Temples. . . all over the place

Sometimes I just get lucky.

My tourist M.O. follows the accidental tourist mentality: I drive around until I see a sign pointing to a landmark, follow the arrows, and hopefully when I arrive there's something to see. Usually the objects of the arrows are big and obvious enough that even this English-only American can find them, like the monument to King Jeonjo the Great, and the Anseong brassware museum. Sometimes after following the arrows in circles I just give up, baffled, frustrated and wondering why there's an English sign on the highway but only signs in Hangul at the destination. Ironically, the Korean Literary Museum is one such landmark I haven't yet found. Fortunately, temples are big, colorful, generally hard to hide and easy to spot.

Driving East along highway 38 one weekend I simultaneously spotted a familiar-looking brown sign with an arrow, presumably pointing toward a landmark. I checked the rearview mirror while braking hard and swerving onto the access road, and mentally added 1.2km to the odometer as indicated on the sign. After a few weekends of seeking landmarks my skills are improving, but sometimes I wonder why people don't want to ride along on my weekend excursions.

The road follows a gentle stream with families picnicking on the wider banks, and at the end lies the parking lot of the Seongnamsa temple.


The first building I saw from the parking lot was over the steps to the temple grounds.




The building is a large open room facing the temple grounds, empty except for a stack of woven rugs stacked in one corner. Perhaps this is the dance hall? The pictures really speak volumes more than I can write, the paintwork is absolutely amazing.



The painted dragon banner picture on my blog page is from one of the beams




I do wonder about the wooden fish though...


Continuing up the steps I see the main temple at the top, with its doors open.



Midway up the stairs is a clearing with still more things see



Yet another stone pagoda...



And finally, I reach the temple. I poked my lens inside the open doors and this is what I saw:






And finally, on the walk back to the parking lot, I discovered the how the Buddhists do real Korean BBQ



Until next time...

Jerry.

Three-storied stone pagoda in Dogi-Dong

Finally, I have The Map! One of my coworkers picked up an english-language tourist map for me from the highway rest area. I've been looking for one of these, even asking at the museums and attractions for a map or tourist guide in English without success. And now, in my possession I have a guide to everything historical, photogenic, and cultural around Anseong mapped out on paper. I now know how it feels to have discovered the Rosetta Stone.

Beginning with the most local artifact to my apartment, I set out to find the Three-Storied stone pagoda of Dogi-Dong. According to the map it stands across the street from the Anseong fire department headquarters, which is down the road from the police station. Finding the police station is easy, it's near the park where I joined the nice family for a picnic lunch.

Driving past the police station I quickly found the fire department headquarters and soon thereafter the road past as shown on the map - I'd driven too far. Driving back I discovered a Buddhist temple and thought maybe the pagoda is an artifact on their temple grounds, but alas looking around I saw nothing made of stone or three stories tall. I assessed the gas station as not being pagoda-shaped and not nearly tall enough, but given the fuel prices these days I briefly considered the wisdom of erecting a shrine to gasoline.

I drove around the area, over roads between the rice paddies carefully threading the rental car over the narrow winding paths. All the roads between the rice paddies are about two feet above water and just barely wide enough for a farm truck, strangely crooked and completely flat. I did find a three story church not far from where the map showed the pagoda, but at last check Christians don't build pagodas.


There's lots of egrets around here. I keep taking pictures of them but I haven't gotten any really good close ups yet, they spook easily, and it probably doesn't help to wear an orange tee-shirt while sneaking up on them, either. I can walk or drive within about fifty feet from them before they flee but I keep trying. When I do get a good picture it'll be here, but for now here's one I saw while searching for the pagoda.


How hard could it possibly be to find a three-story stone pagoda? I mentally reviewed what I'm looking for: a pagoda - it should look like big stack of boxes. It's made from stone: I can take it for granite. It's three stories tall - anything that tall should stand out like a huge stone lightning rod around here! I'm in the middle of a huge flooded marsh recently planted with rice shoots, how could I not find it? With frustrations mounting I stop at the intersection of a paddy road and the highway and restore my blood sugar with peanut butter & jelly and an apple. Okay, I admit I did buy the California Farms brand of peanut butter, but it's Ottogi brand strawberry jam and Seoul Food brand bread! I'm really trying to fit into the culture!

As I finished my last bite of apple and swallow of iced tea I saw it: the stairway. Across the rice paddy I spotted a stone stairway and with trembling hands I took a shaky picture zoomed way in to document my discovery. Could this actually be the stone stairway leading up to the Three-storied stone pagoda of Dogi-dong? As I got closer I wondered what type of treasure I might find at the top - the stairway looked ancient, the stair treads possibly worn thin from the of millions of pilgrims that must have made the long journey to Dogi-dong. I could only imagine the relief in the hearts and minds of those who came before as they spied the stairs and gathered all their remaining strength to make the final ascent. I was quivering with excitement, finally have found the steps to the pagoda...




