The Lunar New Year offers Koreans a nice four day weekend – not including Friday night! – so needless to say, I was off to travel. My good friend Hun Ji would play tour guide, since we would be headed to some rural parts of Korea – the sort of places
we tried to visit before but had some difficulty getting around. Fortunately, we had a little more time this time around. First stop: Jeungpyeong (where Hun Ji’s mom lives).
While riding in the bus, I couldn’t help but get a few shots of the snow and trees. The bus doesn’t always cooperate with a smooth ride and clean windows, but you do what you can.
Jeungpyeong is a nice getaway from the big-city life of Seoul. While not terribly far from Seoul, there wouldn’t be any reason to come here as a tourist. After a couple hours visiting Hun Ji’s mother, we headed to the next town over, Cheongju (don’t confuse this with Chungju from before – they’re two separate towns).
Your classic outward-bending mirrors – the scientific / technical name for them escapes me – which line the steps as you make your way down to the underground mall.
Some things are similar wherever you go in Korea – underground malls sell lots of women’s clothing, for example – but what makes the travels interesting are the elements that make each place unique. This fish tank, and the chairs that rock or roll around it, was a nice distraction from everyone shopping around us.
Back outside, we continued walking and found the shopping district. Much like other shopping areas, you could find quite a few clothing shops, lingerie shops, shoe stores, and the like. There weren’t a lot of people out thanks to the cold and snow, even though it was a Saturday afternoon / night.
Gotta love public art in Korea. This was one of a block-long series of art with a similar theme.
The floodlights outside the local Homeplus (think Walmart, only bigger) – illuminates the snow in a fun way.
Slaves to fashion – it’s snowing and slippery, the middle of winter, and about -8 to -10 C. (about 15-20 F.) – what do you wear? Why, miniskirts and heels of course! These two were far from the only ones – and there’s many more to find in the more ‘fashionable’ areas of Seoul.
OK, so they’re fake poinsettas, but still… The color combination is pretty.
Some bus stop information in Cheongju – each color bus runs a different route; no bus numbers are available or needed. In some cases you’ll pay when you get off the bus (the bus driver calculates your fare). These are the local buses in Cheongju – the intercity buses would take us elsewhere in Gangwon-do (a rural province east of Seoul)…
The next several pictures were all taken from inside one intercity bus or another – if they look a little dirty, that’s the bus windows for ya 🙂
A bridge over an ice-covered stream.
Some beautiful snow-covered mountains and trees. Along the way there were many such scenes.
You know how someone says ‘the snow was THIS HIGH’? In this case it was – perhaps 12-13 centimeters fell.
An unexpected surprise – an ice festival not far from the bus terminal / center of town. That’s one nice thing about smaller towns / areas – most of the town area is situated within a few blocks of the bus / train station.
A curious game – take a piece of wood shaped roughly like a top, spin it on the ice, then thwack the top with a whip – er, a piece of wood with two leather strings at the end – in an effort to keep the top spinning.
Another fun – and more popular – event was ice sledding. Instead of sledding down a snow-covered hill, one sits on a small piece of wood about 2 feet (0.7 meters) square with ice skating blades on the bottom. You move by holding two sticks – each with a sharp nail at the bottom – and jamming them in the ice to move forward. It’s kind of like rowing or trying to ski on flat land – but a lot harder to turn.
Sleds for two were built the same way, but were also great for being pulled around.
A fun half-hour later, we moved on to the other side of the stream to find… a great big iron pot.
If you’re wondering ‘what the heck?’ join the club. A nearby sign explained it all: this fifteen ton iron pot is used to cook rice for the population of the town. With a diameter of 5.68 meters, a height of 2.2 meters, and a circumference of 17.85 meters, can you guess how many people could be fed rice cooked in this pot? Answer at the end of the post.
This dragon, according to the sign, is biting a cintamani, a precious pearl believed by Buddhists to make wishes come true. No sign of the pearl… but it’s there… maybe he swallowed part of it?
At the top of one building, a man holding a giant… red pepper? Sure, why not? Since we were traveling on Lunar New Year’s Day, nothing was open, so your guess is as good as mine. Red pepper paste is a very common spice, used in anything from kimchi to cereal (ok, maybe not cereal, but you get the point).
The tourist information center promoted at the bus terminal – which of course was nowhere to be found. The sign was nice though.
Getting around rural Korea is not for the faint of heart or easily frustrated. The bus timetables, while generally accurate, don’t coordinate very well; after making it from one city’s bus terminal to another one, your wait for the next bus may be up to an hour long. In some cases, buses only run a few times a day to their specific destinations (farther out towns, for example); get there just after the last one left and your wait might reach into the hours… It’s slightly refreshing to know you can get to Seoul from almost anywhere in Korea, however. Bring your detailed map of Korea – and a couple of aspirin just in case.
So how many people CAN be fed rice from the biggest iron pot? According to the sign, about 40,000 – using fifty 80 kg. sacks of rice. I’ll let you do the math; my head hurts just from thinking about that much rice.
