Author: Peter

Previous Post: Part II, “Feeling Provincial”

It was a bit eerie how all of them got extra-polite when they saw The Card.  I’m referring to the many staff at the Empire State Building, who were dressed up like hotel doormen. Many made mild noises of being impressed (“ahh”, “wow”, “aha”, you know the sorts of noises I mean). Some actually seemed to bow  when T.A. flashed it. No kidding: There was a distinct lowering of heads, at times, to accompany the extended arms which showed the way to proceed.

T.A. had insisted on going to the Empire State Building. I soon realized this was because he possessed The Card, which, like that “Ring” of the recent movies, allows the possessor access to a magical ability, in this case the ability to rise to the top of the Empire State Building, any time, any day, free, as many times as the possessor wants, with guests in tow, with no need to wait in any lines. Amazing! T.A. had gotten it through another magical ability that many seem to have: Procuring favors from a network of connections. The card was issued by an employer to a Russian-speaking person whom T.A. seems to know. T.A. said that he has been up to the top about fifteen or so times in this way.

Onward with the pictures:

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Monday was drizzly and overcast. The Empire State Building staff, when not kowtowing to The Card, gently warned us to save our time and not go up, as there was no visibility due to thick cloud cover. We went up anyway. Why not? We had The Card!  We could do anything!

Alas, The Card’s magical powers could not control the weather, could not allow holders to enjoy views as unimpeded as the access was. The 2023 model, or maybe the 2033, may feature that ability. The “boys” are working on it, I’m sure. The lowly 2013 edition’s magic remains sadly limited to inside the walls of this building. Magic isn’t what it used to be.

Later in the day, the clouds began to lift and the Empire State Building emerged. My memory is a little foggy, but it looked exactly like this:

It really looks like something out of Batman, doesn’t it?

Much later in the day, long past sunset, The Card worked its magic again; up we went; this time the clouds were gone:

Manhattan’s super-density, as above, is impressive in some ways, if you’re into that kind of thing. I’d point out that it would be less unique to the typical urban East-Asian of today. Large East-Asian cities all look a bit like the above.

My Korean friend B.W. from Ilsan (an upscale, dense city near Seoul) spent two weeks as a tourist in New York City in early 2010. He told me that although he liked the visit, he was a little disappointed; the USA was not what he’d expected. What he saw in NYC may have seemed to him too much like an often-shabbier, dirtier, more pretentious, more dangerous version of Seoul, I reasoned at the time. I lamely told him, “New York City is not the USA”.

Density of Manhattan, Compared to Arlington and Compared to the Manhattan of the 1910s
The land area of Manhattan Island [23 sq. mi.] is about equal to my place of birth’s, Arlington [26 sq. mi.]. Arlington is an urban county, and is within the core-area of the six-million-person Washington DC Metropolitan Area. Manhattan has 1,600,000 residents, versus 220,000 in Arlington. Parts of Arlington look a little like Manhattan.

I was surprised to see that Manhattan is a lot less-populated today than it was a century ago, when it had 2.33 million people (according to the 1910 Census). For every 1,000 Manhattanites in 1910, there were only 685 in 2010.

Incredibly, in 1910, tiny Manhattan Island had 2.5% of the USA’s entire population (2.33million/92.23million). By 2010, Manhattan Island had decreased to “only” 0.5% of the USA’s population (1.6million/308million). Manhattanites still have that we-are-the-center-of-the-universe attitude. “Bah; there they go again, strutting around as if they’re still 2.5% of the USA!” a person might quip after seeing a pretentious Manhattanite strutting around.

Next Post: Part IV, “Pay Up!”

Previous Post: Part I, Transportation

I left off in post-165 having just gotten off the bus in midtown Manhattan, about 11 AM.

Waiting nearby was one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever come across, my friend T.A. from Kazakhstan. I met him when I was traveling there in 2011. He is in the USA on a “work and travel” visa now. He holds two college degrees back home, and worked in a bank in his hometown. Although ethnically-Kazakh, he cannot speak the Kazakh language very well, as so many of them can’t. He speaks Russian.

T.A. has lived all around the USA now, from the Southern-efficiency of Carolina, to the Northern-charm of New York City, to the gentleness of the Pacific Northwest.

In 2011, I recommended T.A. to read The Great Gatsby after he asked me a question that was, in effect, “What is the Great American Novel?” I found the book locally and bought it for him when I left. / T.A. also asked me around that time about which era or aspect of history one should study “to understand the USA”. Without hesitation, I told him to study the U.S. Civil War, the defining event of the USA, to my mind. In the course of our day touring around Manhattan, we passed a statue of General Sherman on horseback. He didn’t recognize the name. Enthusiastically, I said,” This man won the Civil War”, which, according to my amateur studying of the subject, is not far off from the truth. “Wow!” he said, and insisted on taking my picture in front of the statue (below). I mentioned that if he ever goes back to Spartanburg, South Carolina (his first place of residence, last year), he would do well to not to get too chatty about ol’ Sherman!  [Click on the photos below to enlarge them]

Backtracking to 11 AM, some scenes of the vicinity of the bus drop-off point:

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T.A. and I were hungry. He suggested going to a bagel-and-coffee shop nearby, which we did. The menu was plastered up behind the counter. Items on it that I’d never even heard-of before glared back at me menacingly, in that cynical and gritty New York way. My lack of knowledge of basic “bagel fare” immediately made me feel provincial, and/or reinforced my view of NYC as a foreign-country. One particular item on the menu that I’d never heard of was “lox”, apparently a topping for bagels. Who knew? Not I.

T.A. was also unaware of what “lox” was. The next weekend, I learned from a friend of my father’s (Tim) that lox is a fish-spread used traditionally by the Jews on bagels. I’d learned years earlier that bagels were “invented” by Jews in New York City, or perhaps it was that they were invented in the shtetls of Eastern Europe and hopped across the ocean via Ellis Island.

The shtetl lives on New York City.

The woman holding the orange sign above is advertising a Jewish catering service.

Many businesses in NYC, it seemed, make it clear that they serve only their own ethic-communities. Another example was a poster (left) I spotted for a ‘Jews-Only’ dating agency called “JDate”. 
[Click to enlarge the poster].

There are a few of us Gentiles in Manhattan, too, though. Here are some:

One thing I can say about Manhattan is that the people are (1) more self-consciously wealthy, (2) more fashionable and (3) thinner, than people I’m familiar with elsewhere in the USA. The obesity problem in the USA is almost hard to notice among this kind of chic crowd, as above. The two Nordic-looking young women in the photo exemplify this.

A large number of women on the streets of NYC seemed to wear these “ugg” boots, visible on the red-coat-wearer and plastic-bag-holder above. You can also see above that this particular Monday was rainy and chilly. Nobody seemed to mind much. Bad weather conditions are a lot easier to deal with on foot than in a car.

Next:   Part III, “Up the Empire State Building”

I was surprised to find myself in New York City last week.

A whirlwind trip. I enjoyed it, and I was glad to see my friend T.A. remaining in good spirits.

Itinerary
Monday  4:30 AM: I woke up.
Monday  5:00 AM: I left home in Arlington and proceeded to Union Station in Wash DC to get on the inter-city bus.
Monday  6:15 AM: Departure of the bus from Wash DC to NYC, with stops in Maryland and Philadelphia.
           [Bus ride; I sleep]
Monday  10:50 AM: Bus arrived in midtown Manhattan near Penn Station.
           [I meet my awaiting friend; we walk around, etc., etc.]
Tuesday  1:25 AM: Bus departed NYC to Wash DC.
           [Bus ride; Sleeping]
Tuesday  6:45 AM: Bus arrived back in Union Station in Washington.
Tuesday 7:30 AM: I arrived back at the door of my home.

I want to note a few things I find of interest regarding this trip first, then some photos:

The Opposite of Automobile Dependence
Now, any long-distance trip in the USA which requires no use of a personal automobile at all, “from door to door”, is neither easy nor common. I found myself remarking many times while back in the USA, “Why can’t the richest country in the world ‘get it together’ enough to have decent mass-transportation?”  I have ideas about why.

I’ve always found ways to transport myself without an automobile. For some reason, this has been a point of pride for me ever since high school, and this attitude even impelled me to visit my friend J.S. in Roanoke, Virginia in October 2010 in a…highly-unique way, which I will have to elaborate on later, as NYC is the topic at hand now.

This time, I rode the subway (“Metro”) in Arlington and Washington, the inter-city bus (“Megabus”) for many hours, and the subway in NYC a couple of times; all else came down to expenditure in shoe-rubber, as they say.

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Prices
Even after all fees and surcharges (and there always are those in the ol’ USA of today, aren’t there), I paid $42.00 for the round-trip ticket (232 miles one-way; 464 miles round-trip; ten hours on the bus; dropped off in Manhattan). I’d bought the tickets a few days earlier. I paid another $6.20 for two Washington Metro trips to get to and from the bus pick-up place, and a bit more for several NYC subway trips.

I spent little in NYC itself. I also refrained from putting any of my cash directly to an open flame so as to witness it turn to ash and mist away. Seeing the prices in NYC led me to consider those two actions to be close cousins!

Hazy Bus Memories, Clouded by Sleep
My “whirlwind” schedule on this trip was my own choosing. This was, in-no-small-part, to avoid having to pay for a bed in that city. My friend, T.A., was in no position to offer one. I slept plenty but fitfully on the buses. Actually, I hardly remember the ten hours I spent aboard; it’s sort of a sleepy “fog” of a memory; it seems more like it happened a decade ago than a week ago; I remember a large family with several small children boarding in Baltimore; I remember a trim White man in a pilot’s uniform riding the returning bus in a seat near me (by the way, isn’t it odd that one never sees fat pilots in the mostly-overweight USA?); he must’ve been flying from Washington Tuesday morning.

I doubt I was awake more than two of those ten hours. I can’t even remember with certainty if I sat next to anyone.

Here are pictures of my “transportation to New York”.

First I walked, in a brisk snow, to the nearby station of the Washington, D.C. regional urban-rail network that we call the Metro. I rode on that for a while, got off, tried to find the bus pick-up area, which was curiously almost unmarked. Then I got on the bus, then there is a blurry period of mostly-sleep (not pictured), and finally got off the bus in NYC.

