Fall and the Harvest Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Jeonju. Traveling with my son and Seoah. Making rice wine. The bus ride. The rest stop area with so much on offer. Murdoch wiggling when we finally, finally got home. Korean traditional housing. Warm floors, central courtyard, blue tiled roof. Seoah and her 108 bows. Korean pears and apples. Land not covered with buildings covered with crops. Density.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Memories

One brief shining: Streets of traditional Korean houses, hanok, now housing fortune tellers, coffee shops, souvenir dealers, craftspeople bustled with tourists and folks wearing hanbok, the traditional Korean clothing, women strolling with their hoop-skirts much like Southern belles at a fashion soreé while children ran down a water course that followed one of the streets and jugglers kept wooden discs in the air on small spindly poles.

Not quite what we expected. But fun anyhow. Not a Korean Williamsburg. More like a Korean fair with lots of kids laughing and eating ridiculous food on sticks. The occasional street performance by roaming jugglers and small bands. An air of festivity.

This area filled with over 700 traditional Korean homes has cobblestone streets which you can see in the picture above. Hard to walk on for me. Must have been a charming place to live in the early 20th century when it was built. Seoah says her parent’s original home was just like these. The home before the one Kate and I visited in 2016. Many of the houses in Okgwa are hanok homes still.

These homes featured walled courtyards, heated floors, the traditional tiled roof. Some of the best preserved have wonderful wooden doors with iron hinges, door pulls and decorative features.

Jeonju has a special place in Korean history. It is the ancestral home of the Yi family, the family of the first King of the Joseon dynasty. It also has a reputation as a city of the arts and culture. The hanok village that we visited lies inside the now more modern and much larger city.

The Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 has cast a pall over contemporary Koreans. Got another taste of that in the first part of our trip. We made Korean rice wine.

Making the wine itself was not hard. Put the rice in the bowl. Cover with yeast. Knead. A while later, pour in pristine water. Knead some more. Pour result into a covered jar. Take  home, put in a shaded spot. Wait ten days.

The hard part lay in the narration of why we were doing this. During the occupation Japan imposed a prohibition on any liquor made in the home. Presumably to control restless, drunken resistance.

The old recipes, a part of folk culture, gradually withered away until no one had them anymore. Now the owner of this little DIY project has dedicated himself to seeing that his fellow Koreans never again lose their birthright. At least as it pertains to the making of rice wine.

The odd part for my son, Seoah, and me was that none of us drink. We brought ours home anyhow. My son will give it away to his squad when it’s ready.

Fall and the Harvest Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Tom and the lag. The Woolly Christmas at Nicollet Island Inn. Jeonju, our destination this morning. A hanok village. Feeling better. Seoah and my son. Getting ready. A cooler, but still warm day ahead. Songtan in the early morning. Sleepy yet never fully asleep. A good night’s rest. Buses. Museli. Milk. Cold Water.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Sunseen. Sununseen.

One brief shining: Up early for a view of old Korea reminds me of the other times like getting up with Mom to catch the Greyhound to the State Fair like going to work on a busy day like rushing through the house to get on the road to the airport for a flight to Maui like awakening in Rome to the sound of buses and cars, the smell of dark coffee and croissants, like any time expectation led the way like a little boy creeping down the stairs on Christmas morning.

Energy level better but far from robust. A two hour bus ride to Jeonju and back. Time to sleep a bit. Plan to stop when I need to and rest. Excited to see this Slow City. Love the idea of a slow city, slow food. Especially when the idea merges with the historic and the culturally significant.

My son compared Jeonju to Williamsburg. Maybe. Not really sure. Williamsburg was the birth place of William Schmidt. No, wait. That was Door County. Williamsburg and its colonial reenactors make for a quick dive back to the beginnings of our nation. The sights and sounds and smells, even the dialects. If that’s what we get in Jeonju, I’ll be pleased.

The touristy side of this trip has taken a back seat to health. Mine. That’s ok. I’m with family and in an everyday part of Korea that has given me ample opportunity to participate in and observe Korea as a home. The medical clinics. The neighborhood restaurants. The school kids coming home in their uniforms around 4 pm. The masked ladies ambling their way on a daily walk. The Korean seniors exercising on the Mountain behind the apartments. That kid on Thursday riding his bicycle through a pouring rain. Happy. The construction workers on site at the Peyongaetk City project in their blue vests and hard hats.

Some days I vacationed. Reading. A lot. A couple of days during the cold I never got out of the apartment. This room I have is at the other end of the apartment from the kitchen, the living room, and the master bedroom. I have my own bathroom, a desk, books, and the computer on which I’m working right now. We can go about our mutual introverted lives intersecting for meals, the occasional jaunt out like today.

Realized a month or so ago that I tend to privilege reading above all other activities. Obvious you might say. But it wasn’t to me. If I have spare moments, I read. If I’m reading and other matters call to me, I often don’t pick up the phone. I’ve done that over the last week again. Healing and reading. A good combo for this guy.

Lughnasa and the 2% crescent Korea Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Seoah feeling better. My son’s love. Murdoch’s, too. And, Seoah’s. Songtan. Working out aprés the flare. Hot wings. Writing. Seoul. An amazing and vibrant city. The Mountains of Songtang. The Rocky Mountains. The Apennines. The Atlas. The Himalayas. The Alps. The Dolomites. The Appalachians. The Smokies. The Sierra Nevada.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mountains

One brief shining: With a cup of instant coffee in hand I look out the window from this twelfth floor apartment toward Seoul seeing Songtan below and the Tree covered Mountain that rises behind it, then how the city has engulfed and climbed not only this Mountain but others in its range, street and businesses and housing climbing, climbing.

Figuring out the logistics of getting into Seoul and the National Museum of Korea. We could take a bus, but the times were not convenient. At least going up. So, subway. The blue line to the orange line, transfer and four stops north. Between an hour and a half to two hours. After the museum we will take the bus home, perhaps a taxi from the museum to the bus. Just to make a trifecta of urban transportation. Might be my son and me. Depends on how Seoah’s feeling by Sunday.

I could go by myself. Though I don’t have as much stamina as I used to and my brain doesn’t compute the ways of the various modes of transportation as quickly and easily as it used to. Especially in a language that remains beyond my grasp. Not dementia, just the changing neurological capacities of the aging brain. Rapid processing is one of the things that diminishes in quality.

This visit though. With the still healing back. I’ll choose to go with family that can help. This will be trip three into Seoul. I wanted to focus on Seoul this trip and that’s what we’ve done.

We do have a trip planned on the 23rd to Jeonju, a village of 800 traditional Korean homes with restaurants, crafts people, and places to stay overnight. That will be the only outside Seoul experience (other than Songtan, of course) this time. Excepting the 70th birthday for Seoah’s mom in Gwangju and the overnight in Okwga at her parent’s village.

Every trip, my brother said, has its own rhythm. Yes to that. This one has had a slow deliberate rhythm, pauses often and long. The in depth Korean experience for me has come in Songtan. Hardly a tourist destination, it’s a working city with businesses and streets and transportation to serve its citizens, not the world of travelers. With the exception of the area around Osan AB. But where my son and Seoah live Songtan is an urban area for Koreans.

That has given me an unusual opportunity, as did Seoah’s mom’s 70th, to visit Korea as it is, not as it wishes to be seen or as tourists with shorter stays might ever encounter. The enforced slower strolling my sore back has occasioned has reminded me that I may have gone too quickly through the world in times past. There is much to see and learn at a slow walking pace.