Lost In Me

When you look at it while walking around the streets of Seoul, Korea looks every bit the highly developed, trillion-dollar economy that it is, with its affluent people and glittering skyscrapers. Take a two hour bus ride into the provinces, however, and Korea looks very much like the impoverished, third-world country that it was a few decades ago. It's amazing how much the provinces lag behind Seoul in economic development. In some sense Korea is much like the city-states of ancient Greece; Seoul is Korea, and the surrounding provinces are merely its colonies... they exist solely to feed the population of the capital. You could say the Koreans have already built a time machine: it's the bus going from Seoul to Gunsan.

Of course, the difference between Seoul and the provinces is nothing like the difference between South Korea and the North.