In the caption above, I use quotation-marks around “inter-city bus station” because it’s actually just the upstairs parking lot of the train station. There are no facilities within this bus “area” that I could readily see. No places to wait except standing around on the pavement of the former parking lot, like the people pictured here. No toilets, except far off below in the train station. No clocks even, to check the time; no big boards to check arrivals or departures. No place to buy tickets (you have to buy online) except for Greyhound. No place to buy food or drinks. No payphones that I saw. Nobody was even clearly in charge to ask for help. No lockers to store one’s things. Somehow, it all sort of hobbled along and worked. At least the place offered shelter from the rain, sleet, snow, The bus-stops were sort-of marked.

Now, the last time I rode Megabus, in 2011, the bus stop was two blocks away in a slightly-squalid, poorly-lit, and exposed outdoor parking lot, so despite my complaints, it is a move up.

The grainy quality these pictures fits with most people’s mental condition at the time, I think. It was around 6:00 AM.

I can here comment on the type of passengers I rode with, some of which are pictured above, just having gotten off.

Impressions of Fellow Passengers
I have ridden inter-city buses in the USA in recent years a number of times, maybe more than anyone else that I personally know. It’s just quite uncommon in the USA to travel in that way. The central reason it is uncommon, in my view, is that people are scared of the other passengers. I don’t blame them. Greyhound, in particular, for some reason attracts some really unsavory, frankly dangerous characters. This is Greyhound’s reputation, and I can say that generally in my experience that reputation is deserved. I mean, really: If I were a father, I would never allow my daughter to ride one of those Greyhound buses. (This makes me sad, as a native-born American, that we have to deal with this kind of thing so commonly). However, this is Megabus, a somewhat-new company. Somehow, much of the criminal and semi-criminal element missed the memo that Megabus exists. Most of my fellow passengers on the above-described trip actually could’ve been distant relatives of mine. The large family I mentioned above, that got on in Maryland, looked and sounded a bit like my cousin N.C.’s family. N.C. and her family also live in Maryland. Many of the other passengers seemed to be foreign college-student types. The “semi-criminal” element was vastly under-represented this time, if present at all! (Later in the week, I rode down to southern Virginia to visit my friend J.S., on an Atlanta-bound bus, and on that bus some of that element manifested itself again.)

The Rise in Bus Popularity Explained–?
A big reason why ‘regular’ Americans are riding these buses more these days is, I expect, the rise of the “electronic world” and companies savvy enough to pander to it. Megabus advertises itself as giving access to a power outlet in every seat, and having free Wi-Fi on every bus. In the world of these handheld computers that we call “smartphones”, this means a person can “be online” and productive, or at least satiated with entertainment, for the entire ride: One can work, email, ‘facebook’ (it’s a verb, you know), read online article or ebooks, or entertain oneself with downloaded movies or Youtube, or play games, or do whatever else one can with a computer, for the entire ride.

The above small-handful of pictures takes us only through 11:00 AM. There is more to come!

Next:   Part II, “Feeling Provincial”

Welcome back, readers, if any. I apologize for the long hiatus.

When I posted #163, I expected it would be one of many more to come about my partially-successful cross-country mountain hiking trip in Korea (mid-September to early November 2013), the “Baekdu Daegan Trail”. I had many ideas for posts floating around in my head. Somehow, no other posts materialized. I got too busy in November and then got out of the habit.

Executive Summary: Below I explain why I posted only erratically during my hike; reasons for leaving the trail;  about my trip to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand; how I returned to Korea and settled my affairs. Now I’m in the USA.

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Writing While Hiking
I wrote in a small notebook every day on my hike. I only made about five total posts to this blog, though. It’s amazing that I managed any posts at all here after mid-September. Each post was the product of a lot of willpower and some difficulty. Most of the days of my hike I was not even in a position to reliably get a phone signal, much less have access to the Internet. Unlike my earlier posts of 2013, which were written in my apartment at a nice little desk, my posts after mid-September were all made ‘outside’, wherever I could manage to access a workable computer and the Internet. This usually meant I was paying by the hour at a dank, smoky “PC Room” (Internet cafe), or paying by the day in a motel with a computer, in whatever city I was in at the time. Posts were only sporadic because getting into a city meant making a big detour off the trail. When did I leave the trail? —

Reasons for Leaving the Trail
One unfortunate reason I sometimes left the trail, especially in the early days of my hike, was physical. I got hurt and needed rest to recover. There is one particularly dramatic memory related to this I will post later.

Rain was another reason, including the case of the unexpected tsunami while going through the Deogyu Mountains in early October. I reached one of the so-called “shelters” (which are really semi-serviced mountain-hostels costing 7,000 Won for a berth).  The pair of shelter rangers took me in, but were astonished I was there. I was the only guest. The more-jovial of the two seemed to be laughing at me condescendingly for trying to make the journey in such conditions (though he was actually trying to be friendly; “condescending laughter” is a way, in my experience, that older Korean men try to bond with younger males).

The biggest “problems” causing me to leave the trail were running out of food and water. Those were problems I faced even living in my apartment in the middle of Bucheon (a large city) for two years, though. In the latter case, it was just plain-old laziness that I didn’t stock-up on food until I ran out of it. In my cross-country hiking attempt, it was because space in my backpack was so limited. I made many, many mistakes on the trip — I’d like to write about them another time — but this was lack of backpack capacity was the most serious mistake, which enabled/caused/exacerbated many other problems/mistakes. Mine was 35 liters. I met one hiker along the way who was carrying an 80-L bag. #5-liters is just too small. I could usually find water near the trail, in mountain runoff, and I almost never bought water, but in dry periods this was sometimes a big headache. Food always required going into town. I would stay at a motel (price usually $25-$30/night), try to get quality rest, eat heartily, and stock up on food. A secondary goal was finding a computer to charge my camera batteries and upload pictures/videos.

I really enjoyed the trip, in the end. It was absolutely worth doing despite the problems I allude to above. The problems are even part of the fun. My goal of crossing the entire country was overly ambitious. I made it halfway across.

My Last Hiking Day
Skipping ahead to my very last day on the hike, I was surprised to find myself staying at a Buddhist temple near Woraksan National Park. I didn’t plan it; it just all fell into place that way. The temple had some austere little guest rooms, and they gave me some food. I’d like to post more about this, and about much else (with photos), later.

I walked across the ridge for the last time early the next morning, found the town on the other side, and found a bus-stop. I rode the bus into town and and returned to Seoul. From waking up in a temple to Seoul, in a few hours.

Back in Seoul / Ten Days for $130
Back up north in Seoul, I rented a tiny little room for 15,000 KRW/night [$13]. It was a mangy little place in some ways, and I shared close quarters with fifty or so others, many of whom were middle-aged men. Those who stayed longer got even better deals than mine. One strange thing about the place is that the manager never asked for my name or ID. There is no record of my having been there. It so happens that I heard Chinese being spoken there sometimes, in the hallways and the kitchen area. I speculated that the speakers may have been illegal immigrants. Since no names are taken down and no papers are needed, just cash, it’s the ideal living place for an illegal immigrant who wants to be off the radar and leave no paper trail. It’s also much cheaper than a real apartment. The longer-term residents of that goshiwon [고시원], I think, paid more like $8 a day (=$244/month to rent a small room in Seoul; a great, great price). I stayed ten nights. The place was near Sindorim Train Station [신도림], a very busy and crowded area.

In this period after my hike, I did a lot of relaxing and meeting of friends, including my Korean friend B.W. (whom I met in 2009 in Ilsan), who has become now a hotshot with Lotte Group. His hours-worked on the week seem more like a slave’s. 

I once created a list of things I wanted to do in Korea, and with so little time left, I felt a bit sad in those ten days because I wouldn’t be able to do them all. I knew I would be leaving Korea, and maybe forever. I’d be walking away from the life I’d created there; friends, routines, favorite places, foods, memories. I’d spent enough time and mental effort to feel established in Korea, for better or for worse (and people in the USA, who have seen it fit to give me unsolicited advice on the matter, almost always say or imply that it has been for the worse, a waste of time; I think a lot of friends, family, and acquaintances in the USA viewed my Korean time as akin to a prison sentence; they were interested only in when I was getting out).

I’ve spent three years and three months in Korea. This short period at the goshiwon is the only time I slept in Seoul.

Zipping Around Hong Kong
I left Seoul bound for Hong Kong aboard a plane belonging to the surprisingly-nice China Eastern Airlines, which even served ice-cream. I spent around 36 hours in Hong Kong, and met a colorful Guatemalan in his 40s who has lived in Los Angeles for 10 or 15 years. (He said he was no good at remembering specific years, like the year he arrived in the USA, but that it was something over ten years ago.) We spent the day together, zipping around Hong Kong seeing the sights/sites (I’m conflicted about which of those words is more befitting). Maybe in another post I can comment discuss Hong Kong’s bustle and the surprisingly-poor English of the native people there considering the British heritage.

Hospitality in Malaysia
Before I got the invitation to Malaysia, I’d intended to venture into China again, as I did (too-briefly) in May 2010. I planned to return to the USA in late November 2013. I didn’t have a China visa, and getting one in 2013 is a big headache for foreigners in Korea, for some reason. I was going to try to get one in Hong Kong, but that was uncertain to succeed. Fortunately, my father proposed an alternate plan: Malaysia. (Both he and my mother had been U.S. Peace Corps volunteers there many years ago). He was supposed to be there at that time anyway, and he convinced his friend R.B. to go with him, too, and we all met there in mid-November. R.B. is (in his term) an “ex-Malaysian”, a nonreligious Sikh born in Malaysia but who emigrated to the USA in 1970, the same time my father left. They were both teachers together and have remained friends in the USA lo these past forty years. I will post more on Malaysia later, I hope. The warmth and hospitality of the people there impressed me. We crossed into Thailand for a day. I spent not a single minute on any beach in my time in Malaysia. Mostly the time was spent visiting old students my father and R.B. had.

Cashing-Out of Korea
I spent nearly two weeks in Malaysia, before returning to Korea for three days, gathering up my possessions being held by various people, and doing a bunch of other “leaving the country forever” things like going to the bank to send money home, the post office to send stuff home, and going to the pension office to “cash out”. (All salaried workers, legally, have 4.5% of their salaries deducted monthly to set aside in a government-run pension fund, and the employee’s contribution is matched by the employer. This means that, in effect, we get a 4.5%-bonus on all the wages we earn [i.e., the employer’s contribution]. As a U.S. citizen, I was able to “cash it all out”, and send it back to a U.S. account if I show them a return plane ticket.)

