Repatriate Me!

I’ve been in Toronto just short of 3 months now and it’s time to post about the things I like about living here as compared to living in Korea – here’s the first 5.

1. supermarket selection
   I love going to the supermarket as I can buy anything I can imagine and it isn’t going to break the bank. The selection is staggering and is almost too much, but it’s really great to be able to buy avacodos that don’t cost $5 each if you can find them. While living in Seoul I never made a lasagna because I could never find all the ingredients I needed at the same time. Sure I could find all the ingredients but they were spread across 4 different supermarkets and 1-2 blackmarkets effectively making it impractical to actually cook.
2. grass
   Yes grass.
   
   
   My kids playing in a park 2 minute walk away.
   The kind you smoke is available if that’s your thing (I’ve already been offered some a few times) but it’s not my thing. More importantly is grass in parks and in general on the ground. In Seoul for the most part parks have grass but it’s all fenced off and is only available for looking at. when you visit the park you plant you mat/blanket on the dirt or cement and gaze longingly at the grass. There are a couple of exceptions (Seoul Forest being one of them) but for the most part one is not allowed to touch the grass. I’ve got a backyard! even if you have a yard in Korea it will be packed earth, if you’re lucky, or cement. Parks in Korea require you to drive to find them. I’ve got 3 parks within walking distance of where I live.
3. courtesy
   Yes common courtesy here is, well, common. People for the most part will say “excuse me” if they bump into, stand to one side when one gets into or out of an elevator or subway train. I’ve actually had to re-learn some of this behaviour including smiling and greeting strangers which feels so odd after living in Seoul for so long.
4. clean air
   I didn’t really notice how dirty the Seoul air is because in the 15 years I’d been there it had improved dramatically (blue sky days had at the time I left been close to 50% vs essentially non-existant in 1997)and I felt that it was close to how clean the air is in Canada. I was wrong. Living in Seoul we would clean our apartment floor every day, sometimes twice a day, but it would still be covered by a fine black dust that would inevitably stain ones feet/socks a dark gray. I also found it was necessary to clean my ears every second day with cotton swabs (q-tips). Here in Toronto (arguably Canada’s most “polluted” major city) I’ve not noticed any amount of dirt on the floors or my ears.
5. quiet
   It’s so quiet here. I live in Toronto itself (not downtown, but not North York, Scarborough or one of the burbs that make up the GTA). It’s so quiet here. I mean completely silent as in you can hear a pin drop. When living in Seoul the density of the urban landscape made it so that it was always noisy either through traffic, construction, neon buzzing or just plain people noise. The noise pollution is overwhelming. The thing is over time I stopped noticing it. I guess one can get used to anything. I thought my neighborhood in Seoul was quiet (and it was relatively speaking) but now that I’m living in Toronto I know what silence is. In the same way I feel that there is little to no light pollution. I Seoul I could get up in the middle of the night and walk around and see everything. Here in Toronto if I wake up I almost need a flash light to see the door out of the bedroom.

Bonus Driving

I’ve previously written about driving. here, here, here and here. All I can say is that driving in Toronto is fun and easy compared to driving in Seoul. When driving in Seoul I could not go 5 minutes with out dropping a number of f-bombs and other curses. I’ve been driving daily, and for the first month about 3-4 hours a day, since I arrived and have not dropped one f-bomb in that whole time. Last week I did mutter under my breath about one driver, but it was only something slightly dodgy – not running red lights which I saw happen at every single traffic light I was stopped at in Seoul. One thing to say is that highway drivers in Toronto are just as crazy as the highway drivers in Seoul – insanely speeding, weaving in and out of traffic and tailgating. it’s not quite as prevalent as in Korea, but it’s much higher than I remember from when lived in Winnipeg and Vancouver.

Sep 26, 2011 Comments(2) Tweet

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