Richard's Travel Blog

Hi again. Here’s the news that’s fit to print. Well, I’m not sure the “lipstick on a pig” photo is fit to print.
Since I last wrote, we went on a couple of walks, of course, went to number of art venues in Busan, and had a holiday weekend mostly with our friends here. Busan has some open air exhibits along the beach and elsewhere. They weren’t that good, but we had a nice walk. We went to the museum of modern art. Here’s a photo of it and the convention center.

I took a couple of pictures inside before I learned photography isn’t allowed. The second one is certainly relavant to what’s important in American politics.

This past weekend was Chusoek, the fall harvest holiday, the second biggest holiday in Korea after New Year’s. It is like Thanksgiving in that people get together and eat a lot. They also honor their ancestors. We made food one day at Yung He and Geong Yurl’s restaurant. They were having a get together of about 100 of their family members. Traditionally, Koreans fry up stuff in batter, something they don’t usually do much. Here we are frying up fish, sweet potatoes, lotus root and tofu.

On Sunday we went to Tongdo temple, Tongdosa, so Myung could pay her respects. You can click on search for previously published pictures from there. Here are more.

Oh yeah, people like to dress up in traditional clothes for Chusoek. Myung says this is less popular now with adults than it used to be. Still, the kids are often dressed up.

Make a wish.

Then Monday we went to Geong Ja’s and Il Hwan’s and made more food. Here we are making pot stickers. These are sweet, made with sweet red bean paste or sweet white potato paste. You roll this dough up into a ball, make a little bowl, fill it and fold it. Here Myung is trying to do the wedding cake in the face bit.

After that, we went for a walk and picnic in the woods behind Tongdosa…

…and back.

That bring us up to date. Yesterday we went to a movie at the just opened multiplex in Yangsan. Oh boy, it’s about time this city of >200,000 got a movie theater. The only English movie was Mama Mia, but I liked it. Meryl Streep can sing pretty well and Pierce Brosnan gave it a shot. One love song in his natural, thick Scottish brogue was pretty good. Today is nothing yet. Tomorrow we’re going on a road trip for a few days. I’ll write about that when we get back.
Be well, all of you.

It’s kind of fun posting pictures as I take them. Yesterday’s jaunt took us to Pyochungsa, a 7th century temple site near Miryang, just northeast of here. It goes back to the first years of a unified Korea. None of the original wooden buildings are there. These are the third generation of buildings built after the late 16th century Japanese invasions. What’s left from the 10th century is the three tiered pagoda in the first picture and the bronze bell.

As usual, there is a nice walk through the woods to get to the temple. All in all, these day trips are just plain nice.

We spend a lot of time outside. I’ve acquired the Korean habit of protecting my skin. Myung has been doing it her whole life, and it shows. She also has some tricks, like putting fruit and potatoes on her face.

Be well, all of you.

Greetings. It’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegone. We took our usual walks. The highlights, such as they are, were a couple of visits to friends’ gardens. Last week we went to a tea plantation. The people also had a large garden. We picked stuff and had dinner and several kinds of tea in a semi-formal tea ceremony. It was an interesting combination of regular, informal, routine hanging out and some ritual. The ritual was basically limited to sitting around the woman of the house in a semi-circle while she carefully made tea in a formal way, except for the laughing and banter, then taking the tea with both hands oh so seriously. Yesterday we went to other Gyung Ja’s sister’s. They have a commercial Asian pear orchard and about an acre of garden. They grow many things, including peppers, lettuce, onions, a kind of leek, other greenery I don’t know the name of, chamay (a kind of melon), peanuts and several otgher things. This is harvest season. In fact, Harvest Day next Monday is a national holiday. It’s traditional for people with gardens to have everybody over to harvest and take home some of the stuff. It’s a big getting together time, not unlike our Thanksgiving though without the big feed. The whole harvesting stuff together thing is a lovely part of the culture, along with the extensive gardening itself. I didn’t bring my camera the other day, but did yesterday. We pulled up the peppers and separated the green ones form the red ones. Here, now you see pepper bushes and now you don’t. That’s Il Hwan in the first one. In the last one, we’re sitting in the shade picking them off the uprooted bushes and serarating them.