The pension office woman, in her 30s, was very kind and efficient. I think she specializes in dealing with foreigners enrolled in the Korean pension system. She had an odd habit, though, of switching randomly between English and Korean when speaking to me. Her English was very good and I showed no sign of knowledge of Korean in my dealings with her, but she switched into Korean several times. She may have done this for her own amusement, to try to gauge my reaction. I also heard her do this on the phone during my 15 minutes with her, when somebody called asking how they could punish an employer who was refusing to contribute to the national pension program on that employee’s behalf. She spoke 90% in Korean, which I tuned-out to focus on the plethora of documents before me I had to fill out. Then, suddenly, she delivered one sentence in English: “We don’t have the power here to force them to pay, you have to contact the….”, then back to Korean.

As of this writing, two years’ worth of Korean pension money in my name has been ‘repatriated’ to my U.S. bank account. It took only two weeks or so.

Back in the USA
I arrived in the USA in time for Thanksgiving, and today is December 10th, thirteen days later. Some things have changed in Arlington, my hometown, but much more is the same. I’ve busied myself visiting people and visiting the library. I really missed the library.

I have plans set for January and probably for February, but 2014 is still more of a question-mark.

If you go to a place called Hwareyong [화령재] along Korea’s Baekdu-Daegan Trail, you’ll see something about like this:

Following are more pictures of the area around this giant stele [seven meters (23 feet) in height] and comments:

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It says this stele was erected in September 2007. The various monuments and steles like this of the Baekdu-Daegan were mostly erected in the past ten years (according to their inscriptions), in my experience.

I made my tent and slept in that pavilion (or jeongja) overnight, as is acceptable practice among Korean hikers. (I wouldn’t have done this had I not observed Koreans doing it before several times.) It was very comfortable and dry.

That is dawn the next day, and soon I was on my way. The road here, crossing this low pass, was well-frequented by buses (at least one every ten minutes, it felt like) till even after 7 PM, which in rural Korea is about equivalent to the midnight hour in Seoul. There is a town a few kilometers away. The vehicles that stopped at the pull-over area in front of the stele seemed to be lost drivers checking their maps and one guy who used the toilet and then sped off again.

Finding the trail was a little hard north of here, and I got lost on false trails leading to many tombs. That cost me about an hour. Soon I was back on track again, and headed north towards Songni National Park [속리산],…

[I write this from a Jeomchon motel. My trip is ending soon. This is my final anticipated “comfort accommodation” until I return to Seoul next week. I bought a lot of food here. I expect to update next from Seoul in a week’s time.]

A third attempt at video-making a part of my hike (the first two: post-158 and post-157).

It was a rainy and eerily-foggy October 10th. When the rain let up for a while and the fog lifted, it looked like this:

Try to imagine what it was like on this particular day–

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Imagine steady rain, cold, thick fog causing low visibility, and imagine your clothes wet, your body wet from rain (despite a raincoat) yet sweating. No fun. I spent a lot of time that day trying to find cover on the exposed ridge, mostly failing (though I succeeded in keeping the contents of my backpack dry). Navigating the trail was hard due to slippery rocks.

By now, a general rule for hiking that I’ve learned is this: “The harder the conditions, the better the views”.

The views over the foggy valleys you see here are an example. Without the misery of that day’s hike, the views would’ve been…uhh…less dramatic, or less vivid, or something. I remember reaching this little overview area, which I think is named Sambongsan [삼봉산] or Deogyusambong [덕유삼봉]. The view hit me with the force of a bucket of ice water dumped on the head on a sizzling August day.

Note: This was along the cross-country Baekdu-Daegan Trail (백두대간) in Korea, which I’ve been hiking since mid-September. It was along the trail northeast of a place called Bbae-Jae (“Bone Pass”, 빼재), and east of Deogyusan National Park (덕유산), and southwest of 소사곡개 (Sosa Pass).

Whoever is reading this, I hope you enjoy(ed) this video. I hope it gives a small taste of what my long hike has been like. Thanks for watching/reading.

I reached Yukship Pass [육십령] on the afternoon of October 4th, following my detour to Nongae Shrine (post-160).

These passes are often tunneled to preserve the integrity of the ridge-trail above:

Like most of the southern half of the trail, Yukship Pass sits on a political boundary, dividing Gyeonsang Province from Jeolla Province. The two southern Korean regions have different accents and are in fact different in a lot of ways. It seems they’ve disliked each other for longer than Europeans have been Christian. (They had competing, rival states for a long time, until one of them was finally stamped out of existence by the other over a thousand years ago.)

I saw that there was a village on the Gyeongsang side of the pass, only a few hundred yards away from the border itself. Here’s what I want to know: Do the residents have “Gyeongsang accents”? Do they dislike Jeolla? I don’t know, but one indication of how strong the rivalry between Jeolla and Gyeongsang is (maybe), even at the border is this:

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Neither side wanted the trail to only go through the other’s territory so they both carved out separate trail forks.

Along my hiking trip, I’ve always looked forward to reaching one of these semi-populated “passes”. It’s always good news when one is coming up. They have good facilities, food for sale, water. The guidebook promises the following:

The writers went on their trip in September to November 2007, six years ago now. When I passed by in October 2013, the big place they talked-up so much, on the western (Jeolla Province) side was closed completely. It was a big let-down for someone as hungry as I was at the time. The building seemed abandoned and was boarded up:

I loitered for a while around the jeongja (a large, shaded pavilion raised off the ground, which Koreans seem to use for many purposes including overnight camping — I’ve seen Koreans doing it several times and now done it myself once). The jeongja is to the right of the building above, overlooking the valley in Jangsu County. It was empty.

I was waiting for something to happen. The store I’d anticipated buying thousands-of-calories-worth of food from was dead and showed no signs of coming to life. Maybe I expected the lights to spontaneously come on. It was not to be. The only thing happening in the large, nearly-empty parking lot was that a middle-aged man was watching a dog running around. I got the idea that the man was “looking after” the closed store/restaurant. I think he was actually “just a guy”, though, using the place as a big dog park. I asked him if camping was allowed around there. He replied that it wasn’t. No store. No restaurant. No camping. No water. A big disappointment.

I made by way off to the eastern (Gyeongsang) side of the pass, where there was said to be another “huygeso” or rest-area (store, restaurant, and more). On my way to the tunnel and the other side stood a memorial. It was to the South Korean soldiers killed in the anti-communist-guerrilla campaign fought in this area during the Korean War:

(The government chose the Jeolla side for this memorial commemorating [in effect] the large-scale killings of pro-communist civilians, when those communist-sympathizers disproportionately came from Jeolla [as I understand it] — I’d speculate that this choice of location may be the handiwork of the Gyeongsang circle that ruled South Korea for thirty years beginning with General Park Chung-Hee in ’61 (whose daughter is now president).

These are thoughts that occur to me long after the fact. At the time I snapped the above picture, I was really hungry and out of food (except peanut butter and some “gorp”). I staggered on to the Gyeongsang side of the pass. On the Gyeongsang side, a smaller and decrepit-looking store/restaurant was (at least nominally) open for business:

I was so hungry.

I walked in, said hello, and clumsily asked “Is this a restaurant?” in my poor Korean. I really wasn’t sure whether it was a restaurant. I couldn’t see a menu anywhere. Maybe you just “had to know” what was on the menu.

Two middle-aged women, one very old woman, one middle-aged man, and one young man were inside. I soon got the feeling that all were related. Before long, this materialized on the table in front of me:

I’ve rarely had a meal with so many “side dishes” (banchan, 반찬) before. This one had six. At first, I thought the meal was entirely side dishes. Only about halfway through did I realize that the soup was the main dish. It had beef in it, I think. I ate it eagerly, having eaten little that day. After finishing  the food far too quickly, I stayed at the table and leafed through the guidebook a little, to know what was on the horizon next. It was about 4:00 PM, so two hours of good daylight left. 

I paid 6,000 Won ($5.50) for this meal. In the front, they have a small “store” area with snack foods, chips, cookies, lots of types of ramen, and other things like tuna cans. I bought pound-cake bread and crackers, total 4,000 Won. Off I went again into the forest:

I decided to make camp as soon as I found a good place. I found one and, still hungry, I had a second dinner of peanut butter slathered on my crackers and pound cake:

It hadn’t been windy at all that day. After night fell, though, the wind suddenly picked up. I was glad I was safe in my tent and not outside. The next day, the wind would still be there as I made my toward Halmi Peak (see post-155)….

[This was mostly written in a motel at Chupung Pass on October 16th and finished on October 25th in Jeomchon]

I veered off the trail on Friday, October 4th to visit a nearby (impressive) shrine to a minor Korean historical figure called Nongae [주논개]. It was near her birthplace in Jangsu, Jeolla Province.

The shrine was mostly empty at midday on a non-holiday Friday, which was good; it was also free, which was better still. The grounds were very large and well-kept.
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Who was Nongae? She was a patriotic assassin.

The Japanese, it seems, conquered the Korean city of Jinju in 1593. Afterwards, they held a victory celebration, and they compelled the local gisaeng to join in (a gisaeng was a Korean female entertainer like a Japanese geisha). One of these, named Ju Nongae, won the affection of a top Japanese general. During the victory festivities, the general and his entourage (including Nongae) moved to a scenic spot on a high rock overlooking the river. Suddenly, Nongae embraced the conquering general around the neck and threw herself over the edge, which took him down as well. They both drowned.

Earlier this year, I also happen to have visited the very rock on which this murder-suicide happened. The rock is called “Uiam” within Jinju Fortress. (Nongae is given the title “Uiam” in honor of her act.)

Nongae is a symbol of patriotic loyalty for Koreans.
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Here are some pictures from the large, open grounds of the shrine:

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What I found interesting is that Jinju historical authorities and Jangsu historical authorities disagree on who she was.

Everyone agrees that Nongae killed the Japanese general by jumping off the high rock in Jinju in 1593 (when she was only 19 years old), but Jinju historical markers and explanatory signs, as I recall, said she was just a lowly gisaeng motivated by spontaneous patriotism. The explanatory messages in Jangsu, though (her birthplace-shrine, pictured above) say she was a married woman who disguised herself as a gisaeng  in order to carry out the assassination.

