Tempting Fate

OK, so you are working in South Korea in the shadow of one of the biggest tension times with North Korea in quite a while and you have a day off in Seoul, what do you do?

You head for North Korea, of course!  Armed with only a GPS (in my Crackberry) and in a tiny no name car two of us headed north in Seoul and went to the closet point where the highway nearly touches the DMZ.

Here is a picture from the main highway out of Incheon which turns north just before entering Seoul.  If you stay on it it goes right along the river which serves as the DMZ on the West side of the country.  Somewhere, just a little north of the main interchange into Seoul on the left side of the Highway you begin to see barbed wire and gun implacements, yes I said gun implacements about every 200 meters or so.  Above is a picture of one.  Is a picture of the fnece when North Korea is directly across the river.

At the point where the Highway is closest to NK there is an overlook called the Odu Reunification observation tower.  The 4th floor has a movie about NK topography and shows quite a hint of sadness by the SK people over the dire fate of their cousins across the DMZ.  This overlook is about 3kM from NK which is directly across the river.  Just a bit east of here the DMZ is only 460 meters across, but it is not easy to get there.

This is a map of where we were.  The peninsula to the left is part of SK,  Too the right is the narrowest point.

A South Korean border guard, UN observer and North Korea border guard.

South Korean side.  More on this later.

North Korean side.

Love hotel on South Korean side, less than 3 miles from DMZ.

A Korean drive in theater, less than 3 miles from DMZ.

Had to take the picture

No idea what this building is, but saw it as driving past and had to take the picture.

Symbol looking out of place

The red symbol is not what you or I thought it was.  It is a buddhist symbol, but I haven't yet looked it up to find the significance.

Shilla Bakery and Coffee House

In the Taean bus terminal is the Shilla Bakery.  They will make you coffee (Americano, a shot of espresso with steamed water), latte, cappuchino or espresso.  They also have a lot of bread, pastries and some sandwiches.  Most mornings we went here before leaving for the range.  Here is our coffeee girl.

Here and in most coffee places (even Starbuck's in Seoul) in Korea, if you ask for sugar they put in sugar water or simple syrup which is very sweet in coffee.  In all the hotel rooms you get two sleeves of Korean instant coffee which is packed with creamer and sugar.

This is a shot of the selection of pastries.  I tried to have a different one each day and I was never disappointed.  Even the ones that looked weird tasted good.

Hangul Korengrish lesson

Here is the sign in Hangul for our Hotel in Taean.  The first 'character' is just the first syllable in the hotel's name, "Te", so the first symbol is a "T", the second and third a short "e".  The second "Character" is the letter M followed by the "a" that sounds like ahhh.  So the first 2 characters say Te Ma or Tema.  Third character has M again with the sound "uhh" under it.  So it say Muhhh.  4th chacter starts with the "T" and short e and has a backward "s" or a stylized 2 under it.  That character is the one responsible for most of the Korengrish, because it is both the "L" and the "R" sound in Hangul.  So the 3rd and 4th characters together are M uhhh t e l or Motel in english.

Bloggin station

Here's where I blogged from in Taean.

Blogging station Seoul

I am currently in the Korean Air Prestige Class (Business Class) lounge blogging and having coffee before the 15 hour flight to Atlanta.

Korean Tupperware

One of the wives of the Korean operators made us sandwiches for Monday lunch because we had so much to finish in a short time.  Here is the "tupperware she packed it in.  The white slices in the left picture that look like a sliced hard baoiled egg are, in fact, a white melon that had been peeled, but not cored.  It tasted about halfway between a honeydew and an aremenian cucumber.  The bread is a somewhat sweet toasted blackbean infused white bread.  The sandwiches had ham, egg (like a flat egg foo young, mayo, lettuce, tomato and some more stuff I don't remember.  Pretty good, but sweet.

Thursday night in Seoul

OK, I have posted until I can't post anymore tonight.  Tomorrow I fly back to Hot-lanta.  Had a big surprise when I got back the Hotel in Seoul.

OK, I have a lot left.  It was two screaming busy days on Monday and Tuesday so not much from there.  I'll show you the bakery and coffee shop at the Taean Bus Terminal, dinner in the Seoul City Center Bus Terminal/Mall, and my Thursday adventure (hint: I might not have done this if I didn't know that Kim Jong Il was in Beijing.  I will try to get all that done from the KAL lounge at Incheon Airport and maybe I'll find a few interesting things there.

Korean Trucks

Pick 'em up trucks look quite a bit different in Korea.  You see these all other the place.  It looks like a pick up truck with extremely short walls on the bed.  Our Fedex truck looked like this, too.

Korean Trailer Park

I've been seeing a lot of these in the farming area near the range .  It looks like there are no trailers like we are used to here, but there are a lot of low cost portable houses and shops built out of shipping containers.  We send these ISO containers with our Radar parts and I guess a lot of trading happens and these low cost containers are tricked out and become house and store houses and shops around the country.

Polite Law enforcement

This yellow sign indicates that a speed camera is coming up and when you get near it you should decelerate to 60 km/hr.  These are everywhere there is a speed limit.  It seems that speeding is only enforced by these cameras and they have the courtesy to let you speed between the camera positions and just slow down when they are about to take your picture.  The camera are quite visible hangin over the road or the highway so even if you miss the yellow signs (always posted at least 350 meters before the camera) you have a chance to see these and slow down.  If they had these in Georgia I would be a good bit richer now.

Public baths

About 40 kilometers from Taean is a spa resort that we decided to go to on Sunday.  This place is on the other side of the "Interstate" and the mountains.  It is still a little cool in the hills but is warming up.  The basically took a hot spring in the town of Deoksan that had been found in the hills and turned it into a resort.  It is also a water park so I'm not sure much of the spring is left.

Don't know what this guy is trying to tell me, but he seemed to be having a much better time inside the spa.  There was some important foreshadowing here, but I missed it at the time.

The entrance tells us what we are in for.

Here's the lay out of the waterpark and resort.  I took the picture on the crackberry so it is not of very good quality.  Even if you blow it up.

Shoe locker.  You have to take them off immediately after paying to get in.

This image, for want of a better word, is on the wall as you walk toward the locker room in your bare feet.  Don't really understand why the eyes and mouth are in the places they are.  The wall is black granite.

 Locker room, there were lots of naked Korean men and some naked Korean boys in this area and tons of lockers.  It was here I had an epiphany about the pink towels.  There were too many naked Koreans to take a picture of a stack of BLUE towels with an English label above them that said facial scrub towel.  These diaphonous towels are for scrubbing your face.

The lockers are RF controled using a wristwatch type device to match up with your locker.  Same number on the shoe lockers and clothes locker.  It also keeps track of anything you buy and I had to buy something and lunch.

This shower cap is what I had to buy.  Everyone had to buy one and it looked like they were very concerned about hair clogging up the pumps.  If that is so my friend Kevin who has a long beard and is generally a very hairy guy must have made them verrrrrry nervous.  The Koreans that I saw naked are pretty hairless.

Here is the "bade" spa.  I think this is another example of Korengrish, since they said they were trying to imitate a German spa I think they meant Bad or Baden which are German spa words.  There was a really high ceiling and a huge warm pool with various stations with different jets.  There were also different spas and saunas around including a "Jazz" spa (really offensively racist statues of black musicians and B.B. King playing on the TV), a Germanium (not Geranium) Sauna with elemental properties, a European spa and lots of other outdoor stuff.

Here is the statues in the "European" spa, which was a still hot pool of shallow watter about knee deep with lots of community area.

Here's a picture of one of the "Relex Bubbles" spa.  I am sure they meant relax.

The guide was in Korean and English and the whole place was very white guy friendly, except there were no English speakers.  Don't know what Dr. Fish is but there were spas advertising that and shops advertising that in Taean and Osan.  I should probably look it up.

I couldn't take pictures of the hot sauna (100 degrees C dry sauna, 54 degree C wet sauna, you had to be naked in there) the Oxygen room, the Amythest Ice Room (3 degrees C, the it was bearable, but you couldn't wear shoe so feet froze), severla rooms where the floor was hot and there was wood "pillows".  I didn't go on any of the water rides. 

We spent about 4 hours there, including lunch in a big hot tub bar where we had beer and hot dogs.

Chicken feet

Just for Bob, my favorite father in law.

This is in a traditional market in Korea.  Lots of chicken and pork, not much beef.  Never know why there is no beef in Korea open air markets.

Ahh, the smell of sizzin' pork belly with hot red pepper paste and raw garlic

Traditional Korean barbecue, pork rib meat on left and hot marinated pork belly.  This is the traditional pork restaurant about 150 yards from the hotel in Taean.

You cook it yourself on a flat top metal plate, it is sqaure and tilted so that the juices run off.  They gie you veggies like spring onion and garlic which you can cook or just add raw to your lettuce leaf that you wrap around the cooked pork when you are done.  Oh and as it is cooking you cut the meat with scissors.

Spring Kimchee

Here is a picture of the spring Kimchee.  Not as pungent as I remember from fall, cabbage has a little more crunch, it is a noticiable difference but I can't say much more than that.  The yellow things are a pickled turnip like root vegetable that I don't really know what it is.  Onions and garlic are common and that black dollop is black bean paste.  You see a lot of red pepper paste, but I didn't get a good picture of that during this trip.  It was in a squeeze tube on the flight in.

Tides

After the mountain we went drving around the county of Taean (and probably out of it, the maps and GPS were not very good that day) and found the beach to the north and east of the town.  It was still kind of chilly and so there wasn't anyone around when we found these spots, but it still made for some pretty scenary. 

The white things near the edge of the water in these pictures (you might have to blow them up, if so the second one is better for this point) are not the surf.  They are strings of fishing nets set on poles.  It looks (and I haven't been able to ask anybody about this yet) like they use these to net the fish when the tide goes out (or in, it goes about twice as fast in as out according to reliable witnesses but for the life of me I couldn't say why).  The tides are so large here (30 feet or 10 meters or more twice a day) that the beaches are long and sloping and must change quite a bit.

Here is a bathroom on the deserted beach.  It looks like a palace with painted trees and that huge dome.  It looks even nicer inside and has electronic doors and electronic toilets (like most of the public toilets in Korea, except for the ones that don't and I guess that is another post I might not get to) and formica that looks as bright as the marble it imitiates. 

At the end of a road on the edge of nowhere was a pearl diving 'village' that was a real let down.  We followed the signs down one of the only unpaved roads I've seen in South Korea and came upon a house with a Korean tent snack bar and a lady who was trying to get us interested in buying abalone shells or coriander or something, just buy something.  No oysters and no pearls though.  I did get this neat picture which reminds me of the Monterray peninsula in California.

Ok, back to tides.  This is a little further along the peninsula we were on.  Such great tides must save you a lot in drydock costs if you own a boat.  In lots of harbors like this the boats are left dry at low tide and it is very dry.  In the next picture you can see how far the water line at the end of the harbor appears.

That crab is everywhere

Matt smoked about 25 feet from this sign. I wouldn't normally tell on anyone on TDY, but that was just funny to me.  Notice the omnipresent crab on the upper right hand corner of the sign.

Runnin' up that hill

Satuurday we decided that we would climb the mountain outside of Taean.

This is the view of the mountain from my hotel room.  I can't find where I wrote down the name, but when I find out, from one of the guys who climbed it with me, I will edit the blog and add it here. 

Whenever you hike in the countryside of Korea you may happen upon these signs.  Here there is more reason than most and I will address that a little further down. 

As we hiked up toward the top we were surrounded by cherry trees.  I have so many pictures of cherry trees here and on othe rmountains that I will only post this one here with the Japanese magnolia in the foreground.  I intended to do a post of just pictures of cherry trees, but I won't do it for several reasons.  One I am running out of time, two they would get monotonous and three the pictures universally fail to do the cherry trees justice.  Around the main building on the base on Friday the blossoms were falling like snow, and like the snow in Cold Lake were swirling around the road.  I could not take a picture of that, so I will not post many other pictures of the cherry blossoms and trees. 

Here is a picture of the 'town' of Taean looking back down the mountain and toward the yellow sea.  The range, where we work is about 50 kilometers toward the upper right of that photo, but you can't see it.  Neither can you see China which is about 100 miles in the same direction across the yellow sea.

Who's the fat guy leaning on the marker for the top of the mountain?  Actually, I didn't get a picture but a lot of the Koreans who had made it to the top not only took their picture here, but they had a soju party on picknick blankets at the foot of the rock this is on.  I can't imagine trying to descend this mountain after drinking.

