Adventures in Solitude

My school had Friday off, so I went off on what I consider a trial run for my future travels in Asia. I had been wondering if I could still travel in the manner I had in Europe in the summer of 2006. It looks like I can, at least for three day stretches. On Thursday I got on a train at 11pm and tried to take a nap until I arrived at Busan at 2:30am. Busan is the second largest city in Korea. It is in the SouthEast corner of the country on the ocean. I wandered downtown for a little while and tried to see what sights I could at night, such as the busan tower (a tower on top of a hill from which one can have a good view of the city when it is open, presumably), a couple statues, and bridges to one of the nearby islands with nice views of the myriad harbour (to reference another song by The New Pornographers). In a stretch of downtown there is a road where every intersection is a variation on these shifting lights:After exploring I tried to walk across the city to the intercity bus terminal. I took a wrong turn and ended up going down a mini peninsula and back up it. During my walk I had nice views of the full moon and the neon lights that light up any Korean city. I also had a pleasant walk along the craggy coast. As the predawn light lit up the flowering hills I saw that some good came out of my unintentional detour.
Had I been only a little slower I would also have seen the sun rise over the ocean or a park instead of through the buildings, but oh well.
I then passed through the industrial district, which is the part of the detour that I was not so happy about. Almost a third of foreigners in Korea are cheap migrant laborers, largely Russian or African, who do dangerous and dirty jobs that Koreans don't want to do, such as the many Russians I saw on their way to work at the fisheries. By the time I got back to the proper route I simply got on a subway instead of trying to walk the other 10k to the bus station. I slept a bit on the bus to Jinju, a moderately sized town. I mostly went there to see the city's ancient fortress, which is surrounded by modernity:Inside the extensive fortress walls, I became aware of how provincial Jinju is when hundreds of people said hello to me or shouted about me to their friends because I am a Westerner. I'm amazed at how openly people will stare at anyone who looks different from them. If I saw someone who had purple skin I would certainly look at them, but I would be subtle about it so as not to be rude. Here, everyone just stares (I've had this happen plenty of times in Daejeon too, but I felt like two thirds of the people I saw in Jinju had that reaction). I understand it from the children, but adults, far from telling their children to stop, stare right along with them. School children from kindergarten through high school would giggle amongst themselves and then one of them would come up to me and say hello, or hi teacher, and they would all laugh. Sometimes they would have short conversations with me: "How are you?" "I'm doing alright. How are you?" "I'm fine thank you. Where are you from?" "I'm from the United States." Others would simple shout to each other "waegook!", which means foreigner. Several groups of young women (I would guess college aged but they might have been in high school or older than me) asked if they could take their picture with me. They said I was handsome, which I think had a lot more to do with making their friends burst into fits of giggling than anything to do with how they thought I looked. All in all, it was one of my most intense feelings of being a minority. It's uncomfortable enough being singled out by your skin color and other superficial qualities when the attention is positive; I can't imagine how horrible it is to be noticed like that in a negative way. Other than being treated like the first white person all of the people there had ever seen, the fortress was interesting.
The Jinju fortress is most significant because it was the site of one of three victories that Korea had over Japan during the Imjin war in the 1590s. A super brief history of the war: Japan had been newly reunited by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who decided to go on a war of conquest of pretty much all Asia. The first step was to acquire a land route into China, and so he decided to conquer Korea (this is probably the most embarrassing part of the whole embarrassing war for Korea: it wasn't even about them). Japan conquered about two thirds of Korea in the first twenty days, including both Seoul and Pyongyang, before facing a devastating naval loss. They were then slowed down when their five to one numerical superiority was not enough to take Jinju, and hence South Western Korea. The Japanese slowed down at this point, but came back with overwhelming force and slaughtered over 70,000 people at Jinju a year later before being driven off the peninsula, mostly by the Chinese (this is overemphasizing Jinju's importance in the war, but if you care enough about the details you can look it up yourself). Anyway, there are some monuments to some of the war's Korean heroes. The Korean commander during the siege of Jinju was Kim Si-min: There is also a shrine to a female entertainer who seduced a Japanese general and them pulled him with her over a cliff to their deaths. She is also commemorated in this relief:
There were several other images of the war:
A museum had also been built inside the fortress walls. This is one of my favorite kinds of building in Korea: it is clearly modern but also has strong influences from ancient times. It manages to incorporate tradition and modern conveniences and advances without being phony (like the fake columns of neo classical buildings):
The museum had some nice reconstructions and artifacts, like this example of 1590s siege weaponry:It also had an animated 3d movie about the battle, which was pure propaganda unlike anything I've seen in a museum except in the propaganda museum in Nuremberg (which is, ironically, itself a piece of propaganda, but it would be hard to make a museum about Nazis in the current political climate that simply stated the facts without inserting any opinions, and specifically without thoroughly denouncing them). In the movie all the Koreans were brave and noble defenders of their homes while the Japanese leadership was purely evil and the Japanese soldiers were cowardly. Watching the movie you would think that the Koreans won the war, not just that battle. I did my best to keep my opinions of the film to myself, but there was a point where I actually laughed out loud because the dying general sees himself and his family in a field of wheat, ala Gladiator.