I mounted the stairs, basking in the glow of my good fortune to have come so far from home to visit a sacred relic in the Land of the Morning Calm. At the top of the stairway, just outside the fence guarding the stone pagoda, there's a sign proclaiming that this is an official "Monumental monument" of Gyeonggi-do. The entire plaque reads,

"Three storied stone pagoda of Dogi-dong, Anseong.
Cultural Property of Gyeonggi-do No. 76

This is a pagoda with the height of 5.4m erected on a hill from where one can look over the downtown of old Anseong. The overall configuration indicates that it is one of the pagodas of Goryeo, which followed the style of those of Baekje."

I'll let you do your own Wikipedia lookup for Goryeo - it's amazing how old this is. And here it is, in all it's glory.



So there it is, the Three-storied stone pagoda of Dogi-dong. On my way home I spotted this sign at the highway:



Later in the day I visited two Buddhist temples and they deserve a blog entry of their own. Stay tuned, it's just getting interesting.

Jerry

Namsadang performance center

Saturday May 31, 2008

Three of my coworkers and I visited the Namsadang Performance Center and wandered around for a couple of hours. At the art center there were sculptures and a glassware shop, but most of the time I spent there was watching the show.

At the entrance of the art center there's a building that stands as a reminder that I'm on the other side of the earth. Either that or it confirms that my perspective of the archatechure is upside down. Inside is a gallery of handmade stained-glass artwork from local artists.












There's not a lot to write about the show since the dialogue was all in Korean - the story was truly lost on me. We watched what I understand was a drama, the costumes were colorful and the performance spirited but I couldn't understand a word that was spoken.

Then it got really exciting! A troupe of inmates from the asylum next door managed to get their straight jackets untied and started running around the performance area! Soon their meds started working agian and they walked back inside...

Time to move on to other attractions in the area, maybe something that transcends the language barrier.

More later,

Jerry.

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.

Visiting Suwon

(pssst... did you know the pictures are little previews of something bigger? If you click on one, it gets bigger!)

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.

Shopping and Tourism in Anseong

Good evening, today is Sunday May 11, 2008 and I'm still wondering how the stars aligned to put me in Korea.

I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. My coworker Erik snuck in a care package for me with our last shipment of machine parts: I may be in possession of the largest stash of whole-bean coffee in the city of Anseong, perhaps the entire province of Gyeonggi. I've only been able to find instant coffee in the markets, which is fine in a pinch but it's just not right. It is truly heartwarming to know people back home care about me.

I packed my coffee press in my luggage and a pound of coffee that lasted for about a week, but I didn't pack a coffee grinder figuring one could be found here in town. Lotte mart is where I've been shopping for most of my food and housewares so it was where I went to shop for a coffee grinder.

Lotte Mart is a lot like a Korean WalMart, but they do things differently here. On the road between parking lots is a man directing traffic and he's polite to a fault: he waves his arms furiously to stop the oncoming traffic, directs me to turn in to the parking lot, and executes a perfect bow as I enter the intersection. Finding a parking spot is easy, too, there are two ladies greeting people driving into the lot and directing them to empty spaces.

After parking, I walk over to retrieve a shopping cart and fortunately I have a 100 won coin with me - the shopping carts are locked together, and it takes a 100 won deposit to unlock the cart from the queue. When you return the shopping cart and lock it back in, your 100 won coin is released.

Once inside, Lotte Mart looks like a blend of shopping mall and department store, with various departments set apart by aisles and individual cash registers, but there's also a line of check stands for purchasing food and household goods.

The store is on two levels with an escalator between them with the shopping carts riding on the escalator with the people. To keep the loaded carts from mowing over people downhill, the ridges on the wheels nest into grooves on the escalator belt, allowing the wheel fenders to lock onto the belt. Ingenious.




I was partially correct about finding a coffee grinder, Lotte Mart does indeed sell coffee grinders... unfortunately, they're of the hand-crank variety. Fortunately, they have a housewares section where I found a small blender that does a bang-up job on coffee beans. This morning I brewed a fresh pot of coffee to drink with breakfast. Life is good.

Erik, when you come to visit you're always welcome to come by for a cup of coffee. I even have a spare mug.

The Anseong Machum Museum

I've been driving past the sign pointing toward the museum for a few weeks now and I finally stopped in Saturday afternoon to look around. It's a nice place, costs 500 won to get in, and most of the displays have an English and Japanese translation of the Korean text. I learned that Anseong is renown for its metalworking, especially white brass. There is a large collection of pieces on display from the brass foundries that were in Anseong, along with displays showing how the artisans made the pieces. Some of the culture surrounding the use of brass tableware is also explained.

There are some other pieces that I found interesting also, like the antique mousetrap on display. The round inside portion is about seven inches around and looks quite heavy. There wasn't an explanation of how it worked, I can only imagine... poor mouse.




I revisited the totems today, and someone has repainted them! I took a bunch more pictures and it was sunny this time:






And finally, I'll sign off with a self-portrait. Mental note: the bright orange shirt really stands out when taking pictures along a road - traffic notices. It's also stands out when trying to take pictures of wildlife - birds notice, and flee.











That's all for now, it's getting late and I've got to rest up since tomorrow is another holiday, it's Buddha's birthday.

Jerry.