at least 1, if not 2 foreigner bars.....somewhere the size of Jeonju will have 90% of what's available in Seoul apart from proper western style pubs and night clubs....but there will still be plenty of foreigner bars to go out and have a great time in.

I think that Seoul is OK for the occasional weekend, but hardly the best place to live in Korea. I think that a city of 250,000-600,000 would be perfect.

It all depends on your likes/dislikes. This is something only you know about yourself and people's opinions, such as mine are pretty worthless compared to what you know about yourself.

Everyone I know who lives in Seoul does the EXACT same thing with 95% of their time, the only difference being that the places they go to tend to be more western....they eat more western food, drink more western beer, and so on....they also spend a lot more money.

Most of the things available in Seoul are also available online....you can order books, video games, etc. even if you live in a smaller town...or just head into Seoul for shopping sprees once every 2 months.

I also forgot to mention that the size of the foreigner community everywhere in Korea has probably doubled in the past 5 years....so even in a town of 50,000 you could have 20-30 foreigners teaching there. There are still folk stuck in tiny towns with 2-3 foreigners, but these are truly rural jobs. Anywhere with more than a couple hundred thousand people will have more than enough foreigners that you can pick and choose who you want to be friends with, and somewhere like Jeonju would have a pretty sizable foreign community.

[DavidVance]

Plenty of things:
Buy an MTB and explore the hills and mountains in, next to and near Jeonju;
Buy a pair of running shoes and explore the hills and mountains in, next to and near Jeonju;
Buy both running shoes and an MTB and use them together;
And go to other national and Provincial parks by bus, putting the MTB in the luggage bay (yourself, with the front wheel off, without asking anyone else about it who might think you are asking if they will do it and then give you a negative reply...)
Learn a martial art;
Learn some Korean language;
Read some Korean history;
Shop for great fruit at the roadside markets;
Get books sent to you from Amazon;
Go to the used bookstore area near HongJi new bookshop in the city center;
Play a musical instrument;
Sketch, paint, sculpt or photograph;
Visit the traditional village area;
or,
Sit in a bar or a MacDonalds somewhere like a mentally defective teenager whinging about how bored you are while you remove even more of the neurons you can scarce afford to lose or proceed with laying down fatty streaks in your arteries and help the most idiotic elements of western culture be spread like pox....
Cheers,
dv.

[chellovek]

[Weigookin74]

I been to Jeonju. I was impressed by what they had for a mid sized city. I think I read it is just under 700,000 but it seemed to have things comparable to a metropolitan city. (Not Seoul or Busan of course.) But it was ok. It has more than my mid sized city and certaintly more than my country town the first year. I wouldn't mind living in Jeonju. Seems comparible to Gwangju or Daejeon, except a little smaller.

[jeefunk22]

I don't know why you would be bored. Jeonju is not a town, as some people suggested -- it's a city.
Most importantly, Jeonju has a great foreigner community. There are tons of Westerners there nowadays, and all kinds of clubs, groups, events, live concerts, sports, etc. Super easy to meet people, and they are usually really friendly and welcoming.
It depends on what you want. It's pretty easy to travel all around the country from Jeonju, things are much cheaper than Seoul, and you get a pretty good percentage of non-Korean things you would like. You're still living in a Korean setting in Jeonju, though, whereas in Seoul it's much more Westernized and jampacked with foreigners and foreign things. Some people want that... so it all depends on you!

[verloc]

I've visited Jeonju a couple of times (both times for the excellent Jeonju Film Festival) and had a fine time. The food's wonderful, there's some good drinking to be had (nice makoli joints), the people are quirky and friendly, and the whole city has a very creative, laid back vibe to it. It's also one of the few nice looking, less highrise dominated Korean cities.

If I could get the right the right job, I'd move there.

[gartonator]

I've done Jeonju a couple times in 2006/2007. Once with a party of Koreans, once with my visiting family from the USA. It's a nice place from what I could tell, felt like a big enough city to have fun - makali is a fun, drunken night. Also seemed to have a functional 'old city' that made you feel like you'd stepped back in time, lots of fun things to eat and sit for a bowl of soup, etc. Heard the mountains/temples in the area are something special (from koreans) although I never made it there.

You could definitely do worse, but I'm thinking Busan this time around.

[waynehead]

I visited for a few days during the film festival a few years back. It was nice enough. You could do a lot worse than Jeonju, from what I could tell.