By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff Reporter
Foreigners are more positive about life in Seoul than Koreans.
A survey of 1,000 foreigners by Seoul City showed that expatriates responded more positively to their living environment than Seoulites did.
The expatriates rated their life in Seoul at 62.4 out of 100 points, compared with 53.6 for Seoullites.
The survey covered three categories - residential environment including housing, transportation, water and power supply; the cost of living; and social environment for welfare, medical facilities and more.
There were 255,500 registered expatriates from 152 countries living in Seoul last year, accounting for 2.4 percent of the city's total population, a five-fold jump in a decade.
"I am satisfied with life in Seoul. It's a big comfortable city to live in," said Marco Tessiore, an Italian film maker who has lived in Seoul for a year-and-a-half.
"Myeongdong can be an example of where you can go shopping or find entertainment in one place," he said.
Tessiore said Seoul's English service is still poor despite the city's effort to go global. "The overall service is good, but the service in English is a bit under expectation. Even in big shopping malls, clerks do not speak English well," he said.
Suyun Hong, 21, a Korean resident from the United States studying at Seoul National University for a year, said she is always really impressed with Korea's transportation system whenever she visits Seoul.
"I'm from Texas, where public transportation is non-existent. Here you can really just get on a bus or a subway and go anywhere you want."
On the other hand, she often hears that renting apartments or one-rooms are quite expensive
"The cost of living varies on where you're living and where you're from. A lot of the time, stuff here seems really cheap, like food costs."
The most foreigner-clustered district was Yeongdeungpo-gu with 25,438 followed by Guro, Geumcheon and Gwanak. Only 2,762 foreigners lived in Dobong.
Among the 152 nationalities, Chinese topped the list with 193,000, taking up three quarters of the total. The second largest ethnic group was American with 12,800, followed by Taiwanese, Japanese and Vietnamese.
More than half of foreigners here were laborers with only 4 percent being professionals. Married immigrants doubled to 29,600 in four years while international students also surged more than three times from 6,000 in 2004 to 20,000 in 2008.
Interracial marriages increased 2.3 times in eight years to 7,900 in 2008. Seven out of 10 of these were Korean men marrying foreign women.
The surge of interracial marriages also brought about a rise in multicultural children. In 2008, 2,259 of these children attended elementary, middle and high school in Seoul and 77 percent had foreign mothers.
However, 2,900 interracial couples divorced in 2008, more than a 3-fold jump in four years.