The agricultural sector here is actually having problems. As you can imagine, as the standard of living her improves, fewer people want to do hard farm work. They have few immigrant workers from nearby poor countries like the Phillippines. The work is done by Koreans and generally these workers make a living wage, but most of them yearn for better. The farming population is getting older and older. The days of the yeoman farmer are almost over here, as they have been for some time in the US. It’s an economic and cultural time of trial. They are hanging on by doing things the old way, picking by hand and involving the community and connections, but the prices are getting pretty astronomical. Rapid growth can handle this for a while, but without rapid growth and with that aging population of farmers, industrial farming is coming.
So much for my punditry. it’s still pretty nice now, even if things cost too much.
Be well, all of you.

Yesterday we went to Tongdosa. It turns out that the signs there are all fine except one. Myung thinks they want me to write brochures, but she isn’t sure. Also, in typically Korean fashion, the powers at be need to get their plans together and that won’t be from point A to point B. So, I’ll hear what that’s about when I hear it.

The picture above is of one of the small temple areas in the hills behind the main complex. Right behind where I took that picture is, yes, more baby buddhas.

Today? I just walked downtown to E Mart. That’s a big box modelled after Wal Mart. As big as it is, it’s small compared to a Wal Mart, but it’s big for Korea. A couple of blogs ago I said I should have taken some mundane shots of tghe walk before you get to the river before you get downtown. Here they are. First is down our street. To the left is our apartment building, the one with “SK” on it. Across the street is thaqt warehouse they were building and is now being finished out inside. I’m happy to report that our view remains mostly unblocked.

These next two are as you walk the few blocks down toward the flats. We’ll be walking under that freeway.

Here is view over the sound barrier by the freeway, almost before you get to the river.

they are making the river a nice walkway. It’s really no more of a river than the Calaveras River in Stockton in the spring, but they are making a little investment in beautification. It wouldn’t be too hard to do that in Stockton, just put a walkway and some simple crossings.

Finally you get to downtown. It’s a pretty routine place. Here is a shot of a building nearly finished with the subway station, which is above ground out here. There is supposed to be a movie cineplex, finally, for Yangsan, but work is going so slowly we were wondering if it will be finished. Many construction sites, including a huge apartment complex here, have been abandonned no doubt because of the credit crunch. Credit has been way too easy here, and they have learned from the US real estate meltdown. The see through building is the big blue one.

And finally, our home away from home, E Mart.

That’s about it for now. Talk to you later. Be well, all of you.

If I keep blogging at this rate, it’ll seem more like a diary than news updates. Yesterday we went to a temple right in Busan, Beomeosa. One popular way to tour Korea is to do “templestays”. For a nominal cost, you can go to a temple and have a simple room consisting of a pad to sleep on, a covering and a pillow, simple meals, Buddhist teaching and meditation, and free quiet time for silent contemplation and strolls through the grounds. A quick count on my map of Korea shows 66 official templestay temples. From the looks of it, Beomeosa may be one of the most popular ones. That would make sense, as Busan is Korea’s second biggest city and most people coming here at all are likely to go through. there are several up near Seoul which I assume are popular, but this appeared to be the most popular one I’ve been to except one not on the map by Gyeonju which was a monestary/temple with nuns women pilgrims only.
Typically, there is a nice walk up to any temple. There are then one or two gates. Along the way, there are pillars which mark the graves of noted monks.

The more popular temples have signs in English saying what this and that building or whatever is. They look like this, though often in poor English. I am honored to have been asked to rewrite the signs at Tongdosa, another popular temple near here I’ve written about before.

Here are the usual temple pics.