The Jangsu shrine really gives the impression that Nongae was a saintly yangban aristocratic married woman, the archetype of Korean female virtue. The Jangsu Shrine signs I read, in English translation, said that she felt enraged when her husband died in the battle for Jinju and thus began preparations for the assassination. (Actually, one sign I saw in her birthplace-shrine claimed that her husband hadn’t died in the battle. He had survived the onslaught, it said, but committed suicide at the end rather than surrender. — If you’re going to deify this hypothetical husband, he can’t have simply been “killed by the Japs”, now, can he? He’d have to have been too good, too pure, for such a crude ending.)

The Jangsu version seems — forgive me, Korean readers (if any), for I mean no offense by this, but — It seems to be a case of “a hometown referee calling the game”, if that makes sense. This saintly-yangban Nongae image, with the husband too noble to have died by Japanese hands…It’s creeping closer and closer to that kind of purely self-serving nationalistic mythologizing/deification that the Kim Il-Sung “mythology-apparatus” cranks out in the North.…..

I liked the hour or so I spent at the Nongae Shrine. I spent very little of the day on the trail, though. Mostly I was straddling the yellow line on rural roads in Jangsu, walking to and away from the Nongae Shrine. It looked like this:

After leaving the shrine, I continued walking on the roads to rejoin the trail at Yukship Pass. On the way, I saw this:

A Brazilian-Korean joint business venture, in one of the ruralest parts of South Korea! Doing what? I don’t know.

Closer to the pass, I saw construction workers fencing-off a rocky area above a road:

All along many of the roads here, they’ve blanketed the hillsides with a mesh netting to stop any possible rockfalls, and put up a huge fence down below besides. It seems very thorough, and very possibly overkill, but it gives construction crews something to do.

Road-walking is easier on the leg muscles but can be harder on the nerves, as cars and trucks whiz by. A little past the construction scene above, a man pulled alongside and offered me a ride for the final few kilometers to Yukship Pass, I accepted. After getting some food at the pass, I was soon back into the nether regions of the Baekdu-Daegan Trail….

[This was written at a motel in Chupung Pass on October 16th and finished on October 25th in Jeomchon]

I spent the weekend of October 19th-20th in Jeomchon [점촌, 문경시] in Geyongsang Province, taking a break from hiking. I was happy to find a large Homeplus there to stock up on supplies. They even had a pretty-good potato salad.

Here are some pictures of Jeomchon:

At the train station:

Elsewhere around town, I kept seeing phone numbers which included “555” or “666”, both combinations never-seen as phone numbers in the USA (for very different reasons). Here is one that includes both at once:

Finally, a glimpse of the Four Rivers Cross-Country Bicycle Trail:

I was interested especially in Jeomchon as a place to rest for because the so-called “Four Great Rivers Bicycle Trail” passes through it. In late 2011, South Korea completed its first long-distance bike trails, including the big one that will take you from Incheon and Seoul all the way to Busan on the southeast coast. The picture directly above is along that Incheon-Busan bike trail.

It’s funny to think that I could follow this off-street bicycle trail all the way to Seoul. (As it’s not a walking trail, though, I’m sure the bicyclists would be annoyed.)

Near where I found the bike trail, a reminder that Jeomchon is no big city:

I don’t have any pictures of the $30-a-night motel I stayed in, from where I type these words, nor of the nearby giant Homeplus, where I spent $60 or so on food and other stuff. I am anxious to get back on the hiking trail while the weather is still pleasant…

Like post-157, here is another attempt at presenting, in video form, a moment in my ongoing long-distance hike.

From the top of (what’s left of) Mount Geumsan, near the town of Chupung Pass [추풍령]…..I hope you enjoy:

Some more information about Geumsan:

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Geumsan [금산] means “Gold Mountain”. I imagine there are a lot of “Geumsans” in Korea.

Looking over the “ledge” at this Geumsan was intimidating, but it was one of the few good views of the day. The trail in this region is thickly-forested, offering good walking conditions but few views.

The town of Chupung you can see down below there straddles Chupung Pass. From the guidebook:

Like many other of the mountain passes on the Baekdu-Daegan Trail, I see that Chupung was on the border between Baekjae and Silla (two Korean kingdoms of the first milennium AD) and their predecessor-states.

It’s hard now to imagine the centuries of simmering, “Checkpoint-Charlie”-style tensions that must have occurred at this place, a place of such high traffic. Today, the tensions are gone but the traffic remains in the form of two highways (the Korean equivalents of an “interstate highway” and a “U.S. highway”) and a railroad. There’s not much going on in town, but even here there is a 24-hour convenience store.

[I post this from Jeomchon city., where I am resting I rejoin the trail again on Monday]

A little video I took at the summit area of Samdo-Bong [삼도봉] (“Three-Province Peak”) and then edited together with text. You can adjust it to watch in HD, I think:

Summary and Explanation
This footage was taken by me on the early morning of October 13th at the summit area of Three-Province Peak [삼도봉] where I had camped the night before. More information about the peak below:

This was just after sunrise. It was cold up there. You can see that my hood is up.

The summit and monument are along the Baekdu-Daegan Trail [백두대간], a cross-country mountain hiking trail spanning the length of Korea. I’ve been hiking along it since mid-September.

The monument is the exact meeting point of political-borders of Jeolla, Gyeongsang, and Chungcheong Provinces [전라, 경상, 충청]. Each side of the triangular monument is in a different province, so my feet were planted in each one during this short video.

This is kind of a special place for Koreans, I think, because the three regions (roughly) have had a long history of rivalry and conflict going back thousands of years, which is still seen today. (The regional voting patterns in every election, including 2012, bear this out — the southeast [Jeolla] votes 90% for the “left-wing” party and the southwest [Gyeongsang] votes 90% for the “right-wing” party.)

Height: 1,176 meters above sea level.
Year of Monument Construction: 1990.
Weather Conditions: Cold but clear [on Oct. 13th, 2013]
Time Video Was Made: Around 6:30 AM
Other People at Summit Area: None
Other Features of the Summit Area: Explanatory sign; helipad [0:32] (outlined in white); benches; direction markers leading to three other trails, (1) to the Mulhan Valley [물한계곡], (2) to another peak in the area, or (3) Further along the Baekdu-Daegan Trail.

NOTE: The helipad is visible in the distance at 0:32 in the video. It is constructed on a partly-artificially-raised, broad, flat, dirt surface, creating a four-foot-high dirt wall to the north. I camped just below that “wall” to block some of the wind. It was cold at 1,176 meters above sea level (3,860 feet) that morning.

I am now in Gimcheon, not far from the train station. This city, or this part of it, seems to be dominated by students: Everywhere I’ve looked, at all times of day (in my two days here), they’ve been loitering or walking or talking or eating or whatever else. I can only guess why.

I regret that I haven’t had the opportunity to post much during this trip, due to lack of computer access (though I have kept notes in a notebook). I’ve only written two substantive posts on my hiking trip as it’s developed so far, though I could’ve written many more. 

At the “PC Room” in which I now sit, I’ve majorly revised and updated post-155, “The Mystery of the Halmi Holes (Or, Finding North Korean Foxholes in the Mountains)“. I’m not certain that what I found are North Korean in origin, but I think there’s a compelling case to be made for it. I’m open to all suggestions and I think it’s an interesting subject.

I have to pay by the hour to use the Internet at these “PC Rooms”. This one costs 1,200 Won ($1.00 U.S.) per hour. I’ll leave here soon and try to find the E-Mart in this city. It’s my only hope, I think, to find some peanut butter to make sandwiches for the next big leg of the hike.

One way or another, I’ll return to Seoul around November 1st. Thanks for reading.

The following is the story of how I came to ask myself:“What would foxholes dug in 1950, abandoned for sixty years, look like today?”  I’d found what I suspect(ed) were North-Korean-made foxholes near the trail. It was October 5th.

October 5th is the day I reached Halmi Peak [할미봉], with its spectacular views:

My day began on a seldom-visited stretch of trail north of Yukship Pass (육십령), still a few miles south of Deogyusan National Park (덕유산). I’d camped the night before. It was windy all night.

As I was packing up in the morning, a solitary thru-hiker came through, another middle-aged Korean man. He’d slept at Yukship Pass and he asked me something [in Korean]. I’m about 80% sure that he asked me why I’d camped in the forest and not down at Yukship Pass. (The afternoon before, I’d asked a guy sitting in front of the closed grocery store at Yukship if I could camp there, and the guy had said “No” [in Korean], so I moved on. I have no idea who he was or by what authority he’d said ‘No’.)

The man was soon on his way. This all happened before 6:30 AM. We were both headed north, approaching Halmi Peak (Or Halmi-bong [할미봉]) and from there entering Deogyu National Park.

This was the view along the way:

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Shortly after the above photo was taken, I reached an unremarkable, unnamed 922-meter-high summit with no views. It was here that my wild speculation about North Korean guerrillas began. This was it:

I wouldn’t have thought twice about this place, if not for what the BD-Trail guidebook writers (two men from New Zealand) mention:

The writers’ speculation — that the Japanese bored these holes to assert political dominance — really makes little sense to me. That motivation may (or may not) be plausible, but why would they choose an unnamed, unknown, unspectacular, insignificant peak in the middle of nowhere? There must be thousands of peaks higher than this one in Korea. This summit (such as it is) is even in the shadow of the much-bigger Halmi Peak nearby, actually. The location makes no sense, given the writers’ conjectured-motivation. And, as the guidebook notes, it’s not even on the main area of this summit, but off to the side.

It seemed very unlikely, to me, that Japan did this for the reason the guidebook writers speculated on.

Naturally, I wanted to see the holes for myself. There were two. I located them, but unfortunately failed to take the time to get a good picture of the holes in proper perspective. Here is the best I could do:

The depth of the holes was a few inches, I think. They were filled with water, of course, from rain.

I’d like to hear ideas about what these holes could be; who made them; when; why.

