Recent travel

A week and a half ago (when I started this, much, much longer ago now, we've actually been back and done the show), I went on a trip around the country with Chungeuy.  We've got a gig to perform in April down in Naju, in the southwest (near Kwangju, that's the biggest city in the area if you're looking at a map).  It was great to get out of the city, finally.  Technically I've left before, but never so far, and usually it was just a suburb, a feeder for the city, and felt almost the same.  That or I was so busy working that I didn't really have time to appreciate the location, i.e. the festival last September.  This time we went way out.  Admittedly, it did take well over an hour to actually escape the clutches of Seoul gridlock, but once we were seriously on the highway it was great to be able to look around and see how the other half lives.  (Quite literally.  Nearly 50% of the county's population lives in either Seoul or the suburbs.)  The first thing I noticed was how rural everything else is.  In all honesty, it's similar to driving through New Hampshire and Vermont.  I suppose that makes sense, with so much of everything concentrated in Seoul, but still...  The next big thing I noticed when we finally started to approach Kwangju, the first real city we hit on the trip.  From the direction we approached it just looked like rows of giant apartment blocks.  All the same.  All close together.  Really ugly.  On the outskirts, where we were driving, there were some smaller buildings, I don't really recall what they were, but the general impression was of mechanics' garages, scrapyards, various shops, all kind of run-down and/or dusty.  But I don't really remember.  The afternoon sunlight through occasional light snow didn't help.

Our meeting there went fine, although long, boring, and meaningless from my perspective.  Contracts got signed and stuff, which was good.  And I got a look at the theater, which is huge.  It also has the same kind of board as the theater we were at in Seoul, which will make life much easier, since I'll be able to input cues from the disk we made there.

Afterwards, on the way out of town, we stopped at a restaurant for an early supper.  (Meals are not particularly organized here, it's more of an "eat when everyone's hungry" thing.  The more so because you have to get food when going to bars, which are the most common place for evening socializing.)  It was good, and afterwards the proprietess gave us a cup of coffee, free of charge.  As a general rule, people in the Korean countryside are much friendly and more generous than people in Seoul.  The next morning, after a huge breakfast (more on this later), we were asked if we needed anything else... and if we'd said yes, we'd have gotten it for free!

Driving out of town, back past the ranks of buildings, we could see off in the distance a snow-covered mountain peak, a floating pink cloud thanks to the setting sun.  Very pretty.

 

That evening we visited a friend of Chunguey's, a professor at the university in a small city further south called Suncheon.  We talked for a while, showed him a DVD of "The Angel and the Woodcutter", went out to a bar, and went out to a little nature walk around a big saltmarsh near a bay.  That was nice, although it was pretty dark.  The next day we went to his class, which apparently had watched the video.  There were introductions (awkward, I used up most of my Korean and then was asked to elaborate in English, "What do you think of Suncheon?"), question and answer (most of which were more comments, and weren't directed at me), and we were given coffee by one of the students.  It was interesting.  Mostly awkward, but the students seemed pretty excited to have us there.

 

Afterward we drove out to the bay again, walked around some in daylight, and looked into taking a boat ride.  Unfortunately we would need a group of 6 or more for that.  It was also early in the season, so there weren't any migratory birds around.  We looked around a little, then left to get breakfast.  (After our show in Naju everyone went to Suncheon again, and that time we did take a boat ride, walked around, and saw lots of the area, which was great.) 

 

Breakfast was interesting.  We found a place that specialized in "dubu" (tofu) and got something fairly simple, but with it came bazillions of banchan (the little side dishes of pickled and/or fermented vegetables, quails' eggs, etc., all sorts of stuff).  We also got these crabs, cooked and covered with a sort of sweet, thick chili sauce.  Chungeuy told me that there was a saying to the effect that "these crabs are so good that father and son will fight over them".  I looked at him funny.  He went on to say that Koreans had too much soup with their meals and that led to stomach cancer.  I continued to look at him funny.  Then he said that to fight cancer you had to eat the shells of the crabs.  Then he bit into one, crunching the shell and chewing it all up.  Now these aren't huge crabs, but they're more than bite-size.  They're usually chopped into quarters, with legs and claws attached, and you can usually get a good bite or two out of the body part of each section.  They're not soft-shelled either.  And the insides feel kind of slimy.  It was pretty gross that time.  Although now I'm more used to it.

 

Then it was time to start heading back home.  However, on the way we needed to pay a visit to a theater in Andong, another city and a sort of historical cultural capital in Korea.  We didn't do much there though, just went to the theater, got served coffee, except we didn't because the coffee machine was messed up, although our host spent a while trying to fix it.  Then we gave someone another copy of the DVD and left.  It was an interesting drive home, as we had to go through mountains and it started snowing, the last snow of the spring, I think.  It was also very pretty, with sun shining through the mountains and snow blowing around.  Then we got back to Seoul and there was lots of traffic.  The End.

 

Interesting note though, along highways every few kilometers there are observation cameras to check on people's speed, and before the cameras there are signs saying "Camera ahead" in English as well as Korean.  It seems to work pretty well, because at least some of them are real and you can get somewhat painful fines for speeding.  Not actually as bad as the US, but there's no way to talk your way out of them either.

 

Another thing I noticed was that, with all the massive ugly buildings, there didn't seem to be that much sprawl.  It was kind of surprising to realize that almost every hillside was uncultivated and unbuilt-upon (this is only true outside of Seoul).  The predominance of agriculture was also, as I mentioned before, kind of schocking.  Anything that wasn't built up and wasn't a hill was a field, all over the country.  This is something that was also true in China, and seems sort of indicative of a country that's been inhabited for thousands of years.  The land between hills tends to be flattened by so much use.

 

Other recent travel... I'm home, back in the U.S. now.  I really need to write these faster.

 More sometime.