On the table there in the foreground of the last picture are many little baby buddhas. There were baby buddhas at the place we went a couple of days ago, and now they were here too. Aren’t they just adorable? There are sleepy buddhas, making faces buddhas, cold buddhas in stocking caps, buddhas with balls, buddha playing with his toes, as well as good little mindful buddhas. I half expected baby buddha in a manger. Cue the Christmas music.

I’m not doing much today. The democratic convention is over, so I’m not watching TV as much as the last four days. Now I’m ruminating about Palin for vice president. Is it me or is it wierd in here?
Be well, all of you.

As long as I’m writing more frequently, why not do it again after only two days? So, I’m baaaaack.
-Sa at the end of a place noun means temple. -Pokpo means waterfall. A few km from us is Hongyongsa and Hongyongpokpo. It’s either a bus ride and a 3 km walk, which we did today, or about an 8 km walk through the woods behind our place, which we’ll no doubt do soon. Yesterday was not picturesque, as we went to Busan and extended my visa again, went to a pretty routine city park, and went to the international market for Quaker Oats. Oh, we got cheap California raisins for about 20% of the cost of Korean raisins. Today was yet another nice walk. Here are some pics. This first place is near where the bus dropped us. It’s typical agricultural scenery.

You walk along this, unless you have a car which we don’t.

But like many areas, the views off the road are nice. Even if you were driving, you’d be looking at this.

After about two km you get to a bridge and can look down at the creek and picnickers. Then after a bit you can look up the creek at more picnickers.

Now, Koreans like to have style, no matter how wierd. Up pretty much near the beginning to nowhere are these public toilets.

Finally up a narrow road you get to the temple and the falls. It was a little hot today, so I was kind of draggin’ in one of these pics which Myung took.

So much for another day at the ranch. Tomorrow we’re going to Busan again. There’s some walk Myung wants to do. What else? We might go to the Busan Giants baseball game. They are in a heated pennant race.
Be well, all of you.

Y’know those awkward times when you’re checking into a motel with someone you really should be doing that with? There is a wide open industry here to handle those concerns. For starters, certain motels are known as “love hotels”. You can spend a night there, but you have to check out during the day so they can rent the room for one or two hours at a time during the day. You don’t have to get the fish eye from the hotel clerk because you can pull into the parking garage and pull the garage door behind you, go directly to you room, slide your card and make yourselves comfortable.

There are even pictures of the rooms above the garage door so you know just what your getting into.
I’m going to try to blog more often than once a month. So, since my last entry we’ve done what we often do, that is go out somewhere for some kind of activity for at least part of the day. Like, yesterday we took a local bus to a place where we then walked about 5 miles to a waterfall. That “69” love hotel was one of many on the way to that pretty place.

I changed the setting on my camera and got an interesting blue hue to the base of that waterfall.

After that we went to Myung’s Friends’ restaurant and chowed down on Korean barbeque with them and other friends. I didn’t have take any pics there, but it was some of the same crowd that are in this picture from last month which I posted earlier.

Today we’re going to the local market, what Americans would usually call the farmers’ market. It’s every 5 days on dates that end with 1 and 6, except the 31st. It’s the cheapest place to get fresh food including fish and meat. It’s a regular activity for us on market days. I think I’ll take a few pictures and get back to this with them after we come back.
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Hi again. We lazed around watching the Democratic convention on CNN then walked to the market. I should have taken a picture of the ‘hood but didn’t think of it till we got to the river. They are working at beautifying it. It should be nice when it’s done. So far they have cleaned it up, put in bike paths on both sides as far up as our neighborhood, and made some crossings and steps down.

You walk through town a while and get to the area where the market is, which is basically about four blocks of blocked off lanes. Here is one of the entrances.

I took a bunch of pictures of the stuff in there, mostly some of the stuff we bought today. It’s like most Asian markets in most ways, very traditional. Nothing is pre-packaged. I’ll just post all of these, even though you’ve seen so many market pictures and potatoes aren’t exactly exotic. Here’s Myung buying white potatoes.