Here is my own idea: I noticed, on this section of the trail, a number of well-weathered “foxholes” (i.e., circular pits dug to provide cover for combatants firing at enemies), actually including one right next to the holes in question. They are similar in shape and size to the foxholes you can find in the Paju area near the DMZ (not to mention of WWII movies), except that these in the Deogyu Mountains look older, more time-worn, neither made nor maintained anytime in recent decades, I suppose. Here is a shot of the “foxhole” next to the mystery holes:

This is not a great picture, either, but I assure you that that the pit there,  with three trees now growing in it now, looks manmade and very similar to military “foxholes”. Compare this to foxholes dug in 1944 [photographed in 2011]. [Link]

On the ascent up to this unnamed summit, there were several other long-given-back-nature foxholes. I saw a few more later on in southern Deogyu Mountains. The above foxhole, given different tree-cover, could’ve covered a wide “field of fire”. The other ones in this area I saw were also similarly placed.

It is reasonable to assume that whoever dug the foxholes must’ve made the circular boreholes, too, though for what purpose I don’t know. Some military apparatus must have made both the foxholes and the boreholes.

What would defensive foxholes be doing on this anonymous, seldom-visited summit in south-central Korea?  There are four possibilities, as I see it:

Potential Diggers of the Holes
(1) The Japanese military could have made them (during the colonial period) before 1945, it’s true. But, why? There was no need for them to defend such a place. They never fought any hostile armies on Korean soil in WWII.

(2) The wartime ROK [South Korean] Army or U.S. Army could have made them in August 1950, when they were retreating through this area, to defend against the North Korean advance. This seems also highly unlikely, as the U.S. strategy was to conduct a long delaying action until the Pusan Perimeter. (The location of these holes is far to the west of that perimeter.) Foxholes atop mountains like this do not fit. There was no retreat from here.

(3) Could the post-war ROK Army have made them? Why? For defense seems really implausible. This area is very far from the DMZ. I suppose it’s possible the ROK-Army (or U.S. Army) made them as training. The holes look decades old.

(4) [The only theory that I find really plausible]  There is only one group in the 20th century that ever defended terrain in this area, North Korean guerrillas (and/or pro-communist South Korean guerrillas). They may have dug them. Thousands famously “hid” in the Jiri Mountains, and some were also present in the Deogyu Mountains from Summer 1950 onward. They had mountain bases they. It took many major operations to “flush them all out”, some holding-out even until after the war was over. I’d speculate that they dug these foxholes to guard their mountain hideouts/bases.

Actually, related to (4), it’s also possible that the ROK Army made them during one of their many counter-insurgency operations against the guerrillas during the war. General Paik, in his book From Pusan to Panmunjom, wrote about one called “Operation Rat-Killer” in 1951 or ’52 which he led. The South Koreans may have determined that pro-communist guerrillas were active in moving through this area, so they established strongpoints ate key locations and manned them,  to limit guerrilla movement. I suppose this qualifies as either (4a), or (2a), or (5).

(A monument at Yukship Pass stands in honor of the ROK soldiers who died fighting North-Korean guerrillas operating from bases in the Deogyu Mountains during the war. The BD-Trail guidebook itself notes this just a few pages earlier. This unnamed-922-meter-peak is only a mile or so north of that monument.)

The origin of the circular borehole I’m still uncertain about, but it must be connected to who was manning these foxholes, which very likely was North Koreans. Even if it was ROK counter-insurgency soldiers, it’s still proof that the North Korean guerrillas used the very paths on which I’ve been treading in south-central Korea, and their strongpoints/bases were at least nearby; that is certain. It hadn’t hit me before.

All these thoughts hazily occurred to me that morning as I walked on towards Halmi Peak itself, to the north. The  thoughts I’ve outlined above faded from my mind soon, as the ascent to Halmi quickly demanded my full mental concentration. It is very steep on both sides, and so was physically quite hard to reach:

The view from the summit of Halmi Peak itself looked great:

My physical exhaustion, as well as the persistent wind, prevented full appreciation. Imagine a panting holder of the camera here, with a sweat-soaked shirt (something I’ve now gotten well used to).

Then came the physically-difficult steep descent after the peak:

So much for Halmi Peak. I kept going north, descending into Deogyu National Park. (I luckily avoided paying the entrance fee because I went in along the trail, the “back way”.)

Back to the “Halmi Holes Mystery”: Having done it, I cannot imagine trying to move through the Halmi Peak area without the handiwork of the Korean Forest Service — i.e. the staircase and ropes, the above being two examples of many in that area. I think it would’ve been near-impossible in the 1950, and almost-definitely-impossible as a large military operation with heavy equipment to move through the area. The difficulty of the terrain would’ve made it a good choice for a guerrilla base, which leads me to favor the “North Korean Guerrilla” idea rather than the “ROK Counter-Insurgency” idea. Only a narrow southern avenue of approach would’ve needed to be defended, which is the way all the foxholes faced.

(I’d like to think this is the solution to the Halmi Hole Mystery, but in fact I’m just speculating, too, and I’m willing to hear any other opinions.)

Here is somebody else’s post about long-abandoned foxholes in South Korea: Nojeok Hill: My view from the Top —  the Berlin Wall, the Korean War, Foxoles, and Korean Unification.

[I wrote this in a PC Room on the morning of October 10th in Geochang, where I was forced to return after a typhoon closed Deogyusan National Park.] [Updated: October 16th]

I think it’s no exaggeration to say that it felt a lot, to me, like “being in a cloud” to be on the summit of White Cloud Mountain (Baegunsan in Hamyang County, Korea [함양군 백운산)]).

I was 1,279 meters above sea level, and totally alone.

I reached the top on October 2nd, about 5:30 PM, or 45-60 minutes before navigable daylight was gone for the day. (I’d worried I might not be able to make the steep ascent before sunset; that I did make it was cause for celebration.) I’d come from Jung-Jae Pass.

White Cloud Mountain rises from 695 meters above sea level at Jung-Jae Pass to 1,279 meters above sea level at its summit and the guidebook writers warn how hard it is. I’d just come off of two days’ rest in Hamyang, lucky for me, so it wasn’t too bad.

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Along the way, I was pleased to see the red hiking ribbon of the Koreans I’d met a few days earlier. Many Korean hikers have a tradition of putting these kinds of ribbons along the route they’ve hiked. It helps to mark the trails properly outside the national parks, so they’re quite useful. These kinds of ribbons have helped me a lot on this trip.

Near the peak, there were some mounds that Koreans traditionally use as graves. The guidebook comments:

And here they are:

You may be able to see the trail continuing to the right. It’s a short way to the cleared summit area. The summit was deserted, of course. I hadn’t seen anyone since leaving the bus at Junggi Village (중기마을) a few hours earlier.

At the summit:

Just off to the right in the above picture is a big rock, a “stele”, that had some writing in Korean noting the peak’s name:

On the back of this stone, it explains (according to the guidebook translation) that there are over thirty peaks with the name White Cloud Mountain (백운산) in Korea, but that this one is highest.

The top of White Cloud Mountain would be my campsite.

Another attempted auto-timer self-portrait, the camera standing on a rock:

Here is a little from the guidebook about White Cloud Mountain and the area photographed directly above:

There was no snow on the top (that must be a misprint — Korea has too hot/long summers for snow to last on any peak), but there were clouds. The clouds dramatically and mysteriously covered the valleys below, something out of a fantasy movie.

It was the clouds surrounding the summit that were really astonishing. Looking back on these pictures, as I sit in the Internet Cafe in the small city of Geochang five days later (near a man who arrived at 8 AM on a Monday to play “Starcraft”), I think I’ve failed to capture how the scene really looked. I’m not a good enough photographer.

Here is one shot that was sort of successful:

It got quite cold that night. I got up before 6:00 AM to check out the sunrise. What better place?

Here it is, or “was”:

The guidebook again:

It looks good, but you have to imagine a shivering person shakily clutching the camera as this shot was taken. (Maybe that’s why most of the many pictures I tried to take don’t look good: my hands were shivering a lot.) The sleeping bag I bought here is quite good, but getting out of the tent was intimidatingly chilly. I wonder how much lower the temperature was on this 1,279-meter summit than in the valleys below, like back in Hamyang (elev. 170 meters).

As it was so cold, I broke camp only slowly. A picture of my tent half-taken-down:

I was almost ready to go when I saw someone coming up from the way I’d come the day before. It was around 7:45 AM. He was a thru-hiker, a man in his 40s or maybe early 50s, also hiking alone. He said he was from Yongin, a city near Seoul. I recognized the name of the city because of “Everland”, the enormous amusement park near there. We talked for a few minutes, and he had switched to totally-English by the end. Like all the thru-hikers I’ve met, he was in a terrific hurry to make his day’s objectives on this tough trail.

I told him I was going off the other way to find the supposedly-nearby temple. (One side-benefit: All temple have constant sources of pure, flowing, highly-drinkable water.) The guidebook says this about the temple:

This Choe Chi-won guy seems pretty famous around here. Hamyang was full of references to him doing this and that. I must’ve taken the wrong path, though, because after several hours I failed to find the temple. I suspected I was on the wrong track because signs mentioned “Baekun Temple”. I assumed that was an alternate name for the strange-sounding “Sangyon-dae”, but perhaps that is wrong.

I backtracked. I started along the path that Mr. Yongin had gone hours earlier. I was on the way to Muryeong-Gogae Pass (무령고개), whose name I wrote in my notebook as “Karaoke Pass” (“노래방재”). The man who runs the small restaurant at that pass has a karaoke machine and plays along with his guitar. Reaching there the next day was a half-step back into modern Korea (a kind of rustic “singing room” or noraebang at the pass) compared to the afternoon hiking up to White Cloud Mountain, and then the mysterious, shivering morning atop it.

[This was written in a PC Room (Internet Cafe) in Geochang on Monday, October 7th.]

On October 1st, I woke up in Hamyang, marking two weeks that I’ve been on this hiking trip.

Walking around Hamyang reminds me of Forest City, Iowa (near my father’s hometown). They are similar in size, both have clear main streets, and despite being small they are “the city” for their respective counties.

Hamyang Population and Density Comparison
In post-150, I wrote:

On second thought, the city population must be less than 20,000. That number is for the “eup”  [읍], and the “eup”  includes the area around the city proper, too. The city, the area of densest development, doesn’t much exceed one mile by one mile (1.5 km x 1.5 km), but the “eup”  is 27 sq.mi. Korean administrative units are confusing.

I see that Hamyang County has a population density of 145 per square mile, equal to New Hampshire‘s in the USA. This is way below the South Korea average of 1,300 per square mile, not to mention Seoul’s intimidating 45,000 per square mile. (My home, Arlington County in Virginia, is now over 8,000 per square mile, but was about 6,500-7,000 per square mile when I was growing up — or so I calculate from Wikipedia just now).

