Important Announcement

I decided to extend my contract to stay until Alanna finishes hers. We'll be done and heading back to North America at the end of May/beginning of June.

Update: This post is a lie.

Mokpo and Gwangju

In September Will's sister and brother-in-law came to visit him. We had all planned to go climb in Wolchusan National Park, but decided against it when it started raining and everyone but me had insufficient rain gear (the advantage of living in Portland being that one is always ready for wet weather) and climbing on wet metal staircases is unwise. Instead we went to Mokpo, a major port town in the Southwest corner of the country and the place to get ferries to Jeju island or China. We wandered through some interesting winding neighborhoods to the top of the small mountain overlooking the harbor.

(this seems even less safe when you see it is on a balcony with a bit of a drop)

(Above is the Mokpo ferry terminal. I rather like the building.)

Sadly we couldn't ring the bell, but it had some interesting designs on it:

(The far pavilion has the bell in it)

It wouldn't be Korea without an obligatory statue of Admiral Yi Sun Shin

There were a couple of old cannons that used to fire every hour during the day to tell people the time.

A pavilion had some odd (but rather common in Korea) iconography. I'm not sure what the organ-looking thing is supposed to be, but I'm amused by the fact that the dragons are holding them with their mustaches. The cranes seem to want them too:

Above is the Korean skyline in any city in Korea (except parts of Seoul): identical apartment buildings as far as the eye can see.

Alanna and I found a small overgrown shrine up on the mountain, and thoroughly enjoyed going off path to get a better look at it. At the top there were a couple small Buddhist carvings, not to mention a great view. On the way down there was a balanced rock:

I love this sign. The part in red says "Ui heom," which means "danger."
The blue part presumably reads "watch for suicidal babies."

The city is building a new bridge to connect the mainland with one of the many nearby islands:

At the bottom was an orchid and sculpture garden.
The orchids weren't in season, but the gardens had these fantastic towers:

The sculpture garden wasn't all that impressive, but it had it's moments:

The mountain is lit up at night, which makes it look fake:

Near where we started was the former Japanese consulate, in other words, where Japan ruled the city from when they took over Korea at the turn of the century:Also, I don't think I've mentioned before that Korean semi trucks are a little different than ours. Most buildings don't have loading docks because there is no space for them, so trucks just park on the streets. Thus rear loading is not ideal, so the trucks open on the side:
That night we ate another one of those odd seafood meals with live (well, wriggling at any rate) critters (among other things). I really wish blogger would let me upload the video here, but instead here's a link to Alanna's fantastic documentation of our consumption of still moving octopus bits.




Here's what a few of the things we ate looked like minutes before they were on our table:

Like many Korean cities, Mokpo has a couple lit-up streets:

We stayed the night and then went up to Gwangju (not to be confused with Gyeongju or Gongju, both of which I've written about before). The bus station there is huge and look and feels like an airport. Unfortunately, the best places to hang out were closed, so we had to stay in the less-sanitary parts rather than the(Actually, it mean the waiting room for the cleaning staff, but since it was right across the hall from the waiting room 'cleaner' seemed more like a comparative adjective than a noun.)

Also, you could tell it was almost Chuseok (sometimes called 'Korean Thanksgiving' by foreigners) because people were wearing their hanboks (traditional clothes).

Gwangju is most notably the site of Korea's version of Tienanmen Square where hundreds of civilians were killed by government paratroopers. I'll talk more about that when I write about my second visit there to see and go to more of the sites related to that incident. This time we went to the Gwangju National Museum, which was under renovation but still had some good exhibits, such as small Buddhist metal figurines from reliquaries. Besides the cool tiny Buddhist bronze work there were also some good examples of the height of Korean pottery. Outside were some dolmens, a kind of barrow tomb found all over the world. According to Wikipedia: "The number of dolmens in North and South Korea, approximately 30,000, is about 40% of the total number of dolmens in the world." Most dolmen that we see are those whose mounds of earth have eroded away, leaving just the stone skeleton:

At a nearby exhibition hall was this interesting statue of a scholar:

Also, other monuments and statues:

One of the highlights of the weekend was the Gwangju folk museum.Outside were some reconstructed folk monuments:

...giant Korean folk swings:
...and original monuments incorporated into the museum:
Inside there were reconstructed fishing boats with lots of nets:
...backpacks:
...processions with traditional Korean lanterns:
...tiny models of folk games, including the giant swing from outside, flag raising:

...and my favorite, a game where two enormous ropes are battered against each other with a rider on each side, one representing a woman (but always acted out by a man since women were not permitted to participate) and another representing a man. If the woman team won there would be a plentiful harvest.

In the foreground seems to be a game of tug-of war.

Also in the museum: signs that would make any Anthro major I know wince (well, the first line anyway, the rest of it is interesting):

...masks:
...ornate funereal palanquins that belonged to the wealthy or were rented by the poor:

...painted tigers:
...and fantastic photos from the time not so long ago when Korea was filled with thatch roofed cottages. In recent decades a Korean president decided that the traditional houses made Korea look too 'primitive' and so outlawed them and replaced them with the cement boxes that fill Korea today. Only a few folk villages keep the traditional style.