weekend adventure

last weekend 서정욱 (aka richard), 박현주 (aka hyunjoo) and 조시아저씨 (aka me) went to 강원도 (gangwon-do). it's the northeastern province of south korea. we decided to leave friday night after work instead of saturday morning to beat traffic. it rained the whole way there.

the restaurant we ate at in bundang (or somewhere close) before getting on the road.

 

 

 

i ended up falling asleep, but woke up as we arrived in 경포 (gyeong-po).

 

 

 

we had our on autoclave in our motel room. it's not an actual autoclave, i think it uses uv or something to kill bacteria. these things are in almost every restaurant.

woke up and we were at the beach. i hadn't realized the night before that we were so close to the beach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

some close-ups of the shore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rich, hyunjoo and i enjoying the nice weather and beach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

we ended up in a market. i never got the name of it. you know, the typical 'eat any and everything from the sea' kind of shots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

we stopped and ate some raw fish and 매운탕 (maeun-tang), spicy soup.

 

 

blowfish?

 

 

 

the mountains looked so nice.

 

 

  

we did a little cycling around a huge lake. great time.

 

 

there were dozens of statues running a long stretch of the lake. i'm going to assume there was some kind of narrative involved. here are a few of them.

 

 

 

 

 

it's becoming autumn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i think someone wanted this man dead.

 

 

we were exhausted so decided to stay a second night. you have to love the 'love motels'. such good lighting.

 

 

  

this area is famous for 순두부 (tofu).

my batteries had been pretty much dead for a few hours at this point so the photos stop here. came back to the motel and relaxed with some imported beers and damn delicious persimmons. the ride home was another sleepy one for me, but driving through the mountains, the autumn colors were amazing. too bad you don't get to see it.

추석 잘 보내세요

i'm a little late in getting this post out but saturday, october 3rd was 추석(chuseok), korean thanksgiving. there is the main day and you get the previous day and the day after to prep/celebrate. it was a short one this year with chuseok day falling on saturday, no 5 day weekend.

ancestral offerings.

stop. go.
they like to play this card game on chuseok. they are hard, thick plastic cards. like a poker chip, but rectangular and bigger. there are all kinds of different rules relating to what  things are on the cards and how you use them in combination. they like to gamble when playing, but we didn't.

went for a walk. we were trying to get to the mountain in this first photo, but didn't quite make it.

 

spiders and a bee farm. those trees were really cool with the bulbous greens.

some nice looking cattle. in the bottom one here, that's the ktx high-speed rail. it flew by about every 2-3 minutes.

from what i can tell, this is a balloon flower, except this is not the flower, but the pod that has the seeds in it. i'm not really sure why the farmers have rows of them growing, as they are not edible.

these signs talk about how the government is going to destroy this little farming community so they can build another giant apartment complex.

chickens and more agriculture.

a manure covered trailer. we stole some of the leaves off of these sesame plants, 깻잎(ggaet-eep). they are super delicious.

changes

about a week and a half ago i had to move. nate also had to move. they didn't even bother to tell me about it. they told nate and of course he told me. we were given about a week notice. at least it wasn't the day before like the majority of the changes that are made. nate and i are both leaving in two months and we had to move three buildings up the street. it had something to do with not wanting to renew the lease where we were. it was just annoying and a little inconvenient for us. the buildings look identical and so do the rooms. consequently i'm on the fourth floor instead of the 2nd and catty-corner my old place. it's a bit quieter because of this, but the sun is hell coming in my window when i'm trying to sleep.

plans are in the works for a post-contract trip with daniel. we'll be going to dalian, china to see uncle wally, then head to hong kong and southeast asia. the se asia leg will begin and end in bangkok, thailand. we're planning on getting into cambodia and laos. more on that at in the future.

in the mean time, get a load of this.

덕수궁 (deoksugung)

a few weeks ago i took a little trip to seoul. went to a couple of art museums and walked around an old palace.

no, these photos are not distorted or stretched, that's what the sculptures look like.

these sculptures were on the outside of the palace walls, on the way to the seoul museum of art.  the museum had a renoir exhibit that i didn't look at and a small room with some paintings by korean artist chon kyung-ja.

i quickly moved on to 덕수궁 (deoksugung) the palace. this place has over a 500 year history.

 

 

 

on the palace grounds was the national museum of art, deoksugung. it had a fernando botero exhibit that was pretty nice.

as you can see it was dark when i re-emerged. i was able to get see a little and get some photos, but finding light was tough. most of the buildings here are not painted, so it's too bad i couldn't really see it. but let me tell you, the smell of all of that old wood was powerful.

 

 

 

this building was designed by a russian architect named a.i. sabatin in 1900. the bat in the detail is rad.

 

 

 

 

 

there was some kind of concert going on outside of the palace as a left.

on the return ride home on the train, a couple ajumas (aunties) beat me up. not really, but it was a strange occurrence. they were talking to me, in korean, and one of them hit me in the back really hard after one of my responses. i don't fully understand why. i think they were either drunk or just being crazy ajumas.

memento

Gloria Thompson Gray

5 September 1947 - 24 August 2009