An hour or so north of Mokpo on the train, and still in Korea’s south-western Jeollanan province, is Gwangju. It’s a city of 1.5 million set in an otherwise rural setting.
I took these photos of people selling their goods on the streets – mostly elderly and mostly women. Some of them are tiny, and it’s probably been many years since some of them could stand up straight.
Korea has had a pretty torrid recent history. It’s a major world economy now but it had to build from pretty much nothing following the devastation of the Korean war. That finished 60 years ago, so these women would have been alive at the time, and lived through the hardships of the post-war years.
I watched the women in the top two pictures from the organic coffee shop where I was having breakfast – tea, smoothie and a muffin.
Notes from a Korean island 