Jisan Valley Rock Festival

^Fall Out Boy^

From the 24th through the 25th of July, I got the chance to go to the Jisan Valley Rock Festival with friends from work.

The line-up was one of the most impressive for a music festival that I think I've seen, and certainly for a concert that I've been to.

The Highlights:

Jimmy Eat World, Fall Out Boy, Weezer The Airborne Toxic Event, The Human Instinct, Basement Jaxx Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Patti Smith, Jet, Oasis, Starsailor, Dieselboy, and a bunch of acts from Korea

I didn't get there in time for Jimmy Eat World, but did get to see the end of Fall Out Boy, and nearly every major act after that.

The food was pretty good, and the beer was cheap. The resort did an awesome job with the logistics, including toilets and portable showers for the campers.

Pyeongtaek and Songtan

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:

Visit to Suwon

Suwon and points East
Originally uploaded by Nilstren

To the south of the sprawling capital, Seoul, lies the city of Suwon(수원). You can see in this picture in the lower right the Hwaseong Haenggung (화성 행궁), a palace built in the late 18th Century as a home-away-from-Seoul for the Choseon rulers. Hwaseong is the name for the larger city walls and fortress, one of the few complete city walls still extant in Korea.

The city itself has over 1 million people, with row upon row of the ubiquitous apartment towers that define the landscape of South Korea. In a location much like that of Bukhansan in Seoul, but with the city spilling east-southeastward from Paldalsan instead of southward, Suwon has several streams, really somewhere in between creeks and rivers back home on the East Coast, that run uncovered through the city.

On this particular day, young couples and domestic tourists alike were out in force across Paldalsan, with some local color just enjoying the park. At the top of the mountain, behind one of the "secret city gates," there was a little area next to some war memorials that could be turned into badminton courts, as this family has done. There was also a man sitting beside the memorial, quietly reading a book, his trusty man-purse (Korean style makes American metrosexualism look jockish and macho) by his side on the bench. Two of the daughters in the family would run around and play counting games atop the pediments of the large memorial at right in the photo, and chase flower petals as they spiralled down with the passing breezes.

After a couple of hours exploring the hilltop fortress, I ventured down and took pictures inside of the palace. As palaces in South Korea go, it was a modest affair, but carefully restored. The epically popular "Dae Jang Geum" ("Jewel in the Palace" in Anglophone markets) Korean series was partly filmed here, and there are "try on authentic costumes" stations and signs with stills of the scenes filmed in each spot. There were also the most elaborate ondol (온돌) chimneys I have seen yet in Korea.

Ondol are like the "hypocaust floors" of Ancient Roman baths, except that they arose with no influence from that technology whatsoever, to combat the bitter cold of what is now Manchuria and Siberia and the winds that blow down the peninsula from that region. Traditionally, ondol work by burning wood and other combustibles and directing the hot air across the floor over to the chimney which is usually on the other side of the building. Thus people could go to sleep on the floor and stay toasty, even if the rest of the room got to freezing or colder, and so even in Korea, which can have bitterly cold winters, traditional buildings were not usually built with thick walls if they weren't going to be used for defensive purposes.

But even so, the scale of these chimneys, and their ornamentation, suggests somewhat the luxury of the life of the Choseon dynasty rulers of the time, muted though it might be considered in comparison to the legendary wealth and ostentatious architecture of the Chinese Emperors.

Another thing about the buildings... the traditional wood used in their construction, which I presume is some kind of resinous cedar, smells as it ages like nothing so much as black pepper and incense. That, combined with the bright colors and the open layout designed to promote air movement really makes for a pleasant space.

But back to the city of Suwon. Upon leaving the palace and wandering through the markets and side streets on my way back to Suwon Station (수원역) I found everything from fried insects to live sea slugs, from countrified hardy clothes to the near-latest in Seoulite fashion, and every kind of durable good you could imagine, all in small shops or open-air stalls along the streets. While the megamall concept is taking off, and to some extent the big-box store, these are both on Korean "terms" and run by domestic companies, and thus never feel all that similar to their American counterparts (one exception is E-mart, which feels like a Walmart with slightly lower ceilings and friendlier staff.)

Particular to Suwon was the entertainment district, in which you could the transition that happens from the daytime, when lunch restaurants and retail stores are mainly open and inviting to customers, and the bars, arcades, theaters, computer cafes (PC방) all anchored by the nearly 24-hour convenience stores, such as FamilyMart, 7-11, GS25, and a host of more regional competitors.

For more pictures with commentary, go to my flickr account at www.flickr.com/nealwashere.

Yellow Dust

When it's that time of the year, the Asian mainland sends a stinging, almost angry flow through the air. But instead of a Red Menace, it comes in the form of Yellow Dust. Now, this same yellow dust comes from a region called the "Loess Plateau" that is responsible for a lot of the fertility of the lands to the east of it, including Korea and Northern China. Indeed the same "yellow" in the Yellow River is that very dust, dissolved and deposited in floods across the North China Plain.

What makes yellow dust such a problem is that now, instead of being something of a minor eye/respiratory irritant as it has been for time immemorial, this dust carries with it a host of little problems that may soon turn into much larger ones. The wikipedia article goes into far more depth, but suffice to say the pollutants and microorganisms borne by the dust are fast becoming a major cost and hazard to the South Koreans, and even at times the Japanese.

What does this have to do with me? While I don't have a side-by-side set of photos to show the difference between a dust-free day and I day with heavy yellow dust, it means that visibility goes down a lot and that being in western South Korea is hazardous to your health, despite the pollution problems here being far less pervasive as the South Koreans come to realize that moderate, thoughtful environmental regulations are an important part of keeping your democracy thriving. Essentially it's like the air over East Asia is a swimming pool, and the Chinese have declared their area a "pissing section" (to carry over the metaphor from the anti-smoking-section argument.)

More posts to follow on less politicized topics as I go out over the weekend and explore some more of the country.

Insadong

Me Near Fatum
Originally uploaded by Nilstren

This was me on the stairs to a really cool-looking bar/cafe that ran vertically up the side of a stone cliff. Inside there were even outcroppings of the naked stone that the building climbed.

Greetings from South Korea

Just after I got my assignment here with the Air Force, everyone wanted me to begin posting about my experiences here in the Republic of Korea. It has been over a week since my flight touched down at Incheon Airport, and it already feels like I have been here for weeks. My flickr account is at Nealwashere and I'll be periodically posting travel pictures there.

The town beside Osan Air Base, where I'm stationed, is called Songt'an (송탄) and is a part of greater Pyeongtaek (평택시) in Gyeonggi Province (경기도). It's about a one and a half to two hour train ride from Seoul proper, and an interesting blend of the new Korea with stacks of apartments and gadget shops as well as the "old Korea" in US forces parlance, with a myriad of bars and tile-roofed houses slowly crumbling into the landscape. Since I've arrived I've experienced my fourth springtime; what I mean by that is that in February, spring flowers started blooming in Texas. Then I moved to Florida in mid-February and was there through early March, watching the same set of flowers and some more temperate ones bloom, and then upon driving up to Virginia, I watched the same Springtime once again. The Pyeongtaek area having a similar climate to Pittsburgh, I arrived here just in time to see cherry blossoms and the like yet again, and up in Seoul this made for some beautiful photographs.

Anyway, I hope to have many adventures to share about, and already I have several more entries in the pipeline.