This is an older inscription at the top of the mountain.  This and a relic I will discuss below date from an older period when the Chinese dominated this area.  The script in the inscription is of chinese characters, but in the older Korea language.  Now Koreans use a script called Hangul, which is alphabetic as opposed to character writing in the Chinese.  The letters in Hangul are grouped into syllables which make them appear like Chinese characters (and syllable spacing and word spacing typically do not differ).  It seems to me Hangul is a lot easier to learn.

Saw this lady as we climbed back down.  She passed us and was moving a lot faster than we were, but she had on a mask.  I couldn't figure why you would have a mask on while you were hicking on a mountain in a national park, but she must have had here reasons.  This was the cleanest air we encountered outside of the sea breezes.

Here is the reason that there were more land mine signs on this mountain than in your average Korean mountain hike.  There is a large military facility on this mountain that is important in deterring North Korean attacks.  When we were here is was still soon after the Chongnam was sunk and we thought tensions were high, but the Koreans seem to have gotten used to living with the tensions between the Koreas and did not seem overly concerned.  I learned a little more about this toward the end of my stay, but I will blog that in good time.  Anyway, you should know that South Korea, R.O.K., is on high military alert all the time and it colors a lot of the life in this area.

I wanted to post the pictures of this monastery and buddhist relic from the descent, because it was more impressive to me to see as we were coming out of the wooded trail (as opposed to the parking lot).  This is the view as you descend around a small waterfall to a shelter around a relic of buddhism from around the 6th centtury.

Here is the buddhist relic, the Taean Maae Samjonbul.  Samjonbul, I am reliably told means "three Buddhas" but that is inaccurate, since only the middle figure is actually Buddha or as the explanatory sign (in full English unlike most things in Taean) calls it a Boddhisatva.  The other two figures are actually of Buddhist priests as identified by the robes they are wearing.  It is unique in that the Boddhisatva is not normally depicted as smaller than ancillary figures.  The guy in the next picture told us that this was very similar to the common style of the Norther Qi Dynasty in China in approximately the 6th century and that is the basis for the dating of the carving to that time. 

 The guy spoke the best English of anyone in Taean that did not work on our project and was very welcome for his insights.  I have to believe he doesn't get a lot of English speaking visitors.  The building around the carving was built by the Korean Government in around 2002 (or at least it was refurbished then) and it is not a Buddhist temple, although at the the time we were there some offerings were on a table in front of the carving.

Next door, however was a Buddhist temple and while we were walking around it a service must have been going on because we could hear rhythmic bells and what sounded to me like the rolling of prayer wheels.  While I was curious to see what was going on, I didn't think it was right to intrude as a tourist.  Here are some of the pictures on the side of the Temple which was built within the last 10 years or so.  The guys with me let me know it was not there on our original install back in 1993.  These pictures appear to me to be from the life of Buddha and go all the way around the temple.  They do not look to be protected from the weather at all so I wonder if they won't fade after a few years. 

Here's a wider angle view.  the building housing the carving is behind the trees on the right of this pictue.  Those colorful lamps are stretched all around the compound where the temple (and a building that I believe to be the attendant monk's or priest's living quarters) sits.  It is all set up like a public park and while I believe that Korea does not have a national religion (the people are around 50% Christian, mostly presbyterian from the looks of things) I think that this is a government park like the rest of the mountain and they allowed the monks to build the temple here.

We never did figure this out.  In a garden on the side of the temple some of the trees (which look like young fruit trees to me, but I don't know what fruit) had bottles on them.  These are plastic 1.5 liter bottles of soft drinks or maybe soju and we couldn't figure out why they were there and the English speaking guy whoul could have answered our questions was far away.

The back of the monks living quarters.  Note the sattelite TV dish on the rail.

This is the cooking area.  Charcoal cookstoves and the pots are where they ferment Kimchee.  I think I have a lot of pictures of Kimchee pots, but I don't think I will post on them.  Also there were two dogs in the back, one a poodle-looking tiny thing and the other a "Jindo" dog on a rope tied to his dog house.  I mention this because I need to do a post of the new prevalance of dogs in Korea, no that they no longer eat them a lot, but you probably haven't read this far anyway.