Epic entry - fish market and a folk village (w/ pictures!)

I have to get this entry up about last weekend before this weekend comes, before the new experiences rob the "old" ones of their freshness...

So it was last Saturday and I had spent most of the morning doing laundry and trying to decide whether to venture out into the very tentative looking weather outside. Plus I'd stayed up late watching the Germany-Argentina game, which stretched late into the night with penalty kicks...I have to say though that I was truly impressed by the Argentine national anthem, which I might have to give the "best in tournament" award. It's a beautiful, epic piece, though only a few of the players seemed to know all of the nine or so verses. Speaking of epic, my single load of laundry, in the washing machine, must have taken at least two hours. By the time it's finally done, I realize there is no dryer in the apartment, and I have decided to wash nearly all of my socks and all of my underwear. It's a tough lesson to learn, but I'll remember to keep something in reserve next time I'm travelling and I don't have some sort of reliable way to dry my clothes lined up...

Not about to let a pile of wet clothes ruin my day, and tired of waiting for the weather to make up its mind, I headed out to the subway with the intention of doing a little urban exploring in Seoul. Just as I get to the subway steps, an impulse grabs me and pulls me off to the right. Part of it was just simply to grab what would seem to most as a mundane picture -- but I was really intrigued by the fact that there's this giant power plant in the middle of town, which not only provides electricity but is a central source of heat for office and residential buildings in the neighborhood (we don't have anything like this in the U.S. as far as I know). And in Sim City, if you ever put a power plant in the middle of your posh residential neighborhood, it would instantly become a slum. But not here - in fact there are some of the most expensive apartments in the greater Seoul area in this neighborhood. Granted, it's not spewing coal dust or oil smoke (it's powered by nat. gas) but still, I was intrigued. So I got my precious picture (it's not that good, but you can still see it if you click the link at the end of this entry) and instead of turning around to go back the subway station, I simply kept walking...I can't really explain why, I just thought maybe I'd find something interesting here, and I don't generally like being overly destination-oriented when I'm travelling. So this was my chance to make sure I stayed true to that state of mind...Well sure enough, after a good 20-30 mins or so I came upon this huge complex, which I first thought was some kind of factory...but people were walking right in, and there was plenty of traffic going through its gates...so I kept going. I navigated my way around the back of the massive warehouse, whilst perilously dodging cars weaving their way through the parking lot, and found the entrance. Inside it's like stepping back into the world of "old Korea" that I remember - vendors everywhere, selling all kinds of vegetables, fruits, herbs, some clamoring for my attention, others perhaps just tired of clamoring, just waiting for the next customer to pick their stand out of the 100's of other vendors. I wander around for a while, snap a few pictures, and start feeling a little guilty just being there for my own benefit - so I buy a bunch of grapes to tie me over to dinner time. I figure it will be a dollar, maybe less, but when the vendor hands me the bag I realize maybe I should have just gone for the mandarin oranges. Apparently grapes here aren't cheap. I feel a little pathetic giving in and handing over the roughly $10 for my precious grapes, but I hardly ever pay for food here, and consider it the price of a worthwhile experience.

Clearly done with the fruit & vegetable market for the day, I head to the neighboring warehouse, which is just as big, but filled with all kinds of bounty from the sea - most of it still living. In fact, it might as well have been an aquarium. Red snapper, salmon, eels, halibut, shellfish, octopus, squid, and all kinds of other beautiful fish - all suddenly having been taken from their respective places in the food chain and placed squarely at the bottom. In fact, if you like you can have sashimi prepared right in front of you, which only moments before was happily swimming in the tank. It's pretty amazing to see all of this fresh food being sold directly to the customer - and this was apparently not a product of "old Korea" so much as a part of the plan for Pyeongcheon, the area in Anyang where I live. It's exactly the kind of facility that we were trying to get the city of Seattle, a city with a strong maritime history, to buy into as part of this past year's "food systems" endeavor. And Pyeongcheon isn't even near the ocean.