Hamyang County [함양군] outside the Town of Hamyang [함양읍] has a population density of only 80 per square mile, which is, fittingly, about equal to West Virginia‘s in the USA. I rode a bus through rural Hamyang County after I emerged from some days in the mountains (where I had met and traveled with one, and then three, friendly and helpful Korean hikers in their 40s who fed me and took care of me. That great story must wait for another time).

Speaking of West Virginia, a park ranger in Jiri National Park asked me where I was from. I said “Virginia”. He began talking about how much he liked West Virginia. I think he believed “Virginia” to be short for “West Virginia”.

Around Hamyang
Here’s a map Hamyang City, “such as it is”. Zoom out to see where it fits:

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(I hiked south, west, and northwest of here the past two weeks.)

Hamyang City proper (the dense, gridded area above) is easy to see on foot, in its entirety, in a couple of hours, I think, even at a very leisurely pace. An express tour could be done in an hour flat.

Most of Hamyang City consists of high-density low-rise houses but also a few 14-storey apartments. There is a business district centered on the main street. I was a little surprised to find several “chain businesses” in this “small town”: Dunkin Donuts, Pizza School, and Lotteria (a Korean McDonald’s) all on that street. There is actually even a “hagwon building” with three English institutes and several other hagwon (private educational institutes) housed inside. I don’t know why they put them all in one building.

 You can almost feel like you are in Seoul in a very narrow corridor of Hamyang Main Street. I know I did, as I ate the 5,000-Won, 1,800-calorie pepperoni pizza from Pizza School (a chain that some of my foreign coworkers loved). Off main street, there are other businesses, but few (if any) chains. It feels much poorer.

Here are three Hamyang businesses near the Intercity Bus Terminal, so far off from Main Street. On the left, there is a restaurant that says it specializes in “Korean Beef” [한우] (as in, the cow was born on Korean soil, not imported meat — Korean-beef is more expensive) and “Black Pig” [흑돼지]. The next is selling Buddhist trinkets (recognizable by the swastika), and the third may be a job-placement center:

I have many more pictures of interesting things in Hamyang, but this cheap ten-year-old computer in the motel can’t handle the camera’s USB for some reason, so I cannot upload them now. I can write about them, though:

It appears that Hamyang has put some money recently into sprucing up. There are brand-new-looking historical signs all over the place with impeccable English translations, and a big recreational riverside park in the west seems brand new. A wooden bridge across the river, from that park to the artificial forest, was just completed  on September 17th 2013, the placard says, the very first day of my hike!

Hamyang History Tidbits
There is a very-old jeongja [정자] (a shaded, elevated resting pavilion) on Main Street across from the town hall. The historical marker implies, in flawless English, that a jeongja has existed here since the 800s AD, when a scholar named Choe Chiwon (b. 857) used it to write poetry. The present one is from the 1600s, it says.

There is an artificial forest on the riverbank, planted around 900 AD and still standing, also the initiative of this Choe Chiwon. It was designed to help stop flooding, it says, and is today recreational (and probably was then, too).

A faded stone monument stands inside the artificial forest, erected in 1871, and called the “Hamyang Anti-Compromise Stele”. It’s written in Chinese characters (Hanja). Here is the text of the English explanatory sign:

Korea has changed a lot in 150 years, of course, but this kind of thinking is very much still accepted or even dominant. I can’t forget when, in late 2011, a bright student I liked a lot, railed in class against the then-controversial Free Trade Agreement with the USA. “It would make Korea an American colony”, he said. I saw the brainstorming he did on his paper in Korean, and he’d written “Yankee Colony” in Korean. Koreans use “Yankee” as an ethnic-slur against White-Americans. He was only in sixth grade at the time, I think. He got his opinions from the adults around him.

Finally, speaking of politics: Hamyang seems to be the site of an alleged massacre of hundreds pro-Communist civilians (“85% women, children, and the elderly”, somebody wrote on Wikiepdia) by the South Korean Army in 1951. I didn’t see this mentioned on the “History of Hamyang” sign I saw near the town hall. 

I am suspicious of the details and scope of this alleged incident, because the source may be former South Korean General Choi Duk-Shin [최덕신] who defected to North Korea in the 1980s. He thus had incentive to say how bad the South’s regime was.

(This Choi Duk-Shin was quite a character. Who’s ever heard of a South Korean official defecting to North Korea? He was the South Korean Foreign Minister under the early years of General [President] Park Chung-Hee in the 1960s.)

That many killings of civilians occurred in that war (and especially in this region of the country) is certain, though. This mountainous area of the central-south became a stronghold/hideout for North Koreans, after their units began to fall apart in September 1950 following the Incheon Landing. Perhaps tens of thousands of North Koreans spent time in these villages and mountains to wage their partisan war. They were supposedly supported by many local people, especially in Jeolla Province. 

Major operations to defeat the Communist guerrillas involved burning down entire villages, it seems. I passed right through one such place last week (Nochi Village [노치마을]), which had a historical marker saying it was burned entirely in such an operation in the war. It had a great freshwater spring.

[Pictures to be added later when at a better computer]

Here is a picture I took Saturday, Hamyang County [함양군], Baekjeon District [백전면], Unsan Village [운산리].

I caught the bus from near this spot in Unsan-ri to Hamyang Bus Terminal at about 7:10 AM. There were no marked bus stops anywhere in Unsan Village, causing me confusion. A Korean man, in his 50s or 60s, with an old-style hat was out for a walk that morning. I tried to ask where the bus stop was. He answered with the Korean version of “Huh?” , so I repeated slowly. “Buh-seuh”. He got it that time. The man seemed to say that the bus would be coming around such and such a place in a few minutes and turning, and so I should just wait in the intersection and wave it down, not that I understand most of his words, but I think that was about it. I thanked him and he walked away, and the bus was already visible in the distance, winding its way towards us. The man’s suggested method is exactly the one I used to get on the bus, and so began my ride away from Unsan Village.

Note the church on the left. I once had the idea that Christianity was mostly urban/urbane in South Korea, with rural people being more Buddhist or something, but small towns and villages also have their own churches. In the small city of Hamyang, I later saw several churches, and one woman even handed me a church leaflet and small free gift (a very typical thing to happen in the Seoul area). I didn’t see a comparable Buddhist icon in the village.

Speaking of Buddhists, the bus driver was a bit fat, quite bald, and had a round Buddha-like head. His voice surprised me; it was a baritone radio-announcer voice. This baritone Buddha bus-driver was involved in a conversation at length, for most of the forty minutes from when I got on to when she got off near Hamyang City, with a woman passenger who sat in the front seat. 

I was surprised to see that the bus already had about six passengers when I got on, because I knew from my trail guidebook that there was only one stop before mine, at Junggi Hamlet [중기마을] to the west of Unsan and at the very end of the county road. Mountains were all around it. That hamlet is near Jung-jae Pass [중재 or 중치], the place I had emerged from the mountains the day before.

The bus ride cost 2,000 Won ($1,85). Only cash was accepted. There seemed to be a machine for reading electronic cards, but nobody, of the two dozen or more who got on and off, used it. It must have been just for show!

Of the other passengers, all but two were elderly or nearly so. Many seemed to know each other, of course. I think the bus passed through the districts of Baekjeon and Byeonggok (백전면, 병곡면), the total population of both being 3,000 according to Korean Wikipedia. I presume many or most of these riders have been living there since birth.

People got off almost wherever they wanted; they’d just ask the driver and he’d stop. Most were “going to town” to take care of some business or other, and got off in the city. I got out at the County Bus Terminal (시내터미널), close to the Intercity Bus Terminal (시외터미널). Here is the Intercity Bus Terminal, looking very North Korean:

Here is a shot of the inside of the Intercity Bus Station, with characteristically-elderly people loitering. I think the man standing was some kind of station manager.

I was in Hamyang.

“To make it clear across this country, South Korea, on foot” was the goal (see post-146). A cross-country mountain hiking trail called the “Baekdu-Daegan” was the way. 

I’ve made progress, but it’s been really physically tough, and I realize I’m just not too good at this “trekking” thing. I’ve taken many rest days, including presently. 

I began walking from Jungsan-ri [중산리) on Tuesday, September 17th at about 7:20 AM. I passed through Jiri Mountain National Park over the next few days, staying in the efficiently-run mountain hostels at night (which are reservation-only), and then emerged into one of the highly-remote parts of the trail outside the national parks. 

I don’t have much time now to write. Here is a photo I took in Jiri Mountain National Park [지리산국립공원]:

It really does look like that, at the right time of day. An Google-Image search for “Jirisan” yields many more.

It’s now 9:00 AM on Tuesday, October 1st, or two weeks almost to the hour after my trip began. I am now in a town called Hamyang, a ways north of the Jiri Mountains.

My last day was a Thursday. I expected it to be a Friday. That was two and a half weeks ago. 

Suddenly, it was over, my twenty-four months (about eleven of them good) at “Ava*** English” in Bucheon.

Looking Back on mid-September From Hamyang
I am now in a small city called Hamyang (pop. 20,000 in the city [읍] another 20,000 in the surrounding 250-square-mile county [군]), making the county area very rural — 80 people per square mile versus Seoul’s 45,000 per square mile. As I am resting in Hamyang the next two days, I have the time to relate the story of my last few days in Bucheon:

The new guy arrived on Tuesday, but was secluded and not introduced to me. Thursday was my surprise-last-day. Then came a few stressful days of harriedly packing my things, thoroughly cleaning the apartment, finding places to store my things (temporary and longer-term); frantically ferrying my bags back and forth between places; even finding a place to sleep was a challenge. I finally got going with my across-South-Korea travel plan (see post-146) on Monday evening. I’ve been very seldom on the Internet since then. This is my first post in nearly three weeks. 

Surprise: It’s Your Last Day
At about 5:00 PM on Thursday Sept. 12th, to my surprised-bemusement and disappointment, I was told to not to come in on Friday. (Note that I taught on Thursdays 5:20-10:00 PM; 10:00 being the “close of business” time; this meant that I had only twenty minutes’ warning that it was my last day). The new guy would do all my classes.

