Roof Tops of Ulsan

Sometimes, after two months of staying somewhere new, you discover something great that was right under your nose the whole time and makes you feel a little foolish for not exploring your surroundings more thoroughly. This is how we felt this past Sunday.

We were spending another lazy Sunday afternoon doing nothing in particular, when in a sudden surge of energy we decided to finally climb the remaining stories of our building, just to see what was there. Instead of a disappointing dead end, we found...an open door...and a pile of junk.


Unsure of what this door could be, with trepidation we passed over the threshold, but instead of being transported to Narnia, Never Never Land, or some strange alternate dimension, we simply discovered the roof.

And we felt like idiots.


For two months this magnificent view with its refreshing sea breeze has been hidden to us. We have been huddled away in our apartment, lying underneath our air conditioner, and occasionally peeking outside to see what the rest of Ulsan was up to, and all the time this huge, untapped roof-top balcony waited to be discovered.


This was one of those times when I wished we had one of those panoramic cameras. Here's a view from the roof. Past the rooftops you can see the harbour filled with ships, as it usually is.


Another view a little to the left of the last picture. Just over that hill is the small pine forest we told you about a few months ago.



This is the five-street intersection just below our front windows. Despite the fact that these streets are no bigger than alleyways and nowhere near the main roads, this intersection is always busy...even in the middle of the night.



Here is a bird's eye view of our neighborhood park from Shayne's playground post. It actually looks quite pleasant from this angle.



And here is evidence of what our neighbors really use this roof for: as a junk repository. It's a good thing for us that the roof is really big - when we come up here we'll try to avoid the junk piles as much as possible.

Anyways, now that we've found this, we're left wondering what other gems are hidden just out of sight. Next time we'll tell you about the olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement, the foreign food import store right next door, and the deserted white sand tropical beach that's just a 10 minute walk from our place.

Until then,
Jo