Hello from Anseong.
This weekend is only two days long, there's no holiday on Monday... I was just getting used to these three-day weekends. Oh well, back to a five-day work week this week.
Being in Korea has presented me with wonderful opportunities to be a weekend tourist, and if I could find a tourism map in English I'd be set! I just keeping driving around, keeping track of my wanderings on my GPS so I can find my way home.
This weekend I wandered across something truly amazing: I was driving through Suwon and came upon a giant structure with the road going around it in a traffic circle. I later found out it's the Paldalmun (aka, the South Gate), part of the old walls that surrounded the city before the city outgrew it's own walls.
As I drove further down the road I could hear music playing and a crowd occasionally cheering, and after circling the block a few times I finally found a parking lot next to the Hwaseong Fortress. The music was coming from a pipe player and a drummer, playing as a tightrope walker performed in front of the fortress. I took a bunch of pictures (natch!), but chose to return on Sunday to explore the fortress (I was running of of time...) Here's the guy walking the tightrope, a little wobbly at first...
Oops, I'm Falling! It's ok to drop the fan, but hold onto the microphone! I'm not sure but I think losing his balance is part of the show. Other than this slip, he had amazingly good balance.
One of the other guys in the troupe retrieved the fan the tightrope walker dropped.
After the close call the guy really needed to take a break to calm his nerves, he sat on the rope working the crowd for a few minutes.
Bouncing on the tightrope, this guy got some serious air! He was bouncing off of his butt, not his feet -- I can only imagine how long he had to practice before managing not to bounce sideways just enough to miss the tightrope on the way down, or land just wrong on the tightrope.
"Thanks, and keep coming back..." After the show he sat down and posed for pictures.That's all I had time for on Saturday, seeing the show was a nice touch of the history and culture. I met some friends for dinner in Songton, Korean food again (surprise...). They have a cucumber kimchee that's unique, and the Korean spicy pork is very good.
Sunday 18 May 2008, in Suwon, South Korea
On Sunday the rain and I arrived in Suwon around 11:00am. It was wet and close enough to lunch time to get a bite to eat, so I stopped at a hole-in-the-wall place for lunch.
You can see the menu above the chef on the right side of the picture (click it to enlarge), and if you can read it your Korean is much better than mine! I've been hesitant to go out to eat alone since I don't speak any Korean and usually the people in the restaurants don't speak any English: ordering food is like a box of chocolates. I don't know what I'm worried about, I haven't had anything that I wouldn't eat again in this country. Ordinary restaurant food is generally inexpensive, lunch today cost me 6,000 Korean Won (about $6).
I'm never sure what I eat but this tasted... just ok, nothing to write home about. I did recognize shrimp and egg fried into the rice, and the ubiquitous kimchee. The red soup in the bowl on the right was hot, both in temperature and spice and had bits of tentacles and tiny crab legs in it. The yellow things in the bowl are slices of pickled radish and are really tasty in a strange way - hard to describe, sweet & sour & crunchy. The white things in the bowl with the yellow things are slices of sweet onions. The red stuff in the far bowl is cabbage kimchee and this restaurant has a pretty good recipe, it's just a bit different than other kimchee I've had. The little puddle of black stuff in the middle bowl, God only knows... When I leave I'm either going to love or hate kimchee, but I haven't decided yet.
Waiting for the rain to pass, I took a few pictures of the street since it was a rare opportunity to take pictures without fear of being run over or trampled. The rain really kept people off the street, which you can see in the picture. This is a street in Suwon, not really a back alley but one of the small streets though the city. Imagine this street clogged with traffic trying to flow both directions and you can imagine what it's like on a busy day.
When I got to the parking lot of the palace the rain had eased up a bit, so I walked up the hill a ways. From the road on the hill there is a nice view of the walled palace, the far buildings with the same black tiled roofs as the gate in the foreground, are the buildings inside palace.About 250 meters further up the road there's a bronze statue erected as a tribute to King Jeonjo the Great. I stitched together yet another panarama.
The statue stands about 25 feet high, and as you can see the place was empty today.I still haven't seen the palace - the storm came in and I got back to the car just as it started to really pour. I'll go back again soon to tour the grounds of the palace.
Back in Anseong I stopped at the LPG station to gas up the car and at the far end of the parking lot spotted an antenna growing out of a shipping container, and
the sign next to the door confirmed what I had suspected.I stopped in and visited two guys from HL0LPM, the local amateur radio club, but the language barrier kept us from really having a QSO. We all understand QSL cards though, and I traded a photocopy of my license for their QSL card. One world, many languages.
Thats all for now, I've got to get some sleep and go to work tomorrow - it'll be the first Monday I've worked in a couple of weeks.
More later after the rain clears out.
Jerry.
3 comments:
Your pictures are amazing and as soon as I show your blog to my kid Katie she is going to want to know what kind of camera you are using. She has a Canon REbel XTI that she is using for her AP Photography classes, but your is fantastic!
Amy in Virginia
I think its the fan that makes it look really amazing. Oh, yeah, and the microphone.
Thanks for the food pics. I'm expecting dinner when you come home.
And I thought the whole point of amateur radio was that you met each other, um...on the radio, not in person! :)
The guys here, Simon and Scot, both have said that the guy doing the tight rope thing is called "A puppet on a String". They both said exactly the same thing when I showed the pictures to them.
delayed again, but I might bring the coffee from the office this time. Not too many people are drinking coffee.
Post a Comment