On Friday, despite my working the night shift for 12hrs a night, I went for a two-ish hour walk around the town outside base. I found this:
My best guess has it as a helipad, possibly even as old as the Korean War. Behind it, as you can see, are fairly typical Korean-style apartment blocks (these never seem to age well, at least in terms of outwards appearance, but these are relatively new from what I can tell) and so I don't think that the hilltop I was on was ever part of a military base, at least not part of the American base.
Either way, "X " marked the spot at which I started going through what turned out to be a very pleasant patch of forest. I'm assuming that it was considered a public park, although there were very few "signs" and no pavement, or any of the other features that we think of in the US as denoting "public space." There was a lot of exercise equipment, much like on a fitness trail, dispersed throughout the park, including this forest of T-pipes that seemed decidedly unloved and forgotten, as the equipment went.
The park took up all of the essentially unusable hilly ground, but all over the place there were vegetable gardens. I suppose with space at a premium, and a lot of agriculturally productive land taken up by all of the neew urbanization, Koreans use whatever space is available. But it was still surprising to see random little plots of vegetables growing in the midst of the forest and the park, as though someone living in one of the rows of apartment towers decided "may as well farm the Commons."But around one building in particular, on the hillside, it seemed like almost all the extra space had been turned into a greengrocer's garden. I couldn't tell what the buiding's function was, either. It seemed like it could be a school, but just as easily it might have been a small-scale factory or a large-ish church. There wasn't any writing, at least from the angles I saw it from, visible to even venture a guess.
One other pleasant feature of Korea, at least around Gyeonggi-do, where our town and base are located, is the overwhelming sight of roses, huge and pink and red and ubiquitous. They seem to grow everywhere, especially on fences, as they work like trellises, but I've seen rosebushes grow as tall as crepe myrtles here and still put out large flowers, even though they didn't look to have been pruned at all. Here are some on the fence of an apartment complex, for example:
And last, but not least, I give you "Pretty Nail." I would almost venture to look in the window, just to see if a certain Ms. Swan owned it:
