The city that I live in, Okpo, is on Geoje Island just south of Busan and is tucked into a steep-walled valley facing the sea.
Much of the town seems to have been built in the last couple of years save for a few small, scattered old buildings. You could land a plane on these things, or build a small town on their decks.
These are the DSME workers and they come from all over the world, usually on a contract basis. One of the first things I learned about this place was the availability of prostitution. There is a place directly across the street from my apartment building that is painted all blue with a red lightening bolt on the front.
If you go in there you can sit down and have coffee with a girl, and then take her home. Not a bad package, but still well below my moral flexibility. The thing that baffles me about this whole prostitution thing is its contradiction with the rest of Korean culture. But I can walk 20 yards from my apartment, choose a girl, have some coffee and some sex.
I can also walk to the store, grab a beer, crack it and walk around drinking it wherever I want. I even walked into a store with an open beer and no one batted an eye, and then I hopped in a taxi with it β no big deal. I guess our town is apparently a bit of an anomaly from the rest of South Korea though, probably because of the high concentration of transient men living here who make way more money than most of the people here and have no wives or families watching them as they find ways to spend their free time in a foreign land.
