BMW Seoul, and Downtown Anseong

Hello again from Anseong. It's been a couple of weeks since my last blog entry, I haven't had much interesting stuff to post until now.

On Saturday 24 May I went to Seoul with some friends from Osan for a seminar. People back home keep asking about the food here so I'm beginning to bring my camera with me at lunch. This day I had the bimbibap - it was served in a burning hot clay bowl on a trivet, with rice, sliced carrots, seaweed, bean sprouts, and other stuff that I couldn't identify mixed in. In the bowls above it is spiced squid, kimchee, noodles, and bean sprouts. Nothing fancy, just basic Korean food.

After lunch a couple of us snuck down to the BMW dealership to look at the shiny toys. JR wanted to check out a used F650GS they have for sale, so the two of us walked down the street to visit the dealer. The panorama is on the second floor of the dealership where they keep the used bikes with JR checking out the 'gs.



There are some models I haven't seen in the US yet, like the C1 executive they had parked out front. I wasn't brave enough to ask for a test ride, besides I can't imagine splitting lanes on the freeway in San Jose on this, but it would certainly attract attention. And look mom, it must be safe -- it has a seatbelt!

Amongst the used motorcycles there's one green RTP model that I especially liked. If I can't get the entire bike, I would love to have the seat with the radio box for my own r1100 back home. It would be the perfect amateur radio bike for CW motorcycle mobile, and the lights and siren would help get through the morning commuting traffic, too.


On Friday 30 June I picked up three of my coworkers from the bus terminal in downtown Anseong. I arrived about 9:30pm, early enough to find parking and to walk around a bit with my camera until they arrived. With the neon signs lighting the streets the grimey humanity of downtown still shows through, looking only more surreal and desperate than when sunlit. Every time I drive through a downtown section of a city I keep thinking it looks like a hollywood set gone too far, there's way too much neon to be real but it is.

The picture at the left was looking down a side street across from the bus stop.

The panorama was stitched together from pictures taken right in front of the bus station in downtown Anseong, so it's not the best part of town. Even at 10:00 on a Friday night there were middle-school aged students milling about in their school uniforms, I was told after-school tutoring can run late into the night. Most of the people at the bus station looked college-aged, either arriving in town for the university or leaving for the weekend. I saw a few well dressed businessmen walking (stumbling?) around hailing cabs and such, presumably after late night business dinners.

After dropping off the luggage we all went out for a midnight snack to a local restaurant where their specialty is fish stew. It was obvious the meat in the stew was fish (bones and all). There were unhappy little clams, fish, seaweed, tofu, green onions, all swimming in a spicy red pepper stock, and to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, if you gaze for long into the stew, the stew gazes also into you. I'm not used to seeing seafood see me, at least not at the table. If you look closely at the pot of stew you can see the dark nose of a fish poking it's nose above water against the left side, opposite the ladle. I asked what the curly things were, expecting some kind of exotic noodle but no, they're fish guts. Sorry guys, I don't think I'll be asking to go back there on this trip.

On Saturday we visited the Namsadang performance center, and on Sunday I was playing tourist again but this time with an official Anseong tourist map! In English!! I'll have to write more soon but tonight it's getting late. They shifted holidays on us this week: we work on Monday but get Friday off for Korean Memorial Day.

Keep Checking back, I'll be posting again this week sometime.

Jerry.