Sunny Breaks

and Seon yu-do 선유도.

The young lady and I had a chance to get away for a couple of days so headed for the west coast of the peninsula. Incheon was as far as I’d got to that side. From the US air-force base town of Gunsan, it was an hour and a half passenger-ferry ride to Jang ja.

It was sunny weather on the way there but a bit rocky on the boat. It seems the boat pilots in this country are of a similar ilk to the taxi (and little green bus) drivers, for there was quarter given. One young lad sicked up a bit, Je got dizzy and even I with my iron bowels felt a tad queasy.

Got there we did though, checked into the really nice little min bak  (cross between motel/cabin kind of thing) and then walked around a bit.

It’s really unscrewed up there – very little trash, trashyness, neon, cars or CLR!DE shops. In fact I would go so far as to say it was the nicest place I’ve been to in Korea. Bikes can be rented for 3000 won an hour. Some of the min baks have electric golf carts, and there are a few cars but not many. There’s not a lot to do there as far as organised activities go, but that’s fine by me. It’s probably this, along with the ferry ride that have kept the island from becoming trashed-out and overloaded with obnoxious Seoulites.

I guess it’s all pretty shallow there because there was a big difference between high and low tide. Low tide presented a lot of mud on the beaches. (But no Sneetches on those beaches.) The shallowness makes for relaxed swimming though, compared to the East sea, where it’s more like jumping straight into the Arctic ocean.

It’s a good idea to bring a whole load of food with you. Min baks have a small gas cooker and the place we stayed at had a communal BBQ thing outside aswell. Bring meat and whatever else. We didn’t bring much so ended up going to the restaurants there a fair bit. Some of them are quite nice, and you can get quite a bit of food for the money—but the prices are fairly expensive. After a couple of days you’re going to be craving something other than seafood.

The morning we left it was raining and the ocean was a bit choppy. When the boat pulled in and even the boarding was heiry I thought we’d be in fr a breakfast-refunding kind of jaunt but I guess they’d added water-ballast to the boat because it was smoother than the journey there.

I had an exam last Monday. I was over on the east coast for the last couple of days taking a much needed break from it all. I’d forgotten what unpolluted air tastes like. Sometimes my patience grows short with the people here and I got to think it was koreans – that was the problem, but I’m more inclined to think it’s actually cityfolk. Could be any huge city like this—people tend to be more in a hurry, more pushy and rambunctious, more likely to stick their nose in.

I was staying in a small seaside hamlet. See flickr for fotos. I walked past an unattended fish place, the kind that has tanks out the front with various live sea creatures stocked for eating. There was a fish flipping on the asphalt. It’d jumped out of its tank and was suffocating in the air. I walked around the place to see if one of the people was there to tell them that one of their fish had jumped out but there was nobody to be had.

I stood for a good minute or two debating what to do. Had the fish jumped out on purpose? Was it nobler to die on the tarmac than in a cooking pot, on the way to being eaten by someone? I got to wondering what Captian Picard would do eventhough I haven’t watched that show in years. In the end I decided it was better to do what I could to prolong the fish’s life now and if it ended up getting eaten later that day it was out of my hands. I put if back in the tank but maybe it was out too long because it was ‘swimming upside down’ as they say.

I’d forgotten how much people out there like telly. Everyone was watchin telly all the time. Dramas mostly, sometimes a little baseball, sometimes christian telly. It made me wonder what all the folks out there, out in the remote villages, the satellites, the two-bit one-horse towns—what do they think of yankee beef and the FTA? I don’t know, I couldn’t talk to them.