Here she is buying doraji, a root similar to ginseng. She sauteed it tonight with seaweed in sesame, garlic, red pepper and probably something else. Most things are prepared with those ingredients here, in varying amounts and proportions. Obviously this vendor is selling many other things.

Here’s some ginseng. Most varieties are inexpensive here.

One common way of eating is to wrap stuff in leaves and pop it in your mouth.
Probably the most popular leaf is the red leaf lettuce Americans are quite used to. Another popular leaf is sesame leaf.

Koreans like to buy their carrots still dirty. Myung says they are fresher that way.

Here’s rice and legumes mostly.

Here’s the kimchi. Myung makes ours, but this gives you the idea how many kinds are common. There are actually dozens of kinds.

Apples and peaches. the peaches look great, but they aren’t very juicy or sweet. The apples and Asian pears are great, though.

Mushrooms are one of the few things that are cheaper here than in the States.

Bored yet? This will be over soon. If you like steamed corn, like most Asian markets, you can grab a bite while your at the market.

Or stop and smell the flowers.

Lastly, I’m down to the phish photos. Today we bought these squid. We often eat mackerel. there are many kinds of fish but most of it is pricey. Those long ones are razor fish. They are good but not too heavy, so $5 each is a bit much. The third pic is of dried little fishes of different sizes. They can be eaten as is. or lightly sauteed with, what do you think, garlic and red pepper. The last pic is of these tiny rockfish about the size of your hand. Pathetic. They barely qualify as juveniles, I’d guess. They have to be 20 years old to reproduce. Oh well. It’s happening all over.

So, we got home and made dinner. Most of it was Myung’s doing. I made a traditional American salad with red lettuce, onion, bell pepper and carrots with thousand island dressing I made out of mayo, ketchup and pickles Myung made. I forgot to put in the cukes. The pot has kimchi stew. You can see rice there, doraji with seaweed, these pancake things like Indian pakora which she made out of sweet potatoes and greens this time, spicy long green peppers with sesame, and the little fishies. Typically, Koreans have a multi-course meal like this. As you can see, I didn’t exactly make the table look picture perfect. It’s our one table and it’s gets used a lot.

Okay, that’s it for now. Be well, all of you.

My favorite bathroom signs remain the ones that were at Donahue’s coffee shop on Disappointment Slough near Stockton. The doors were labelled “Inboards” and “Outboards”. For those of you who may be not boat literate, boats with engines inside are inboards and boats with engines mounted on the back are outboards. You go from there.
It’s hard to believe my last blog entry was almost a month ago. How time flies! It’s been pretty warm and rainy for the month. Usually the temps have been in the 80’s F (That’s high 20’s C) which isn’t too bad even given the humidity. Just in the last week, it’s been getting cooler in the evening. From Late July to about last weekend when there was a three day national holiday weekend is the tourist season. Several times we joined the throngs and went somewhere popular. One day it was estimated 6 million went to the beach somewhere. Now, Korea has a very long coastline, but that’s about 12% of the total population. We went a couple of times with friends or Myung’s sister’s family. We also went alone a couple of times. At no time was it your romantic, lonely stroll. Those are Myung’s friends, Geong Ja and Il Hwan, and me in the shade of a “pavillion” on the beach.

A couple of weekends ago it was her sister’s family we went with. Here they are inland from the beach at Seoraksan National Park, way up in the northeast.

And here is a spot near there.

Here are some pics of Seoraksan. It’s yet another beautiful place in this country.

Of course there are temples. Here are the obligatory temple pics. I still don’t tire of how they look from all the angles.

As long as I’m talking friends and family, here’s one of Myung’s childhood friend, Yung He and her husband, Geong Yoerl. They all went to grade school together.

This week we went on another little road trip, this time by ourselves, down to Hallyeo Maritime National Park on the south coast. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s beautiful, like a poor man’s Halong Bay in Vietnam. The other is a famous naval battle between Korea and Japan happened there in the 1590’s.