Satisfied with the whole experience, despite the $10 grapes, I head further up the road, where, after quite a bit of searching I eventually find the entrance to a trail that I'm hoping will take me to the top of a local mountain. It's been a bad week for smog and I'm craving a little fresh air. As it turns out, the trail is good, and I make my way up, through a traditional Korean burial ground (grassy mounds of dirt piled over the dead) and up a steep slope, complete with ropes so I can pull myself up the rocks (they come in really handy on the way down). It's a good hike to the top, and I savor the view with my expensive snack. I had no idea Anyang was this big - the apartment towers seem to flow through the valley like concrete glaciers, although these glaciers tend to keep growing, unlike the case of their more traditional cousins. High density development is everywhere, and as far as I can see, anything resembling the single family home so familiar to us in the U.S. doesn't exist here. I think about how most Koreans must think of their public and private space. Private space is at a premium, and usually small - quality public spaces are essential. Traditional Korean architecture has given way to buildings that almost all look the same; with so many people in one building, the architecture could never really democratically reflect a unified sense of space anyway. The "new" architecture as far as I can see is no longer the building - it's the collected personal spaces of hundreds of people on the inside, and well-designed urban spaces (especially public ones) on the outside that give people a sense of community. With this in mind, they're doing what I think is a pretty good job of making urban areas livable; although since the government realizes nice places like Pyeongcheon are quite expensive right now, they're on a mission to build 48 more "new towns" much like it, mostly from scratch. As I've said before, some extraordinary things are about to happen in Korea, as well as other places facing similar issues, as far as urbanism goes. 2 Shoes actually sent me a great article today that brings some of this to light check it out here.

This post is getting kind of long so I'll try to finish up...on the way back from my meditations on the mountain, heading home, I passed under a busy expressway where I discovered a whole neighborhood that existed right underneath and to either side. At the center was a well-used sculpture park area, with foot bridges connecting either side of the commercial area (still going underneath the expressway). As is the case for most successful commercial areas I see here, neon signs lit just about every square inch of the buildings, people walked, sat, and talked in front, kids ate ice cream and learned to ride their bicycles...the recipe for urban success happening right there under a freeway. It was cool to see - I don't know what, if anything, the government might have done to encourage this, or if there was more to the story I didn't know, but nonetheless, a nice bookend to my adventure for the day.

On Sunday I went to the "Korean Folk Village" (a sort of "old Korea" cultural experience that tries its best to be authentic) with the Hos, which I had remembered from my childhood long ago as an actual folk village in the country. I think it's expanded quite a bit since then - there's now a theme park right across the river, and apartment towers surround the area, which is totally urbanized. Inside the gates though, you forget about that for a while, and walk through the dirt streets, past the blacksmiths and artisans, the farmhouses and their (yes, real) crops, eat authentic old-style Korean food and buy authentic souveniers. Most impressive were the performances - people doing wild tricks on horseback, tightrope walkers, see-saw acrobats, and some mesmerizing dancers who could twirl these streamers attached to their headdresses in unison, while barely moving their heads. That was all great of course, but my favorite part of the day was sprawling out and taking a nap on the hard, wooden floor of an open gazebo with the Hos - which they comfortably did, at their 75 years, for over an hour. It was a nice way to recover from a little too much dong dong ju (they swore off drinking last week) and a very hearty lunch.

The evening was capped by another great dinner prepared by Wan Mi, their daughter - this time it was chicken stuffed with ginseng, garlic, and some kind of red fruit, accompanied by kimche, rice, pumpkin gruel and the requisite OB...which I was satisfied to enjoy alone (but nonetheless in great company) this time as result of last week's pinky promise.

So thanks for staying with me for this epic entry, unless you skipped all the way to the bottom just to see the pictures, in which case, I'd still be more than happy to share them with you, here:
Pictures of my wanderings around Anyang here

The Folk Village here