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I
took
a trip to Korea in June, 2002. My Korean wife, Gihong, always takes
the kids there in summer, but I usually stay in Japan and teach. This
year, however, I met up with them and spent about 10 days there.
This
was a "tracing old steps" trip. I don't think I hardly went
a single place I hadn't been before, but since I hadn't been back to
Korea in six years, I thought it would be fun to see how the old places
I'd gone to while I lived there had changed. Although I took a laptop
as I had on the Palau trip, I didn't write this while there at night.
Rather, I'm writing this from home in Tokyo and looking back on an enjoyable
stay.
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We
started out in my wife's hometown of Busan. We rented a car and drove
west out of Busan to the city of Tongyoung. One of my wife's old friends
has a timeshare at a condo there, and she gave us her card and told
us to go use it. The URL for the place is http://www.kumhoresort.co.kr/eng/chungmu/condo.htm
.We had an apartment on the sixth floor, but they didn't give us a
room looking out to sea. Instead we had to look back towards shore
and the town. Soon after we got up to the room, I looked out the window
and saw this beautiful scene. |
| If
you actually did click the link above, you know that the picture that
they put up of the Resort is a lot more attractive than this one.
Still, this is what the Chungmu Marina Resort looked like as we cruised
out to see on a chartered boat. Tongyoung is on what is called the
Hallyo Waterway (the "Riviera of Korea" to the Kumho people),
and if you go there and never take a cruise, well, it's like going
all the way to Orlando and never going to Disneyland. So cruise you
must. |
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Korea
hasn't had a lot of heroes that I'm aware of, so the ones that they
have had you really hear about. General Yi (also romanized as "Lee"
or "Rhee" on occasion) Soon Shin is like Washington and
Lincoln rolled into one. Back 500 years ago or so the Japanese brought
a whole armada of ships to the coast of Korea, intent on bringing
the Koreans to their knees. What happened instead was that General
Yi had one of the world's first ironclads up his sleeve, the famous
"Turtle Boat," and with it he destroyed the Japanese as
their cannonballs bounced off its iron deck. This is a picture of
the Turtle Boat lighthouse as seen from the island on which the General
camped for four years so long ago. |
|
As your four-hour
tour progresses, you see some pretty spectacular rock formations.
I don't know it the real Riviera has any views like this; I didn't
see any where I was there. This reminds me more of what we saw in
Thailand, except that these rocks don't look to be limestone. We
took lots and lots of pictures, but here's one that gives you a
pretty good idea of what it's like.
|
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OK, with cruise out of the way,
it's time for lunch. I really did enjoy the food in Korea, but I've
got to admit that I kind of eat a few favorite dishes over and over.
One of them was a Chinese dish that I never see back home in Japan,
jajang myon, pictured here in the foreground. It looks not
unlike motor oil on worms, but it tastes devine. Here it's got thin
slices of cucumber on it. Center left is hot radish kimchi
and sweet and sour radish slices, or tanmooji with sweet onion
slices. They taste very good dipped in fermented soybean paste,
center. We also ordered fried Chinese dumplings, or mandu, center
right. Got to admit I like the ones in Japan a little better. At night
we often had kalbi, or Korean-style barbecued ribs. |
| I
only include this one because I like the look on Kelly's face as she
makes short work of her noodles and fried rice. |
 |
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When
when weren't cruising around, we were driving around. When I got out
of the parking of the condo I took a left and got a very nice view
when we got to the top of the first hill. We were still close to the
condo, so this is basically the view we would've gotten had we stayed
in a room facing out to sea. The road rolled up, down, and all around
this peninsula jutting out in the sea, and every time we got up to
the top of a head land we got a great view. The drive was so nice
that we went back for another tour the next day. |
| At
the tip the peninsula is a park. It's not visible from the street,
and you could drive right past it very easily. If we hadn't had a
map that had it marked, we would have. That would have been a big
loss, because the view was one of the prettiest we'd ever seen. We
couldn't help comparing it with the view from the Hotel Nikko we'd
been treated to a few months before in Palau. |
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|
|
OK,
I've never put a picture like this in my travelogs before, but we
asked somebody up there to take a picture of us, and here's how it
came out. |
| Back
in Busan, I decided that I wanted to go up in the Pusan Tower again.
The view is nice, to be sure, but the real reason I wanted to do it
was that Busan had changed so much I wanted to experience something
familiar, and I figured I'd recognize the view from up there. I did.
At least they hadn't changed the shape of the mountain and the bridge
was still orange. |
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I
wrote last time that it seemed like all the housing starts of the
last ten years had been apartments. Well, it's gotten worse. I found
myself looking for a real Korean house. Someone must live in a house,
right? Pretty hard to find. They build them high, many even 19 stories,
which is something you rarely or never see in Japan. Perhaps they
just don't fear earthquakes in Korea. Yes, we were staying in one
of these, too. |
| Since
we were staying in Haeundae, we were able to walk to the new aquarium
they have built right on Haeundae Beach. If you've looked at many
of my travel pages, you know that going to aquariums is a recurring
theme. The one there really is nice, probably as nice as any I've
seen. A little too much flash photography going on, though, and it
doesn't seem to be discouraged at all. |
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I
have fond memories of going to the rollaway drinking tents, or pojangmacha,
on Haeundae Beach in the 80's. Well, they're still there, but with
the official pursuit of pushing the area upscale, the pojangmacha
have been pushed into a corner away from the beach in favor of places
like Bennigan's and TGIFriday's. The ones that remain are all nearly
identical, save for their identification numbers outside, and they
all have fish tanks of lobster, sea squirt, sea cucumber, octopus,
sea urchins, and unbelievable pink sea worms, just visible above
Gihong's shoulder. Her face says it all-- if you weren't raised
eating that kind of stuff, the mere thought will give you shivers.
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Tokyo,
Japan
August 1, 2002
© Glennsworld, 2002 All rights reserved.
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