Have you heard about Paju city?
Introduction
Paju is a city in Gyeonggi Province, that is located around 33km from Seoul, the capital city of South Korea. It is not far and there are actually some ways for you to travel from Seoul to Paju.
How to get there?
Firstly, you can take the subway which will take around 50 minutes and cost around 10,000 won(Taxi fare include). Or you can also take the public bus which will take around two hours but it is really cheap. It will just cost you around 4,000 won.
So today, I would like to recommend you two places that I found out super interesting that located nearby in Paju city.
Read more:
English Village
The first one is English Village. This village is made up of a number of buildings, with mainly three of them featured in K-Dramaland so far. Gyeonggi English Village is a publicly owned institution that has been in operation for over nine years. The purpose of that institution been built up is to provide opportunities for the students to learn English and boost their leadership skills.
Regarding the admission fees, I got to know that we need to pay around 10,000 won to enter the English Village. But when I went there at February 2021, I was surprised to see that there is just a few people who visited the place. And we were free to visit the places anytime we wanted to.
What can you expect?
You can see a lot of English-style buildings at the village. That will make you feel like you were traveling at western countries far away from South Korea. You can wander around that place as it was not very hard to explore. And as I mentioned just now, there was not much people who visited that place. So you are free to take pictures at anywhere anytime without any discomforts.
If you asked me which part that I like the most, then it will confirm be the train which is located at the center of the village. You are able to find a railway and two train models at there. One in red and one in blue. If you visit here during autumn, it will be awesome as the leaves started to change their colors.
Restaurant and Cafes
There were not as much cafes or restaurants as I expected when I visited that place. I was finding a place to eat with my friends when I visited there but I can only found one cafe. Which also only available for dine out due to the corona virus outbreak.
Because of that, here comes to the second place where I wanted to introduce to you, which is the Provence Village.
Provence Village
Provence Village is a southern French culture town with beautiful buildings located near with the English Village. The admission is free and it has more activities to do compared to the English Village.
What can you expect?
You can have your meal around that place as they have various kinds of restaurants and cafes. I had my meal at one of the traditional France restaurant there and the food was really delicious. Although I am not a France people, but I can feel the efforts that had been made by the workers there in order to provide the best services for their customers.
After having your meal, you can straight away enter the Provence Village and you will see a Paris Tower model at the middle of the village. There were a lots of small shops where they sold clothes and souvenirs. It was like a small shopping street and you can buy anything you like.
Restaurant and Cafes
Not only small stores, they also have a mall where you can buy some handcrafts. The prices were affordable and they had a plenty of choices for each of the products. If you love cafe hopping, there were also some cafes that located inside and outside the Provence Village. I went to a double story cafe inside the Provence Village and ordered a Green Tea Latte for my drink.
When it turned into evening after sunset, you might be able to see another version of Provence Village, where they lit up all of the decorations at there. The village will be pretty colorful and it just looked like the Light Festival.
If you are the one who love western culture or wish to travel to Europe countries, then I am very sure that you will love both of these places.
But, based on my personal experience after visiting both the places, I can feel like both of these places did not have a proper maintenance regularly. As you can notice there are some parts at both of these places were being neglected and I felt so sad to see that. And this is the reason why I chose my article title to beโ The Forgotten City- Paju โ.
Any way, they might be in the process of renovation and I hope that you will find out those places are interesting when you visit them!
Have fun!