The reason this was disappointing was that on Fridays, I was to teach five classes (of 65 minutes each this semester), including LN, GA (both are high-level 6th-graders), and T3 (medium-high-level eighth and ninth graders studying “TOEFL“). Of the thirty or more students between those classes, I’d had nearly all over multiple semesters, and a couple of the older ones for nearly every semester since I started in September 2011. I had a lot of success with them. I fully expected, and told them, that my last day would be Friday Sept. 13th. 

I should explain that Fridays were my only “significant” day in the two to three weeks I spent there in Fall Semester 2013. What I mean is, the way the Fall schedule worked out, in all my other classes that week (Mondays through Thursdays), 90%+ of the students were either quite-new or brand-new to me (with perhaps a narrow majority being “brand new”), and classes were all low-level.. My saying goodbye to such classes meant little, both to them and to me. 

My schedule was designed for the new guy, and they planned to plant his foot firmly on the lowest rung of the ladder, regardless of any other consideration, because hierarchy must be enforced and people have to know their places. This means he was given the lowest-level and most problematic classes, I was a place-holder for the two to three weeks of Fall Semester till he arrived, except Fridays, when I still had some significant classes.

Such…Relentless…Antagonism
Being forbidden from saying goodbye to LN, GA, and T3 seems just cruel. This is exactly the kind of stunt the managers would often pull. Always cutting corners against us, cheating on money in small ways, lying, withholding information (why was I not told of this “plan” earlier? — The date of my last day seems important enough to merit some advance notice), social ostracism, and just any other miscellaneous bits of antagonism. 

[An aside: In the months leading up to the end, I began to see that the antagonism was probably is race-based on the part of certain managers. That is to say, they want(ed) to feel superior and want(ed) to express Korean racial pride, or something, by “screwing” us foreigners and so on. This sounds like a crude analysis, and is not “P.C.”, but I don’t care. Over two years at “Ava**n”, I accumulated some quite-specific reasons for believing this.]

Surprise Phone Call from Students
It wasn’t all bad, though. One manager, the only one who has been consistently kind to me, Elly, surprised me by calling me on the phone during her LN class (high-level sixth graders). The class spent at least ten minutes on the phone. She spoke some, they spoke in chorus some, and each student said something, things like that they would miss me and that they think I was a good teacher; one said she was sorry she didn’t work harder. Some students, I learned, had made some kind of cards which they had planned to give on my last day, but were now unable. Many seemed very sad, (I’m sure they would become attached to most people in my place who earnestly gave their full effort). 

I told them I was sad that I wasn’t able to see them on my last day. I told them, via speaker-phone, that their new foreign-teacher was good and they should listen to him (to which they replied in chorus “No!!” — That was touching but made me cringe for the new guy and don’t bear any grudge against him. In truth, I have no idea what that new guy is like, because they didn’t let me meet him; they kept him sealed-off in the other building and did not introduce us, and did not have him watch my classes. He is from Canada; in his 20s; his name is the same as the Biblical evangelist formerly known as Saul. I never learned his last name; he had some kind of trendy haircut.) They had just seen him about a half-hour earlier for his first class.

An Impromptu Goodbye Speech
That phone call came on a Friday about 5:30 PM, as I was packing my bags in the apartment. I’d left Ava**n (the name of the institute) at about 10:40 PM on Thursday. After 10:00 PM on Thursday, a cake materialized. I was asked to make a goodbye speech to the five Korean teachers in the second-floor building. I didn’t have anything planned.

What did I end up saying? I referenced the “farewell comedy routine” that my friend C.H. delivered in June 2012. [See post-73, final paragraph]. He actually delivered a list of jokes about the institute, something like Jay Leno or David Letterman would do. I also deliberately referenced M.R. (looks like Steve Jobs) who finished in June 2013 in my speech. Both of them also had problems at that place, and by mentioning them I was trying to get the coded message across of who I believe the good guys really were, or something like that. I don’t know if anyone understood that, except potentially C.R., the young California coworker sitting and listening to it.

The essence of my speech was that most of the Korean teachers had been kind to me (the real antagonists were not present, of course), and I wanted to thank them for it. I went home and started packing.

Vacating the Apartment
Why did I go home and immediately start packing? Because I was also told, in yet another “kick in the stomach as my foot was out the door”, that I had to vacate the apartment by Friday evening. (The institute controls the apartment.) Remember I was told this about 5:00 PM on Thursday.

Why not give a little more warning? My final work day was explicitly-stated in the contract as September 13th, but it was usual to remain a few days after one’s final day, to get affairs in order. I expected to leave at noon on Sunday.

The manager who engineered this, whom I have here in the past referred to as “Stringbean”, must have done this solely to antagonize me and “show me who was boss”. They always did things like that. But, as I said in the impromptu final speech on that Thursday, “It’s all over now”.

I recently visited the battle site of Chipyongni, a three-day siege in February 1951 during the Korean War, when 5,000 Americans and French defeated 25,000 Chinese attackers. It was first successful defensive stand for the Americans against the Chinese in the Korean War.

I mentioned my visit in post-148 (“the Gettysburg of Korea“). I wrote:

Below is the location of Chipyongni (now called Jipyeong-myeon, 지평면). You can  zoom-in on this map all the way. It is anchored on the site of the memorial, which is in the middle of the American defensive perimeter.

Across the Country By “Subway”
One of the amazing things about this excursion to Chipyongni is that I covered 95%+ of the distance to the battle site (the red marker above) using what is loosely called “the subway”. It has evolved into a cheap-and-easy Greater Seoul Rail Network. It has been gobbling-up legitimate (above-ground) train-lines for years, and continues to expand. There are now about twenty lines. I wrote about one such rail-line way back in post-9:

I also rode the “subway” very-long distance to Chuncheon this year. See post-15. This most-recent Jipyeong-myeon/Chipyongni trip is another instance for which sarcastic quote-marks on “subway” are called for. I scanned-in with my transit card at Bucheon (west of Seoul), and stayed in the system all the way to Yongmun, the terminus of the “Jungang Line”. The trip involved 80 minutes of riding Line 7, then waiting around to transfer in east-Seoul, then another hour on the Jungang Line until Yongmun. The total cost for the subway trip, as the screen told me when I scanned my card out of the system at Yongmun, was an incredible 2,150 Won (less than $2.00 USD[!]). As you can see above, this was a trip near halfway across the country, east-to-west. The trip was not very pleasant, though, as I had to stand for almost all of those three hours, and it was generally crowded all the way. At $2.00, it becomes a “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”  thing. South Korea is no longer a cheap place to live, but it still for transportation.

At Yongmun
Saturday. Sometime before 10:00 AM, my traveling companion and I arrive at Yongmun Station, tired, groggy. For an “end-of-the-line station”, the atmosphere outside is downright “kinetic” this morning, though. Koreans in hiking gear are frolicking about. They are probably all going to the Yongmun Temple area.

In the 850-page travel guidebook on Korea I have, this entire region (Eastern Gyeonggi-Do) gets about a page and a half’s write-up. All that is mentioned is Yongmun Temple and its environs (“Yongmun-sa [temple] sits below Yongmun-san [mountain]. At 1,157 meters, this mountain is not the tallest in Gyeonggi-Do, but some say it’s the best-looking. Of its many hiking trails, the one that’s perhaps most often used goes over the….”). A few resorts are also mentioned.

In that guidebook, the word “Chipyongni” appears nowhere., though.

Eastward On Foot
The original idea was to get out of the train station at Yongmun and proceed to Jipyeong on foot, only three miles away. I carried printouts of the battle history, downloaded from history.army.mil, which I read again on the train ride. Included was the following map:

My idea was to use the landmarks on the above army-history map to try to find the U.S. and French defensive positions during the siege and walk along them. They defended low-lying hills around the village. I had little idea as to how I would find those exact hills. I just sort of hoped it would work out. I didn’t have any clue if there was any kind of memorial or anything.

Walking through the town of Yongmun, we got some kimbap and a disappointingly-small plate of tteokpokki (떡볶이). Heading east towards Jipyeong, I saw a ROK Army base:

I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that this Korean Army base includes several “cute” things, a cartoon soldier with the word “Last Punch” (I don’t get it), and a yellow smiley-face on the sign.

Minutes later, we were out of the town, and came upon this kind of scenery:

This is the kind of thing that the veterans of the Korean War must remember, at least during autumn. It’s not how it looked during the Battle of Chipyongni, though, as the battle was in frigid February. Temperatures were below freezing and snow was on the ground. Walking through in the pleasant fall weather, and with the drenching-humidity of summer in very recent memory, it’s hard to imagine that this landscape will become “Siberia” in a few months. It will.

On to the Memorial
A snag in my ad-hoc plan presented itself after a while. It was necessary to cross a narrow mountain pass, but construction workers were obstructing it. We turned back. A taxi passed by, and we got in. I marveled at this good fortune. A taxi passing by such a road was lucky, exactly when it was needed. The friendly driver drove us the few miles to the Chipyongni Battle Memorial, dropping us off in front of the below sign. The ride cost 5,000 Won ($4.50).

The old tradition in Korea is to mark an important event with an inscribed stone. This was done for the dramatic battle of Chipyongni by a ROK Army division in 1957. That stone still stands. I later heard from a local resident that it used to be nearer the town hall, and was moved out to its present location some years ago. Both locations may be arbitrary when it comes to actual place-significance for the battle. The locals we spoke with later said this, something I’d already suspected. Here is the map, again, zoomed in. The red marker is the location of the battle memorial:

As best I can tell by comparing the maps, the American defensive perimeter in the north ran in a line from the larger of the two little blue lakes in the top right of this map, and straight west from there. It ran a bit west of the creek, then turned south, which was the French position.

Here are some photos of the memorial:

Museum Under Construction
The building shrouded in blue will be a new museum. I found this sign in front of it:

The sign above says the cost of the museum project is 1,761 백만원, or $1,761,000 (if I converted that correctly), and that it will be completed on January 30th, 2014. The cost is being paid 50% by the army and 50% by the state. There will be two floors, one an education hall (교육장) and the other an war-exhibition room (전시관, I am not sure of this translation).

I spent a long time at the memorial. I read every word, though I already knew the history from my previous reading on the subject. As I hope the above pictures show, the atmosphere at this memorial site is very pleasant. There were no other visitors or passersby in the hour or more I was there, though I did see one construction worker.

