Myung Dong and house factory

Myung Dong market

Myung Dong market is a huge street bazaar that sells mostly clothing, but you can buy just about anything if you find the right block. There's a fun mix of street vendors and indoor shops which range from humble carts to international retailers. We somehow managed to find the same places we went to the last time we were here. I bought sunglasses from the same lady last year.

TO:UR chicken

I'm slowly coming to this conclusion: Koreans have a different sense of marketing than westerners. There's really no reason to name your chicken shop like this, but the edgy/nonsensical seems more appealing here. To put it nicely, perhaps Koreans are more appreciative of the whimsical. Or perhaps there's something else I don't get. In any case, it's more fun than KFC.

It's on sale!

Myung Dong has become a tourist haven for Japanese and Chinese. There are many shops that cater specifically to Japanese here, so I can imagine it's a lot like being in Tokyo.

happy family in a new house

Bro's business is changing. He used to build efficient living spaces out of discarded shipping containers, which was a nice way to recycle and cost effective. However, the bulk of his new sales have been coming from vacationers looking to build a weekend homes. They typically have a plot of land that's either too remote or prohibitively expensive to build a new house, but they still expect the amenities of a house. Bro said that the old containers worked well for a quick and sturdy construction, but lacked good insulation and made customization difficult. So now the full operation takes place like a free standing custom built home. The only difference is that the base of the home is designed to fit on a flatbed truck for shipping. Some of these are even shipped out to small islands, where the house will have to take a shipping ferry. It's quite a journey.

how to assemble the house

Since the houses are now built with a wood frame, you can stack parts of the house that make the second story. The house on a flatbed has to fit inside the many mountain tunnels that wind through Korea, so the technique makes shipping tall houses possible.

hard at work building the house

The other two younger bros work here too, so they get to argue about whose ideas are better and whose family is more stressful all day. The typical stuff bros love to argue about - right? I guess I wouldn't know. Older bro has made himself somewhat more scarce these days because he's been required in a sales capacity vs construction management of the past.

beautiful house

The finished product gets more appealing each time I visit! The houses are definitely cozy, though I can't really imagine wanting to travel out to some remote place just to stay in one.

sawing the gourd

We also got to laugh at younger bro as he sawed this gourd in half. Some of the subtleties regarding why you'd want this gourd sawed in half were lost on me. I don't think it's eaten, but they used to make bowls out of the dried halves of this gourd - it's that strong.

harvesting the seeds

What's a good gourd without seeds? We saved these to plant more gourds... for more bowls presumably.

future watchdog

The new pup at the factory is on a short leash. I don't think bro does much to train these dogs to be real guards; the others are pretty docile at this point.