Navigating Dongtan

After Gangnam, the Mr. and I moved into our new home in Dongtan. Dongtan is technically a district in the city of Hwaseong, but it operates as its own city. It was designed by some architects who claim to have considered the natural features of the land and laid Dongtan out almost by feng shui. Read about the planning of Dongtan here.

Dongtan City is too new to be in guidebooks (thanks for nothing, Lonely Planet. Just kidding. Really I love you). Just about the only useful information on it is from the vlogger Qi Ranger. Here is some information that I have learned through trial and error about navigating Dongtan. I hope this helps other Anglophone ex-pats who find themselves in a city so new that until about a month ago, Google satellite just showed a construction site.

This is a Google map of Dongtan. I added pins of important places.

View Dongtan, South Korea in a larger map

(To make the most of this map, you should learn to read Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. It's much easier than it sounds! Blog post about it coming up.)

Dongtan was designed around a mall, Metapolis, which has four towers. You can see the towers from anywhere in town; they are a most useful landmark. They even have their own wikipedia entry. You'll go to Metapolis to go to Home Plus (sort of Korea's Wal-Mart where you can find anything you need) or the movie theatre, CGV. Metapolis in Korean is 메타폴리스. See it on the map? 

Central Park runs through Metapolis and bisects the town. See 동탄센트럴 파크 on the map?The blue pin just north of Central Park is our apartment. (The GS25 is actually a FamilyMart.) We live above a restaurant that specializes in Jeju black pork. This is our apartment building:

It's much nicer on the inside. North of our home on the map you can see a big gray square block. That is the Samsung factory, which is also a very good landmark although it's not quite as tall as Metapolis:

On the map, east of the Samsung factory I placed a marker for the post office (우체국). You have to walk though a thin park-like walkway and over a highway to get to the post office, but at least you won't wander around following bad directions for two hours in -9 degrees Celsius to find it, like I did. You're welcome. In this picture the post office has an orange sign and is below a Nanometrics office.

In the center of the map, to the east, I put a pin where the downtown area is. If you are in the market for a noraebang (Korean karaoke) or pub-crawling, you want to head to this area. That's where the gang (the Mr., Natron, YK, and yours truly) hangs out when we're in Dongtan.

Last but certainly not least, check out the blue line in the southwest corner of Dongtan. That blue line is Dongtan's train-tracks, which connect to Suwon and Seoul's Line 1 eventually. The train station is called 서동탄 역 (West Dongtan Station). The train is about a 30-minute walk from Central Park, or a 10-minute 3300 won cab ride. This is 서동탄역 and the Mr.:

 The train connects to Osan, Suwon, and Seoul. It's more English-friendly than the buses. 

I hope this information is useful to my future Dongtan neighbors. Until next time, ^^