The main naval battle was fought here. It actually is interesting. The Korean admiral utilized the world’s first iron clad ships, called turtle ships because they had covers like turtles with spikes to deter anyone from jumping on. Secondly, he used the then new strategy of flanking the enemy ships and attacking at an angle. Before, they charged and passed, like the European navies still did a hundred years later, firing canons and trying to board. He engaged the front of the Japanese formation with his invinsible turtle ships while the smaller ships cut them up from the side. It all happened here.

After that we went up to Deogyusan National Park. Need I say it’s exquisitly beautiful?

Then we went to Maisan Provincial Park near there. It’s mostly famous for this temple built by a lay person over the course of 30 years. There is no mortar, not even on the little towers. Needless to say, there are many signs telling people not to touch. Someday somebody’s going to mess it up, no doubt.

Some of our travelling together is very nice. Sometimes….

The picture of the guy in the upper left sums up my feelings after a long day somewhere and the then the sometimes long subway ride to Yangsan after a long bus ride.

Let’s talk food. I’d say we eat fusion. Actually, I probably get more American food than when I’m travelling because I can have anything I can find the ingredients to and make it myself. That’s as long as I can cook it on the stove. Koreans don’t usually have ovens. They fry everything. Even Korean barbeque is essentially frying, as it’s on a hot plate over coals or gas. You just grease it up with pork fat or something and fry whatever you have. The outer part of the BBQ surface is a moat where you boil up soup the way you like it. The ingredients are all on the side. This is what we have whwen we are at Geong Joerl and Yung He’s restaurant. Anyway, at home we often have fusion or a little of this and a little of that. We do eat the Korean way, that is we have one or two main things and several side dishes which invariably include a couple of kinds of kimchi. We may also have an American salad with oil and vinegar type dressings or thousand island I make up out of mayo, ketchup and pickled cucumbers Myung makes. We even have balsamic vinegar. This is foreign food to Myung. Also, she is “the noodle queen”. I pronounced her that after watching her eat noodles maybe nine out of ten days we were travelling. She wasn’t that wild about Indian food and steadily enjoyed noodles. So we have spaghetti a lot. I’m not that busy, so I kind of like chopping up the excellent tomatoes they have here and adding the usual ingredients. I wish we had fresh Italian seasoning, but I was able to find dried McCormick’s in a store in Busan. It’s looking like I make breakfast, so we always start with filter coffee with beans ground at the store we get them. Sometimes I even drink my coffee with sweetened condensed milk, a habit I got into after eturning from SE Asia in ’99. Then I often make eggs. You don’t want to know how many eggs I eat. If I had a cardiologist I think he’d have a heart attack. I like the way I cook eggs, nice and soft over low heat. I’m afraid the Koreans like them flash fried hard over high heat. That’s why I’m the breakfast cook. I often make omelets and scramlets with various things I’m familiar with, like mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions and ham. The ham here is like spam, but what the heck. I also like to make home fries. Myung likes this fine and lets me do my thing. Oh, we found Quaker’s Oatmeal in Busan. We went through that in no time. For a price you can get raisens. Also it was good with granny smith-type apples and cinnamon. Lunch may be sandwiches or Korean food. You can by whole wheat bread with too much conditioner, and that’s what we have around the house. We have ham a lot, usually with mustard, onions, tomatoes and lettuce. Sometimes we have american cheese. Real cheese is expensive and a little hard to find. I’m not going $8/pound for cheddar, thank you very much. One good thing is that Myung doesn’t have preconceived notions about foreign food, so what is old hat to me is fun for her. She even likes peanut butter, mayonaise and lettuce sandwiches with me. The folks back home laugh at that one. As for the Korean food, Myung is a fine cook. Sometimes it’s a little hot even for me, but it’s just the way we like it, ain’t it boys. I’ve eaten practically everything you can eat someplace or another, so nothing “funny” bothers me. Koreans generally use only a few spices, salt, black pepper, much red pepper, sesame, soy sauce, onion, garlic and ginger. Other seasoning is in gourmet cooking, but you don’t see much of it. Delicate spices don’t exist. Most of what she makes is fried or sauteed. What the Koreans lack in seasoning variety, they more than make up with food variety. We eat a million kinds of greens, tubors, beans, ferns, whatever. Our main meat is mackerel. We bought a hunk of pork last week. That was a first. Beef’s expensive, though it’s come down since Korea started allowing American beef after many years. That’s a long story involving mad cow fear, saving the domestic beef industry and competing political entities. The kimchi is of course not fried. We have a rice cooker. That’s handy. We also eat a lot of soups and stews. She really is a good cook.