After leaving the memorial site, we walked south to the heart of downtown Jipyeong. Here it is. I don’t know why there is a woman dressed in old-fashioned garb:

Again,this is right in the center of the village, the most significant intersection. There were very few cars around.

The red banner there says “우리도 죽기전에 지평면에서 수도권 전철 타고 싶마”. I recognized enough words to understand that it was a slogan demanding that the Seoul urban rail network be extended to Jipyeong Station. It currently ends one station before Jipyeong, at Yongmun. This is a major inconvenience for Jipyeong residents. If they want the ultra-cheap way to get into and then around Seoul (see above), they have to go to Yongmun first. They can still ride the “normal trains”, but those are much more infrequent and more expensive. Maybe a bigger reason for this campaign is to put Jipyeong “on the map”. To Seoul-area dwellers, Jipyeong doesn’t exist. If it’s on the subway network, suddenly it exists, and more people would visit, and would spend money. These banners were all over Jipyeong.

Here is a wider shot of the intersection:

That blue structure is a bus-stop. About the time I took this picture, I was approached suddenly by a boy. He said something like “I have never seen a foreigner here before!” I think those were his first words. He spoke in English. His grammar and accent were both great. I asked if he’d been abroad, and he said he’d been in the Philippines. He informed me that he was in middle school, and he said the town had only 100 students. I don’t know if he meant 100 in the middle school, or if 100 was the total for the elementary, middle, and high schools combined. I could believe the latter. He wondered what I was doing. The boy was eager to please, so I asked him for help in my quest to walk the hills of the battle. I showed him my map print-out, and asked if he knew how I could find any of those hills. He puzzled over it for a while, trying to orient himself. Soon, a small gaggle of friends had joined him. Nobody knew anything. One girl identified “Pongmi-san” on this map, but nobody had heard of “Mongmi-san”. They wandered away.

This boy’s warm conversation, and (futile) attempts to help, was the first of many instances of kindness from Jipyeong people that really impressed me (the taxi driver was first, but he was a Yongmun person, I think. He undercharged me, knowing I was a foreigner visiting this historic site). Random “street” kindness to strangers, especially foreigners, is quite uncommon in Korea, and this boy’s kindness amazed me. Never once in Bucheon, in two years, has anything like this happened to me.

Continuing on, I resolved to try to find where the railroad crosses the major road east of town, that being where the 23rd Regiment’s 2nd Battalion was entrenched, according to the army-history map. I never made it that far. Walking a short was east, I found a town-hall. I had the idea to look for a map, but it was locked up. A bunch of men were loitering outside an adjacent building, and invited us in to eat. It was a dining hall. Before we knew it, this happened:

Those tin-foil spherical objects are “rice balls” with a few other ingredients tossed in. This is commonly called “fist rice” (주먹밥). There are also side dishes (반찬) and fried mushrooms. All free. This was the second instance in which I was amazed at the Jipyeong people‘s generosity and hospitality. We weren’t entitled to this food, being non-residents. Again, in my experience in Korea, you don’t invite strangers in such a way as this, much less foreigners. (I mean, hell, in two years we foreign-teachers were never invited once by the boss[es] of the language-institute to dinner). This was an event organized by a civic group that I presume offers free lunches at the town-hall every Saturday.

So the guys standing outside the town-hall insisted we should eat this free food. Bottled water was also given freely, and there was even beer. The man in the blue baseball cap in the above photo came over and talked to us for a long while. He insisted on sharing some beer. The subject turned to the battle. The man consulted my map (this one), but held it upside down. He talked at length, my Korean friend reported, about the site of his house and how many Chinese were killed in its vicinity. He said he’d been in the USA in 1988, while in the ROK military. Another local, a man with tied-back hair who greatly resembled an American-Indian to me, also sat down, mostly quiet (his taciturnity added to the “American-Indian vibe”). He was clearly interested and wanted to help.

Soon the man with tied-back hair asked if we were interested in the small museum about the battle. It was housed in the nearby library. We were. It wasn’t open. The man with tied-back hair said to wait a minute. Minutes later, the man returned, and led us to the library adjacent to the eating-hall and the town-hall. He’d gone to fetch the octogenarian Korean-War veteran museum-caretaker. He asked him to open it on account only of us! The old man had kindly come in, and was waiting. I couldn’t believe my good luck to meet such people as these. (This kind of hospitality puts Seoul and its satellites, like Bucheon or Ilsan, to shame. It made me think, “I hope this place fails to get its train station incorporated into the Seoul Metrorail network”, for fear it would be corrupting.)

A small room constituted the Chipyongni Museum:

I spent a long time here, looking at everything carefully, and listening to the man speak. He had a lot to say and was highly enthusiastic. He is a veteran of the war, and I presume he is from Jipyeong. This is his museum.

There is Korean War paraphernalia of all kinds, uniforms, helmets, equipment salvaged from the battlefield, badges, portraits, photographs, books, maps, and binders filled with photos of the various commemorations over the years. Every year, he told us, a French delegation arrives to honor the French battalion. Descendants of the American veterans also come every year, he said. The man informed us of various fine points the history of the battle (it involved only 300 Koreans, “KATUSAs” embedded in the U.S. Regiment and the French battalion, he said), of the village (it has not really grown much since 1951), of the museum (the new, larger, museum [see above] supposedly opens in 2014, but he doubted it would), and the preservation efforts (he said there was talk of making some or all of the defensive perimeter into a marked hiking path. It would be two miles long or so). This man has documented a lot about the battle. I get the feeling that the new museum, next to the memorial, may have been his initiative.

I noticed the guestbook on the table. When I visited on the afternoon of September 7th, there were no names in it yet for September. In fact, the previous entries were on August 20th, and prior to that, August 11th. I leafed through all the pages, going back to early 2012, and found only a small handful written in English, and those belonged in all but one case to U.S. Military personnel. They wrote their “address” as “Camp Humphreys” or the like, nothing more. There may have been about five military who visited. There was a single non-military foreigner in the past year, the man recalled. He said she was a middle-aged woman from Texas visiting her daughter who was teaching English in a nearby city. He described her.

I signed the guestbook, leaving my name and address.

The man, at one point, criticized young Koreans for their anti-Americanism. He became a little more animated. He was apparently saying that they are ungrateful and spoiled. This is characteristic of his generation’s attitudes. The younger generations were fully ready, a few years ago, to believe that U.S. soldiers had deliberately murdered two Korean middle school girls by running them over with their tank during an exercise for fun, even (or so goes the lie) backing up several times over them to ensure the girls were dead. These U.S. soldiers were animated solely by hatred for Koreans, many believed or claimed to believe. Then, they were tried in a U.S. military court and found not guilty, further evidence of American disregard for Korean life! (The court found the incident to be a tragic accident, and determined that the girls were walking in a strictly-restricted zone that day). That Koreans really believed the storyline as presented above is baffling. I attribute it to the “follower” mentality. No, it’s not rational, but others are saying it, so we’ve got to follow. That story probably literally originated with North Korea. It’s the kind of thing they do. The protests against U.S. beef of the late 2000s, and then the protests against the FTA of the early 2010s were equally ridiculous, the museum-keeper commented. (U.S. beef is still not being sold in South Korea in my experience.)

At the end, the kind and energetic man gave me two pamphlets about Chipyongni in English and Korean, and a medallion that says “We Will Not Forget / Battle of Chipyong-Ni” and something in Korean.

After leaving the museum, we walked to the train station to get tickets on the “normal train” get back to Bucheon, with the intention of also finding some of the other historical markers the kind old man at the museum had discussed.

Another act of unprovoked kindness followed at the train station. The attendant said no seats were available, but that we could come back later and maybe some would open up via cancellations. Someone in Seoul or Bucheon would’ve just sold us “standing tickets” (the same price, for some reason, as sitting tickets) and been done with it. This man, though, waited, and constantly monitored the status of seats available via his computer. He tracked us down outside the station an hour or more later and said he’d reserved the tickets. We paid. We rode back to Seoul that evening in seats, and fell fast asleep (having woken up at 6:00 AM), which would’ve been impossible with standing tickets. Why did this man go so far to make our trip more convenient? He gained nothing from it. These Jipyeong people are amazing, I concluded.

Before leaving, I found a few more historical markers. The French memorial is near the train station:

We ate a small dinner at this spot, on the grass.

I suspect that these memorials were set up by the Americans because of the grass. Both here and at the main battle memorial (discussed above), the grass is of the softest kind you often find on American front-lawns, not unlike my memories of my mother’s front lawn from years ago, so soft it’s more pleasant to lay on than a bed.

Judging by my comparison of the current map and the battle-history map, this was probably the above was about the view the French soldiers had as the Chinese approached and attacked.

One curious thing during this visit to Jipyeong was the butterflies. They were everywhere. I captured one in a photo:

Finally, the train came through at 6:09 PM, and about six people got on at Jipyeong Station, myself included. The train was already packed, having started way down in Andong, but we had seats due to the vigilance of the attendant.

Minutes after settling into the train seat, I fell asleep. I awoke in Yongsan, central Seoul, and hour later, amazed at what a great day-trip I’d just had.

Tomorrow is September 11th. Two years ago on that day, I left the USA by plane to come to Korea for the second time. I started a job. Now two years have passed. I regret staying at this particular job that second year. It was a mistake.

In 2011, I knew I had to come (again, that is). There were many reasons. For some reason, I took a lot of “audio books” that I copied from the Arlington library, but I ended up listening to very few of them. Maybe only two. Of the clothes I arrived with, relatively few are left. I have more money in my bank account now. I know more about Korea.I’ve seen more places. I’ve seen more people. I’m not sure if I am a more confident teacher. My ex-coworker M.R. (in Korea since 2004), who was said to resemble Steve Job by many students, was so antagonized by management here that he felt “working in Av**** has caused me to become a much worse teacher”. I sympathize with him, and I fear the same.

I don’t know where I am going with this wandering retrospective, but…Oh, and somewhere along in there I got the idea to do a big hiking trip across South Korea, which I will begin on September 16th.

Ever since I’ve been able to “see the end”, I’ve been doing various things I need to do to “get my affairs in order”, and have not had the energy or desire to update this thing. Oh, right, I also started this blog in the two years I’ve been here, but have not much publicized it.

I still have never eaten dog nor “still-living octopus” (산낙지), but I could if I wanted to without much trouble.