The Trip Begins

Hey Everybody, I'm back from my fantastic trip to Southern Korea. With the biggest national holiday this week all of school was cancelled. I seized the opportunity to visit some of the cultural gold mines in the southeast part of the nation. Early Tuesday morning I hopped on the bullet train for DaeGu, transferred to bus and rode all the way to the port city of Ulsan.

The holiday, as you may already know, is called Chuseok, and it's the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving. The official Chuseok is actually on Friday, but the whole population travels out to the countryside to visit grandparents and other relatives. I took the opportunity to follow my friend HongDae down to his place in Ulsan on Tuesday, planning on visiting his city and then leaving for Pusan on Wednesday so that he could be with his parents during Chuseok.


The bullet train was quite a trip indeed. It took about an hour and a half to cover almost the whole nation with one stop. Most of the trip we were pushing speeds around 300 km/h (anyone, math?) according to the speedometers on the TV screens. We could have whizzed all the way down to Pusan, the second largest city in the country and the most important port, but we took the bus to Ulsan instead.

After we arrived in Ulsan, I met HongDae's family (mother, father, younger sister). contrary to my wildest expectations, we all piled promptly into the car to visit the granparents in the countryside. I had never expected to get out of cities here in Korea. There's no easy way to get to the country without your own car, Iwouldn't know anyone there, and I wouldn't know what to do. It was really exciting to be in the rural areas though.

I think the figure is 3/5 when it comes to the mountain to arable land ration here in Korea, so I got to see the terraced rice patties that were developed to make the most of the land. The strange thing about mountains here in Korea was hard to put my finger on. I can't exactly tell if it's that they're bigger or smaller, or if the trees are just shorter or less dense, but there are weird things visually about their size and tree cover. One obvious difference though is the spacing. In Georgia it's a steady decline from Appalachia in the North to foothills to just hills to the flat south. Here, however, the mountains seem to be sprinkled all over, not in any particular cluster or range. Therefore, you can be driving along surrounded by perfectly flat land, but there are single mountains or in pairs periodically on either side.

The grandparents lived in a small house on a garden filled plot of land that could only be reached by gravel road. They were growing all sorts of vegetables, some being dried or cured in the shack, some in various storage pots out back. The grandparents themselves were interesting, as all old people are. Most shockingly for me, through them I had my first encounter with the southern accent (of which I had been warned on account of it's speed and strange sound). When they spoke I didn't understand a single word. In fact, if I had heard them on the streets I would have thought they were half Indian half Japanese. There wasn't one familiar sound in any of their speech.

After sitting around and eating fruit, we took a nap with the grandparents. I slept on the pictured "pillow" which was made of strings of wood beads connected on either side to two boards. Since it was hollow it was supposedly "comfortable" in warm weather.