Those are breakfast dishes we had a few days ago at a restaurant while we were travelling. I had the tripe soup and she had the congealled blood drop soup. I had blood soup before in Asia. I preferred the tripe, with three cups of coffee. Fusion.

The food is so hot here that I wear a headband to keep the sweat out of my eyes.
Y’know, I could really write endlessly about this time in my life. Maybe if I wrote more often, the entries would 1) be more digestible and 2) have more written content and fewer pictures, at least at a time. Well, I’ll try to get more in here. I’m not sure who reads this anyway. I get very little feedback. I think I’m doing it mostly for myself, like a diary. Someday it may be of interest to me. The pics I’ll have on CD’s and DVD’s.
I’ll close for now with a few more pictures I just like. The first is of one of the huge black butterflies here. The others are just pics of Myung and me. Be well, all of you.

I say this a lot these days: I’m not that busy. Myung and I just hang out much of the time. Usually we do something during the day. Occasionally we go somewhere overnight. Sometimes, especially in bad weather, we stay in and do stuff on the computer, read and watch TV. I must say, sometimes it is a little boring, but so is travelling all the time and working. I’m caught up on much of the news by reading it on the net and watching news channels like CNN and BBC. I’ve become probably more of a political junkie than I was, and that’s saying something. Today we were going to go up the coast to Chilbo and watch a couple of evenings of jazz on the beach, but the weather is threatening and sitting on the beach in the rain doesn’t sound like fun. Maybe we’ll just hit the beach with our friends on Sunday when the weather is supposed to clear. Korea is at the northern edge of the monsoon so although it isn’t very hot, only occasionally over 30 degrees C (about 90 F), it rains a lot at this time of the year. It should be dry and warm/hot from about the second week of August till the second week of September. Then it will cool down and be beautifully colorful by mid to late October.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures. Finally, duh, I figured out that the pixelated pictures are the ones I’ve rotated, so from now on I’m going to post only the horizontal ones. Too bad in the camera and when viewing them the computer or on a CD/DVD, they look fine. These don’t need much narration. They’re mostly of nice places. The soldier is Myung’s nephew who got a weekend off from his universal draft duty.

Needless to say, this period of my life is interesting. Living here has had many facets. There’s Korea still being a new place, yet there is no rush at all to see every little thing. We’re getting around to stuff in due time. I’m getting used to the place. I even understand Korean a little and can concoct a sentence or two. So, there is also the experience of settling in. Then there’s the experience of settling in with Myung. Add to that the likelihood we will travel again in not too many months. That means, yet again in our lives, both of us are following a path that doesn’t have clear signposts. We’re playing it a lot by ear. It’s like travelling even when we stay at home. What’s around the corner and what do you want to do today? Well, “shanti, shanti”, as they say on the backpacker circuit in India. The small stuff and the big stuff will come about in due time. Unusually for a Korean, Myung doesn’t need to rush around and achieve as much as she can. She has already succeeded and doesn’t need to prove anything. I did, too, to my satisfaction. So what now? There must be something we’re supposed to do, or be. When I think of something, I’ll let you know. Myung says she is fine. “Fine” works for me. For now, I think we’re both fine with taking our time to have a seat and let things emerge as they will.