It's Saturday night, two days until my first day with a new class, at a new school, teaching a new grade (five). After an exhaustive search, utilizing no less than 4 real estate agents and visiting some 16 apartments, I settled on one. It's beginning to feel like a home now, and because of all my exploring and apartment hunting, I have a good mental map of my new city already. My three week impression of Songdo thus far is that this is how every city ought to be designed. I've heard of Japan's sleek cities, but Songdo must not be far off. Ugly power lines are buried underground, sidewalks and streets are wide and the bike paths are plentiful (there's even a neat divider fence protecting you from car traffic). My apartment is surrounded by three separate and quite large parks, with meandering walk/bike paths, exercise stations and jungle gyms, hedges that form garden mazes, and ponds with fountains and the sound of frogs ribbiting. The amount of greenery is awesome.
Songdo saves space for all those parks and wide boulevards and sidewalks by building high. 50-story office and apartment buildings are the norm, saving precious ground space. And the buildings are a site to behold. Aside from being impressively large, some also curve and bend as they rise (strange to the eye!), others have gaping rectangular holes in them, and still others have zig-zagging strips of LED lights from bottom to top, shooting twilight blasts of light up the building's side.
And the city is clean as a whistle. The usual filthy trappings of city life are tough to find here. The city employs an army of cleaners, garbage sorters and workers tending to the many landscaping needs of the city. I've yet to see an ugly part of the city. Behold:
That bottom picture would be even more impressive were the buildings to the left completed and lit up.
Next up, my new place!
Songdo saves space for all those parks and wide boulevards and sidewalks by building high. 50-story office and apartment buildings are the norm, saving precious ground space. And the buildings are a site to behold. Aside from being impressively large, some also curve and bend as they rise (strange to the eye!), others have gaping rectangular holes in them, and still others have zig-zagging strips of LED lights from bottom to top, shooting twilight blasts of light up the building's side.
And the city is clean as a whistle. The usual filthy trappings of city life are tough to find here. The city employs an army of cleaners, garbage sorters and workers tending to the many landscaping needs of the city. I've yet to see an ugly part of the city. Behold:
Next up, my new place!
