Visiting England is one of the things I want to do in the future. I planned a trip there in the middle of September. I purchased air tickets to and from London and booked hotels there. To my sorrow, however, I was forced to cancel all of the reservations because of the hectic work I had been doing for almost two years. The British Hills is one of its alternatives, but I get tired of it as I have visited there many times. One day, I heard about such a place in South Korea that mocked English streets. That’s why I visited South Korea this month, though I didn’t understand Korean at all.

The Gyeonggi English Village is located in Paju, Gyeonggi-do, a 50-minute drive from the city center of Seoul.

The entrance mimics an immigration office, making you feel as if you were entering a foreign country. When you pay 3,000 Korean Won at the ticket booth in front of immigration, you receive a booklet that looks like a passport as well as an admission ticket. At the immigration counter, you present the passport-like booklet to an immigration officer, who stamps it after asking a few questions.

Once you clear immigration, you reach another entrance that looks like an old European castle.

Passing through the gate, you have a romantic European street with posh markets, restaurants, and an English bar. All staff members speak English very well.

The GEV is an English theme park with a wide variety of attractions. If you rent a road bike, you can go around the railed route of the streets with it. In the concert hall, you can see a musical show performed a few times a day. You can learn how to say in English at a mock-up of a travel agency, a clinic, a bank, a post office, a police station, and so on if you join an English-learning program. If you think these are too childish, you can drop in on the Double Decker English pub, where you can drink a glass of beer, enjoy fish-and-chips, and talk a bit with Jackie, who runs this pub.

This 70-acre site was built by the Gyeonggi-do government to create global Koreans. Public English-training facilities like the GEV are in several places within the country. I think it’s one of South Korea’s national projects to educate people to become fluent in English so they can play an active role in the global arena. To my knowledge, the GEV is located less than two miles from North Korea’s national border. You can see filthy-looking North Korean neighborhoods beyond the Imjin River if you climb up a footpath to the top of the hill of the GEV. Training global human resources in such a militarily tense area strongly suggests thinking about what the world is about, what nations are about, and what it means to get along with people from different countries.