After viewing the fortress I ate a meal of eels in a restaurant along the river. Eel tastes pretty much like mild fish. I ate everything you see pictured below, but not the second round of side dishes that were brought out a few minutes later. Korean meals involve far too many side dishes to eat (and usually several of which I truly don't want to eat), which seems a bit at odds with the country's history of Buddhist influence, where great pains are made not to waste any food.
It was then time for another nap in the buses to Jirisan National Park. At the entrance to the park there is a magnificent temple complex with more than thirty buildings.The path up to the temple complex was lined with lanterns, and even the parking lot (above) was nicely decorated.
There were many larger than life (1.5x to 2x sized) statues:There were also equally interesting paintings on the outside of the buildings that housed the statues:...Pagodas, both old and new:...truly ancient monuments:...oversized and heavily decorated musical instruments:...this building with tree trunk support beams:...and other Buddhist stuff:[Note: I am fully aware that there are far too many pictures here. The scary part is that I was selective about which photos I posted. I take way too many pictures of stuff like this. You should see the number of pictures I took of The Acropolis...]

From the temple I went a couple kilometers up a bamboo lined stone path to a waterfall:
As the sun set I backtracked a little ways to a campground, which had a bunch of balanced rocks.I learned at this point that about 90% of the national park was closed for the season, so I will have to come back later to climb South Korea's second highest mountain. I went to sleep and was rather cold despite wearing all the warm weather gear I own and eating peanut butter straight from the jar (sound familiar, European Hobos? I have a lot more warm weather gear with me now though). I got up at about five to walk back down. I took buses and trains to Yeosu, a small city on the center of Korea's South coast. Yeosu is famous for being the base of operations for the admiral who sank most of the Japanese fleet in the 1590s. Here is a reconstruction of his military headquarters:I wandered the city for a while, visiting places like an island that is one big botanical garden.The island has a cave called Dragon Cavern. Legend has it that it was once filled with thousands of centipedes and so the locals stayed away. One day a female pearl diver who was ignorant of the area entered it and fainted at the sight. Her husband and the villagers used fires and smoke to make the centipedes pass out, and the smoke made the cave look like it was inhabited by a dragon. This story was conveyed to me by a volunteer at the island who was eager to be my guide. Here he is in his shiny suit below the island's lighthouse:He asked me to look over the English on his notes, which was pretty much fine, and he told me about a few other sites on the island, such as the 215m long barefoot walk, which is designed to help the blood flow, but from the looks of it the blood will be flowing outside our bodies, not in it:After leaving the island I wandered the city again and ended up on the park that overlooks the island. I'm pretty sure that this is not the path that one is supposed to take up there, but it worked:The path through backyards and ridiculously sloped vegetable fields came out at this gateway overlooking a not yet completed bridge:(Don't tell Sarah Palin about this bridge to nowhere or else she will adamantly support it until it becomes a national laughingstock and then she will claim that part of what makes her a maverick is that she was against it from day one...)
The bridge is one of many construction projects in the city in preparation for the 2012 world expo in Yeosu. There are posters, bumper stickers, building fronts, etc everywhere promoting the expo. If the Daejeon 1993 expo is any indication it will mostly give them weird looking buildings that are trying to look futuristic but end up being nearly abandoned and looking silly fifteen years later. Of course, at least Yeosu will get a new bridge out of the deal... Anyway, the park had lots of monuments, flowers, and pretty views.At the bottom of the park was this house made from a larger destroyed house. Notice the bathroom tile on the garden wall and that the door clearly was once inside. In the evening I took a bus to a much larger island also connected to Yeosu. At the tip is another pretty big temple complex. I arrived after nightfall, so I hiked by the light of the nearly full moon up into the mountains by the sea and slept out. It was a nice night: I didn't have to put on warm clothes until about one a.m., which was the same time I moved locations because my first choice was more steeply sloped that it looked like and I kept slipping a little down hill. At four thirty a.m. I was awoken by the sounds of a group of Korean hikers. I got up and joined them on the top of a mountain to watch the sun rise through the mist, with views in all directions from the highest point on the island.(In this picture I look about how you would expect one to look after doing what I have described above for the previous few days.)Partway down the mountain there was a Buddhist temple complex. The temples I saw this weekend are the most impressive and least commercialized ones I have seen so far in Korea. I have to say that building places of worship partway up a mountain so that one has to climb hundreds of stairs through imposing gateways will definitely increase the awe factor. It helps when pretty much no one else builds on any mountains, so that temples are high above the secular world.This temple had a thing for turtles.Of course, I should talk, given my obvious (from picture frequency) obsession with dragons.This temple also featured several narrow crevasses that one had to pass through to enter different parts of the temple complex.The many lanterns might be permanent, but might be in preparation for Buddha's birthday on May 2nd. Tripod!...and so many turtles:...more random Buddhist stuff:This adorable old man seemed oblivious to the fact that his hat said 'princess' in sparkling script.On the rest of the way down the mountain I had a nice view of the fishing nets in the ocean and of the quintessentially Asian act of hanging seaweed up to dry on clothes lines on the roof: Restaurants and street vendors line the steep path from the bus stop up to the temple, and both carried interesting sea food:
Well this has been my most ridiculously long post to date. I need to be less adventurous, less diligent about taking pictures, or a better self editor when it comes to narrowing down which pictures to include. And to think my last post was on microblogging...